Issued in the same year as the Companion for the Altar, Hobart’s Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church fills out the catechetical and devotional programme he had begun. Where the Companion for the Altar concerns itself with the centre of Christian worship in the Eucharist, this volume traces the Christian year as the long meditation of the Church on the mysteries of the faith.
Each of the principal feasts — Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, the Ascension, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, and the feasts of the apostles and martyrs — receives the same treatment: a short essay explaining the doctrinal and historical occasion of the day, a series of meditations leading the reader into its significance, and a collection of prayers for use at home and at church. The fasts of the calendar are treated with equal care. The result is a small lay catechism organised by the rhythm of the year.
Hobart’s purpose throughout is to fix the doctrine of the Church in the spiritual life of the layman. He believed that the Christian year was the Church’s most effective tool of instruction, more durable than sermons, more searching than catechisms, because it shapes the imagination as well as the memory. The Companion is the practical extension of that conviction.
This volume is the natural pairing with Volume I; together the two will be available as a matched set in slipcase.