An interesting read from Catholic Productions tells us this:
Today the church celebrates the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, technically the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Every year on June 24 the church celebrates this festival which goes back to ancient times, goes back to the fourth or fifth Centuries A.D.
So why does the church celebrate the festival of John’s birth on June 24? Well if you go back to the Gospel of Luke and you think about the story of the Annunciation to Mary, you will recall that when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, he tells Mary that her cousin Elizabeth is pregnant with a child and that she is now in her sixth month. That’s in Luke 1:36. And so because of this, we can infer that Jesus is born six months after John the Baptist, and that’s always been the traditional interpretation of the gospel account. So when we think about the of birth of Christ, the traditional date of Christ’s birth being December 25, if you just back it up six months it puts you in June. And so the traditional date for the birth of John the Baptist is June 24 and the church has celebrated it on that date.
So one of the things the church is also doing with celebrating the feast on this day is kind of recognizing the movement of salvation history from John the Baptist coming to the birth of Jesus Christ. And the first person that brought this to my attention was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who later went on to become Pope Benedict XVI. In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, which is probably my favorite book that Benedict wrote, well he wrote it before he was Pope, but in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy Cardinal Ratzinger makes a point about the meaning of this particular feast that the church is celebrating today, the Nativity of John the Baptist. So I just want to read you his words here. On page 109 Ratzinger says this:
Between the two dates of March 25 [the Annunciation]…
Which is the traditional date by the way of the Annunciation, right. Nine months before December 25.
…and December 25 [Christmas] comes the feast of the forerunner, St. John the Baptist, on June 24, at the time of the summer solstice. The link between the dates can now been seen as a liturgical and cosmic expression of the Baptist’s words: “He [Christ] must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). The birthday of St. John the Baptist takes place on the date when the days begin to shorten, just as the birthday of Christ takes place when they begin again to lengthen.”
So what Ratzinger is pointing out there is that not only is the celebration of the birth of John in June premised on the gospel account of the timing of the Annunciation and the birth of John, it also has a kind of cosmic significance. When John says, “He must increase, but I must decrease,” what we see there is this kind of movement from the old covenant to the new covenant in a way that’s similar to the movement from the time of winter to the time of spring, to the growing darkness in the world that precedes the birth of Christ at Christmas. And then when Christ comes the days begin to lengthen because he is the light of the world who’s come into the world, right, to bring the light of truth, the light of grace, the light of salvation.
Read the full article or listen to the podcast: https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/mass-readings-explained-year-a/the-solemnity-of-the-nativity-of-saint-john-the-baptist?srsltid=AfmBOoq9MxlwFWfzqP_AU0fXZ4mk29nGPQszDRTynxdnleuYLW91TMDv
