Pillar 03 · Festa & Traditions

Żejtun’s Other Religious Feasts Through the Year

St Catherine’s festa in June is the loudest of the parish year, but the calendar is full of quieter observances. This is a month-by-month guide to the others — the procession to St Gregory’s, the chapel feasts, Corpus Christi, and the November feast of St Catherine herself.

This article is a stub. We’ll fill in dates and chapel-by-chapel feast information as we walk through a full year.

The shape of the parish year

The biggest single observance after the June festa is the Good Friday pageant, which falls on the Friday of Holy Week and is one of the most affecting religious events in the south of Malta. The first Wednesday after Easter brings the procession from St Catherine’s to St Gregory’s, a tradition observed since 1614 and one of the oldest continuous religious processions on the islands. Through the spring and summer, individual chapels around the agricultural land outside town hold their own small feasts; many open only on that one day a year. Corpus Christi, in late spring or early summer, brings a procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the historic core. November 25th — St Catherine’s calendar feast day — is observed quietly inside the parish church, with mass and a small reception.

[LOCAL FACT — Mattew to populate a complete twelve-month calendar with chapel-feast dates and any sung-mass details.]

How parish life shapes the year

If you live in Żejtun, the parish year is one of the rhythms your year runs to. Holy Week and the Good Friday pageant; the procession to St Gregory’s the following Wednesday; the chapel feasts through the spring; the festa in June; Corpus Christi soon after; the quiet summer; the November feast of St Catherine; Advent and the Christmas crib in the parish church. Visitors who time a stay for one of the lesser observances often find them more affecting than the headline events, partly because the crowds are smaller and partly because the parishioners are more visibly themselves.

What this article will cover

  • A full twelve-month parish calendar
  • The procession of the first Wednesday after Easter — origins and route
  • Chapel feasts: which chapel, which day
  • Corpus Christi and other movable feasts
  • The November observance of St Catherine
  • How to attend respectfully if you’re a visitor

Read more on this pillar

Part of our Festa & Traditions pillar. Pair with the chapels guide, the Good Friday pageant, and visitor etiquette.

Mattew Cassar

Resident · Writer

Mattew writes zejtun.com from a flat above his grandfather’s old workshop on Triq San Girgor. He has lived in Żejtun for twenty-three of his thirty-one years.