Catholicism - Festivals and Celebrations

Catholics are obliged to make attendance at Mass a part of their wider observance of Christmas. Four such Masses are usually on offer, though we have mis-titled ONE of these ~ which one?

We believe Jesus' earthly life to have been a little over 30 years, but the modern liturgical year telescopes its events into barely half as many weeks. It is unlikely He was actually born 'at Christmas' in the now-familiar sense of 25 December, not least since sheep would not have been out on the hills in midwinter; but if (for present purposes) we at least accept that He was born on earth at all, obviously there must be an anniversary somewhere. Midwinter is a good symbolic time to mark this, with its almost primeval awareness of winter having waned its farthest and thus the promise (or premise!) of a new natural cycle to emerge.

At any rate, the further 'book-end' for the Jesus story as a whole is fairly obviously Easter, preceded by Good Friday, linked in turn to Jesus' own ancestral observance of Passover, which in turn is tied to the first Full Moon after the spring equinox (hence, in Europe and elsewhere, the coincident timing with spring imagery: daffodils, rabbits, lambs etc.)

What is the name of the solemn religious day that marks the start of Lent ~ the penitential preparatory season of '40 days and nights' towards the somewhat moveable date of Easter, each spring?

During Lent and Holy Week, a Catholic church's set of narrative sculptures ~ The Stations of the Cross ~ come into their own, and indeed are the only statuary not to be veiled at this solemn season. They depict key stages of the Passion narrative. How many such Stations are there in the sequence?

The Catholic Church marks numerous other important festivals during the year, but whose links to specific dates are not so obvious. Trinity Sunday, for instance (as in the Protestant churches) ~ celebrating One God in Three Persons ~ always falls ... when?

Catholics devote a lot of attention to the Blessed Virgin Mary ('mother of Our Lord'): here are some of the more major Marian festivals, in the usual order of their occurrence within the secular calendar year. In which of these, as listed below, is there a significant mistake?

Down the centuries, the Church has acquired quite an army of Saints ~ individuals honoured for their devotion to God and His work, commemorated annually on their feast-days and prayed-through by believers (e.g. St Jude, patron of lost objects and causes). New saints are identified and eventually canonised, according to due process, almost all the time: Mother Teresa of Kolkata is now officially a Saint. To those of us brought up to think of saints (primarily the Apostles, perhaps) as ~ mainly ~ historical men in stained-glass windows 'through whom the Light shines', as supposedly one little child once perceptively put it, it feels odd to that someone one remembers from television news footage is now a fully-fledged Saint.

Here are the Feast Days of our usual EQ number of just four key Saints ~ you may spot a further connection between them. Which ONE of them has been allocated the wrong feast-day?

Other, more Biblical Saints are honoured ~ not only by Catholics, and you may have seen church buildings named after them, perhaps with the intention of their communities echoing the inspirational behaviour of the name-saint. ONE of the following is not Biblical: which one?

The Catholic Church has created or otherwise accumulated so many saints, that it would be confusing to refer to them simply as 'St. X' as the forenames tend to recur (e.g. when a devout couple have their child baptised Stephen in honour of a / the previous St Stephen, and then such are his own later devotional works that he in turn becomes 'St Stephen [+ surname]' or 'St Stephen of [placename]'). One of the following founded the Society of Jesus, better and more crisply known as the Jesuits: who was he?

Other saints were canonised for their particularly diligent and potent work as pastors ~ rather than necessarily having been martyred, i.e died for (rather than 'merely in') their faith. The specific objects of their patronage can be updated by the Church in the light of evolving circumstances, as in the following examples ~ ONE of which (as usual) is wrong ... which one?

It was ~ at least until fairly recently ~ the tradition within other faiths and denominations, that a young person marked their transition toward adulthood within the faith community at an age broadly commensurate with the bodily changes of puberty. Thus not least do we read of Jesus Himself on a pre-barmitzvah pilgrimage to Jerusalem just as He was entering His teens (though the average age of puberty may well have been rather further into people's teens back then, with less plentiful nutrition and hygiene / medicine). In the Catholic Church, however, it has long been cherished practice for well-pre-pubescent children to partake of their First Communion. Even if you are not yourself a Catholic, you will perhaps have seen gatherings around a girl of (say) 8 years old dressed almost like a bride or bridesmaid, or at least, cherished photographs of such occasions. Such a child is not cognitively mature enough to assimilate the full richness of relevant doctrine, but the following are all insisted on ... apart from which rogue ONE, as usual?