-
April 1, 2022■ April 14th - Mass of the Lord’s Supper – Holy Thursday at 6:30 pm
■ April 15th - Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion – Good Friday at 6:30 pm
■ April 16th – the Easter Vigil – Holy Saturday at 8:00 pm
I’ll be on special assignment next weekend, and I am grateful that Msgr. Costigan and Fr. John Lyons will be covering for me. But it means that I won’t have an opportunity to nag you about the Paschal Triduum. It is always a joy when I meet parishioners after Mass and they say, “See you next Sunday!” But there is one exception: on Palm Sunday. When they say it leaving Church with their blessed palms, part of me wants to politely stop them and say to them with a smile: “Do you really have no plans to RSVP for the Last Supper that Jesus ‘eagerly desires to eat with you’ (Luke 22:15) on Holy Thursday? Will you be there on Friday when they crucify your Lord? Are you excited about Easter, such that you cannot wait to celebrate it at the earliest possible moment, which just happens to be during the most beautiful and liturgically significant Mass of the year, the Easter Vigil?”
The Church professes that in the Sacred Triduum—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil—the Church marks the most sacred time of all time. We enter temporally into the eternal moments when Jesus gave us His Body and Blood in the Upper Room, sacrificed that Body and shed that Blood on Golgotha, and ultimately rose triumphant from the dead. And yet, in my 40 plus years of ministry, I’ve always been so very discouraged that there are a shocking number of Catholics who faithfully come to Church every Sunday who do not attend any of the moments of the Sacred Triduum. Many others come just to one of the three, normally the Good Friday Passion Service. It is very rare to find parishioners who attend all of them.
Who matters most in your life? If you had to confess what you want out of human living, would it have anything to do with a crucified Lord? The Church will survive heresy and hatred, sin, and persecution. What imperils Catholicism is our lukewarmness: Jesus Christ does not turn us on. God dies on a cross for love of us and business goes on as usual.
This is, I think, one of the effects of the increasing secularizing of Catholic sensibilities. Secularism means living as if God does not exist. It is a type of practical atheism. Rather than living as 24/7 Catholics, we have our “times” for prayer, for Mass, for other religious duties, but the rest of the time, we basically live indistinguishably from those around us. The Church must recover a sense of full-time Catholic identity. One of the most important ways to do that is by recovering a Catholic sense of time through living well the liturgical cycle. And one of the biggest litmus tests as to whether we have a certain level of spiritual maturity is how we live what we proclaim to be the holiest week of the year.
So, I am asking you to live your Christian commitment, to live day after day the dying-rising that Holy Week symbolizes. It is not enough to re-present the crucifixion of Christ liturgically, play it out once a year. There will always be a pattern of dying and rising, of letting go and finding new life in each of our lives. The liturgy expresses ritually what goes on in the rest of our lives; the liturgical journey ritualizes the human journey. But does it? Will we connect the Paschal Mystery of Jesus to our own faith journey? Will we show up? Will we be all in this Holy Week? What is preventing you from celebrating the liturgies of the Sacred Paschal Triduum?
