The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist is the solemnity celebrating the birth of the forerunner of the Lord, the son miraculously granted in their old age to the priest Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, as the angel Gabriel had foretold. So great is John's place in the mystery of salvation — the last and greatest of the prophets, the herald who would prepare the way of the Messiah and point him out as the Lamb of God — that the Church honors the very day of his birth, an honor she grants only to Jesus, to the Virgin Mary, and to the Baptist.

Fittingly, his birth is kept on 24 June, six months before the Nativity of the Lord at Christmas, in accord with the Gospel account that Elizabeth was six months with child when the angel came to Mary; and just as John himself said, "He must increase, but I must decrease," so the daylight begins to shorten after his feast as it lengthens after Christ's. The solemnity celebrates the dawn that heralds the rising Sun, the joy that came into the world with the birth of the Lord's messenger.