Section II: Of Sacred Times

Sacred times are feast days; and days of abstinence and fast are counted among them.

§ 1. It belongs to the supreme ecclesiastical authority alone to constitute, transfer, and abolish feast days, and likewise days of abstinence and fast, common to the universal Church.

§ 2. Local Ordinaries can, by way only of an act, impose peculiar feast days or days of abstinence and fast on their dioceses or places.

§ 1. Not only local Ordinaries, but also pastors, in individual cases and from a just cause, can dispense individual faithful subject to them and individual families, even outside the territory, and in their territory also travelers, from the common law concerning the observance of feasts and likewise concerning the observance of abstinence and fast, or even of both.

§ 2. Ordinaries, from a peculiar cause of a great concourse of people or of public health, can also dispense the whole diocese or place from fasting and from abstinence, or even from both laws at the same time.

§ 3. In an exempt clerical religion, Superiors have the same power of dispensing after the manner of a pastor, as regards the persons of whom in can. 514, Sec. 1.

The reckoning of a feast day, and likewise of a day of abstinence and fast, is to be made from midnight up to midnight, with the prescription of can. 923 preserved.