Midnight Mass
first liturgy of Christmastide that is celebrated on the night of Christmas Eve, traditionally beginning at midnight when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day
In many Western Christian traditions, Midnight Mass is the first liturgy of Christmastide that is celebrated on the night of Christmas Eve, traditionally beginning at midnight when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day. This popular Christmas custom is a jubilant celebration of the Mass or service of worship in honour of the Nativity of Jesus; even many of those Christian denominations that do not regularly employ the word Mass uniquely use the term "Midnight Mass" for their Christmas Eve liturgy as it includes the celebration of Holy Communion.
History
The tradition of midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was first chronicled by Egeria, a Galician woman who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land around 381. She witnessed how the early Catholics of Jerusalem honored the Christmas mystery with a midnight vigil at Bethlehem. This was followed by a torchlight procession to Jerusalem, arriving at the Church of the Resurrection at dawn. The tradition reached the Western world in 430 under Pope Sixtus III in the Basilica of St Mary Major. He instituted the practice of a midnight Mass after the cockcrow in the grotto-like oratory of the famed Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. There are discrepancies, however, as to the exact time of the cockcrow due to the fact that the ancient Romans set it at the start of the day.
By the twelfth century, the practice of midnight Mass had become more widespread as all priests had been granted the faculty of celebrating three Masses on Christmas Day (previously reserved to the Pope), provided the three different propers were celebrated at their appropriate times of midnight, dawn and day.
In 1587, the head priest of the Church of San Agustin de Acolman in Mexico, Diego de Soria, petitioned Pope Sixtus V to allow the Mass to be held outdoors because the church could not accommodate the large number of attendees at the evening celebration.
The public source identifies “Midnight Mass” as first liturgy of Christmastide that is celebrated on the night of Christmas Eve, traditionally beginning at midnight when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Midnight, Mass and first.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q431867. The Library of Congress control number is sh85025318. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1587.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Midnight Mass” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.