But these claims, truth be told, rely on a somewhat disingenuous blurring of history.
There is a wonderful Mass of Thanksgiving listed in the Roman liturgical calendar. But this is a votive Mass—it is meant to be applied to whatever occasional need arise in the community. It can be said at any allowable time within the liturgical year or when appointed by ecclesiastical authority. Our Catholic explorers and settlers very likely made excellent use of it in the historical examples we cite.
But these “votive” thanksgivings are not what gave rise to American Thanksgiving, which is of a dramatically different character.
As James Baker flatly noted in his 2009 work Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday: “the American holiday’s true origin was the New England Calvinist Thanksgiving.” None of the other candidates—though they may well have been Thanksgivings of their own and been first—“had any influence over the modern holiday.”
This observation should disquiet no Catholic who knows that the pagan Robigalia underlies the Rogation Days, or that the Advent wreath originated among German Lutherans, or that the Communists’ International Workers’ Day served as the direct inspiration for the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker in 1955. The Universal Kingship of Christ empowers the Church to rebaptize and reconsecrate such practices as she thinks useful—no matter where they came from.
I’m sure those who promulgate these alternate Thanksgiving firsts believe they are helping the Church’s cause. But one can easily forget that the modern holiday is more a development of American folklore, than a recreation or even commemoration of a single historical event. None of the historical events we have to choose from—even those from New England—are quite like the modern holiday.
For example, the autumn 1621 event in the Plymouth colony, classically referred to as the “first Thanksgiving”, is described in the primary sources as a rather straightforward harvest festival, without any discernible religious overtones:
Our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a more speciall manner reioyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours … many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some ninetie men, whom for three dayes we entertained and feasted.
Yet there was also a Puritan tradition of Thanksgiving Days being called specifically for religious worship, on which servile work was prohibited. This is the tradition that Presidents like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were directly drawing on when issuing their own Proclamations.
William Love’s 1895 book on The fast and thanksgiving days of New England reviews a number of primary sources from the time period. In doing so, he makes an important distinction between the special days of fasting and thanksgiving, called to respond to a current need, and the annual, recurring days that were set aside for the seedtime and harvest. His analysis, the validity of which Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe largely affirmed in his 1982 book The practice of piety: Puritan devotional disciplines in seventeenth-century New England, shows that the antiliturgical New Englanders were warming to a yearly cycle of seedtime fasts and harvest feasts in the latter half of the 1600s: a “Puritan re-ritualization”, as Hambrick-Stowe called it:
“Puritans objected to the Catholic calendar, with its roots in pagan agricultural rites, but their annual cycle of special days followed the same traditional seasonal pattern.” (p. 101)
Hambrick-Stowe explicitly acknowledges the correspondence between the Puritan Spring fast and the Catholic Lent (p.102). But of course the April, May, and June fasts of New England could also be compared with the Greater Rogations of April 25th, and the Lesser Rogation days before Ascension (usually May). The Rogation Mass Epistle recalls
the story of Elias who prayed for rain “and the earth brought forth
her fruit” (James 5, 16-20). Civil proclamations from Connecticut after 1661 show phrases like “To seek favour of God in ye occasions of ye insueing yeare,” “bless the fruits of the earth,” and “blessed with a seasonable springtime” (Love, p. 251).
Likewise, by the mid-1600s, Autumn thanksgivings seem to have become common in the Plymouth, Connecticut, and Massachusetts colonies in New England. Unlike the week-long harvest festival celebrated with the Wampanoag of 1621, these were single days of worship thanking God not only for a successful harvest but also for the King and many things that seem quite out of place in the modern holiday.
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| Massachusetts Bay Thanksgiving Proclamation for November 28th, 1723. Note the harvest language "to give us great plenty of the fruits of the earth" as well as the prayer to defend the colony against the "rage and fury" of the "Indian enemy"—quite a different tone from the amicable festival with Massasoit. |
Modern Thanksgiving is not, in the end, a faithful reproduction of the 1621 festival or the Days of Thanksgiving called by the New England authorities. It draws from many different elements, and has been shaped down the centuries by a long process.
Washington's famous Thanksgiving Proclamation set aside Thursday, November 26th 1789. It is very explicitly religious in tone, directed entirely to thanking Almighty God for the ending of the Revolutionary War and the formation of the new Republic. Yet harvest themes are rather absent; it is a thanksgiving for a patriotic situation rather than an agricultural one, and there is even a slight Masonic tinge to the language. Notwithstanding the national nature of the Proclamation, the ongoing holiday remained largely regional for many years.
Beginning in the 1840s, New Hampshire-born Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, wrote successive Presidents unsuccessfully trying to nationalize the holiday. She eventually won over Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed a national Day of Thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War in 1863. Hale is now known as the "Godmother of Thanksgiving" and was instrumental in shaping the holiday and standardizing the menu. But in the process, it weakened some of its religious associations—Hale had ties to Freemasonry, and she seems to have promoted Thanksgiving in Godey's Lady's Book as a domestic, non-sectarian holiday that all Americans could enjoy.
She obviously succeeded in doing so—as many still enjoy it in this way. But religion was firmly embedded in the colonial New England tradition that was eagerly taken up into the larger American tradition (as seen in the Presidential Proclamations). To keep the holiday in a strictly secular manner is to entirely miss the point that we are giving thanks to Almighty God.
So the Catholic is left to wonder—since there is a religious component to Thanksgiving, and that component was formed in a Protestant and even Puritan environment, how does a Catholic keep it?
Toward a Catholic Integration
In a previous article The Thanksgiving Mass and the Ordinariate (2019), I have noted a Catholic tendency throughout the 20th century to "liturgize" the holiday. This process culminated in dedicated Masses for the holiday in the Novus Ordo Missae and the Divine Worship Missal of the Ordinariate of St. Peter. In the main, it seems very natural that Catholic Americans wished to render their thanks in the Sacrifice of the Mass, although I agree with commentators who have found fault with some of the Mass texts that were produced. Regardless, American Catholics seem keen on finding Catholic ways to celebrate the holiday, now collected in a booklet of Thanksgiving Prayers and Devotions.
Perhaps counterintuitively, I believe the Puritan concept of Fast Days and Thanksgiving Days, as we have outlined above, have something unique to contribute to the liturgical discussion.
Those of us in parishes where the 1962 Missal is used are fortunate enough to still have the Rogation Days on our calendar. But by and large, the wider American Catholic community who use the new Missal have never heard of them. They were never actually abolished, they were just left to individual episcopal conferences.
Could we perhaps pair the revival of Rogations with a liturgical Thanksgiving, in a manner reminiscent of the way that the New Englanders scheduled their planting fasts and harvest feasts? As two bookends of a natural cycle of seedtime fasting and harvest feasting?
Consider how Americans are already accustomed to conceive of Thanksgiving as not just a single day but an entire weekend. Over 20 states make the following Friday a public holiday, where it is regarded as a long weekend off from servile work. We have expressions like “Thanksgiving weekend”, “Thanksgiving Friday”, and “Thanksgiving Saturday.” Every year around this time Catholics see many online discussions of a Thanksgiving indult allowing Americans to eat leftover turkey on Friday. I can't comment about the legality of it, but the discussion points strongly to an ecclesial extension of the feast to complement the civil holiday.
So what if we looked at Thanksgivingtide as three days of harvest feasting to complement the three days of seedtime fasting at Rogationtide?
What we asked for on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension has now been gratefully realized on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Thanksgiving. For us laboratores (laborers), one full work week from Monday to Saturday thus symbolizes the agricultural year from May to November. The week also symbolizes the six days of creation—the earth which has been our blessing since Eden, and our toil since the Fall.
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the exact themes will differ slightly based on when Thanksgiving falls and what calendar our parish uses, but in general they will speak of the consummation of all things, with Christ gloriously reigning at its head. Reminding us perfectly that the goods we give thanks for in this life are to be appreciated only insofar as they get us to the next life.
To me it seems that the Rogationtide and Thanksgivingtide form an almost too perfect liturgical pairing—one that a future historian might even find hard to believe occurred by mere accident, rather than arising organically.
Whether this pairing proves useful for the American Church I leave for others to decide. Meanwhile, I would implore Americans to resist the temptation to simply “one-up” each other chronologically with historical events without really coming to terms with the Thanksgiving holiday as is.
A search for origins is not out of place—but we must always remember that we are dealing with a tradition amalgamated by centuries of folklore. History has shaped Thanksgiving, but singular historical events cannot dictate every facet of it. And if we try to reduce it to any one event or proclamation, we will end with an impoverished holiday. Which is to say, a decidedly less Catholic one.
American Thanksgiving is not really a votive Mass of Thanksgiving, or a secular harvest festival, or a Puritan Day of Thanksgiving, or a Presidential proclamation, or a non-sectarian domestic feast. It is a deep cultural tradition that was formed as a combination of all those things—and it is a tradition that can and will be formed by the way we Catholics choose to honor it.
