Second Day of Christmas — Two Turtle Doves
Long dismissed as a nursery rhyme, The Twelve Days of Christmas belongs to the English recusant world: a culture of memory, symbol, and whispered catechesis formed under persecution. Read catechetically, the carol unfolds as a compressed rule of faith—Christological, Trinitarian, moral, and ecclesial—fully consonant with the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Baltimore Catechism, Sacred Scripture, patristic consensus, and the Church’s liturgical year.
The Old Testament and the New: One Word Spoken Twice
After the stillness of the first day—after the soul has been brought face to face with the singular gift of Christ Himself—the carol does not hurry onward. It pauses, and it teaches the listener how Christ is to be known. The second day gives not another Christ, nor a second centre, but a pair of witnesses: the “two turtle doves.”
In the life of the Church, and especially in the life of persecuted Catholics, this distinction mattered profoundly. The two turtle doves signify the Old Testament and the New—not as rival authorities, not as stages of religious evolution, but as one revelation spoken in two movements. To confess Christ rightly is to confess that God has spoken consistently, patiently, and truthfully across centuries, binding promise to fulfilment, shadow to substance.
The Catechism of the Council of Trent is explicit on this point. It teaches that the same God is the author of both Testaments, and that the New is hidden in the Old while the Old is made manifest in the New. The Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the histories of Israel are not discarded at Bethlehem; they are opened. Christ does not contradict Moses. He reveals Moses’ true meaning. He does not silence the prophets. He speaks with their voice now made flesh.
This unity is not a later theological construction; it is the Lord’s own method. After the Resurrection, when Christ encounters the disciples on the road to Emmaus, He does not begin by narrating His own experiences. He begins with Scripture. He interprets Moses and the prophets, showing how all that was written spoke of Him. Only then are their eyes opened. Only then do they recognise Him in the breaking of the bread. Revelation precedes recognition. Scripture precedes sacrament. Word precedes sight.
The turtle doves themselves are not arbitrary symbols. They belong to the Law. In the twelfth chapter of Leviticus, provision is made for those too poor to offer a lamb: they may instead bring two turtle doves or two young pigeons. When St Luke records that Mary and Joseph offered turtle doves at the Presentation, he is not supplying picturesque detail. He is making a theological statement. The Holy Family stands within the Law. The Son of God does not exempt Himself from the covenant into which He is born. The Word who inspired Scripture submits to Scripture’s discipline.
For recusant Catholics, this detail would not have been lost. In post-Reformation England, Scripture was often wielded as a weapon against the Church, detached from its liturgical, sacramental, and apostolic context. Catholics were accused of abandoning the Bible in favour of tradition. The carol teaches the opposite lesson quietly and insistently: the Church does not choose between Testaments, nor between Word and sacrament. She receives both. She sings both. She hands both on.
In a world where Catholic Bibles were confiscated and priests forced underground, Scripture survived in memory, in psalms, in hymns, and in carols. The two turtle doves were not an abstract theological pairing; they were a mnemonic of survival. They reminded children that the God of Abraham is the Father of Jesus Christ, and that the Gospel is not a new religion, but the fulfilment of an ancient one.
Meditatively, the second day teaches the soul patience. God does not rush. He prepares. He promises. He waits. Christmas is not an interruption of history, but its culmination. To separate Christ from the Old Testament is to turn Him into an orphan. To read the Old Testament without Christ is to leave it unfinished. The two must remain together, faithful, paired, and inseparable—like turtle doves, who do not wander apart.
Thus the second day forms the Christian mind. It teaches how to read, how to listen, and how to recognise Christ when He comes—quietly, lawfully, and in fulfilment of all that has been spoken before.
- Catechism of the Council of Trent (Roman Catechism), Part I, Article III, on the unity of divine revelation and the continuity of the Old and New Law.
- Luke 24:27.
- Leviticus 12:8; Luke 2:24.
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