Christ the Lord has promised us the Holy Spirit: come, let us adore him, alleluia.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: White.
Other saints: Saint Clotilde (475 - 545)
France
Clotilde was a Burgundian princess who in about 493 married Clovis, King of the Franks. Brought up a Christian, she had their children baptized, and in due course Clovis himself was baptized, somewhere between 496 and 499, marking the beginning of Christian France.
When Clovis died in 511, and especially after her son Clodomir died in 524, Clotilde devoted herself to works of charity and founded many churches and religious institutions, setting a pattern that was later followed by many royal widows in Europe. She herself died by the tomb of St Martin of Tours in 545.
Liturgical colour: white
White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.