Why Is the Priest Wearing Purple This Week? The Calendar Says So

A set of colours is assigned to seasons and to particular days, and everything visible at the front of a church changes together, including the vestments worn by clergy, the hangings on the altar and pulpit, and sometimes the bookmarks in the service books. Somebody walking in without knowing the date can tell which season it is immediately. The scheme is not decorative in origin, and each colour carries a settled association that the season is meant to invoke, so the visual change is doing the same work as a change in the music or the readings.

The associations are consistent across most western traditions:

• •White or gold for festivals, joy and the major celebrations
• •Red for martyrdom, for the Holy Spirit and for Palm Sunday
• •Purple or violet for preparation, penitence and waiting
• •Green for ordinary time, the long stretches between seasons
• •Black for funerals and for commemoration of the dead
• •Rose on two particular days, marking a pause in a penitential season

The practice grew gradually rather than being designed and the standardisation is later than most people assume. Early Christian clergy wore ordinary good clothing rather than distinctive dress, and the vestments now used are descendants of late Roman civil garments that simply stopped changing while fashion moved on. Colour use appears locally from around the twelfth century, with different regions choosing differently, and Pope Innocent the Third described a Roman scheme around 1200 that gradually spread. The fully standardised sequence in the Roman Catholic Church dates only from the sixteenth century, and Protestant churches that had abandoned the practice largely readopted it in the twentieth.

The assignments are not arbitrary and the reasoning behind each is partly symbolic and partly economic. White reads as purity and light and was also the plain colour of undyed linen. Red is blood and fire, and so covers both martyrdom and the descent of the Spirit. Purple was the costliest dye in the ancient world and carried imperial associations, which made it suitable for solemn and royal contexts at once, and it later became the colour of mourning and restraint. Green was simply what remained for the long ordinary stretches, and its association with growth was attached afterwards.

Uniformity is less complete than the summary suggests and the exceptions are interesting. Eastern churches use a different scheme entirely, with bright colours for festivals and dark for fasts, and the details vary between traditions. Some English cathedrals maintained a distinct medieval local sequence and several have revived it deliberately. Blue is used for the season before Christmas in a number of churches, which has no official standing in Rome and long precedent elsewhere. Unbleached linen appears in some Lenten practice. And where a community cannot afford several sets, one set serves the whole year, which was historically the normal situation.

Assigning colours to seasons turns vestments and hangings into a readable calendar, with white for festivals, red for martyrs and the Spirit, purple for preparation and green for the long ordinary stretches. The practice grew locally from the twelfth century and was only standardised in Rome in the sixteenth. Eastern churches use a different scheme, and local medieval sequences survive.