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 pastoral experience, 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.

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 spiritually-calibrated watch is how we live what we proclaim to be the holiest week of the year.

The phrase “Holy Week” refers, after all, only to one week each year. It is supposed to be special. It is meant to make us holy. But with the exception of the Good Friday abstinence and fasting, too many Catholics live it like any other week of the year. Sometimes people ask me whether priests should simply be satisfied that people come to Mass at all on Sundays. Happy? Certainly! Satisfied? No, because we care too much about the people we serve not to challenge them to an upgrade in the way they live their faith. Holy Week is an opportunity for us to grow greatly in love of God and in appreciation of what He has done for us, and we hope and pray that those He died for will open themselves up in faith to receive all the gifts He seeks to give.

As a young boy growing up in a practicing Catholic family—not very long ago!—we always spent the Sacred Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil attending the Church’s most solemn liturgies. It was, frankly, unimaginable that we would not be in attendance. I never believed I was doing anything special. I thought that this was what basically every practicing Catholic did. For disciples of Jesus to miss any of these principal celebrations of our faith would have been as incomprehensible for me as a diehard New Orleans Saints fan skipping the football games in the Superdome.

When, however, I left seminary for parish life, anticipating that the Holy Week liturgies would be mob scenes, I discovered that they were, in contrast, rather sparse affairs, in some cases even less well-attended than Holy Days of Obligation. I did not know whether it was a case of insufficient catechesis on the part of priests, parents, and religious education instructors, or general lukewarmness on the part of parishioners, or the failure of the faithful just to reflect adequately on the incredible invitations Jesus makes to us during those days.

But I soon began to discover that Holy Thursday—pastorally—can be a little depressing. The day on which Jesus established the Holy Eucharist and founded the priesthood to make the Eucharist possible is one on which the vast majority of parishioners are doing something else than coming to celebrate these gifts and mysteries. Most Catholic faithful love the Lord but do not come to celebrate the establishment of His extraordinary Eucharistic self-giving. Most faithful likewise love their priests but do not come to celebrate the “day of the priesthood” with them.

Good Friday is a little better, when more people seem to try to come to something, whether the Passion Service, or Walking the Nine Churches, or the Stations of the Cross. But I have always wondered how it is possible for anyone to live the Catholic faith and not to seek to overcome every obstacle to come to say to the Crucified Lord “thank you for dying for me” and “have mercy on me and the whole world.”
The Easter Vigil is more like Holy Thursday when many priests must put on a massive recruitment effort to get people to come. Yes, it is a Saturday night; it is the longest Mass of the year by far, with many more readings and prayers than a typical Sunday, not to mention litanies and triple alleluias, fire and a lengthy solo of the Exultet. But how seriously and eagerly do we approach Easter? Many just seem to choose to fulfill their Sunday “obligation” the following morning. They have no idea of how much they are missing.

Occasionally someone asks, “If Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil are so important, why aren’t they Holy Days of Obligation?” I think for the same reason why we do not need laws or rules mandating the celebration of a loved one’s birthday: because it would be unfathomable that such a mandate should be needed. Obliging attendance at the principal events of Jesus’ life by which we enter into His Passover from death to life would be totally to miss the point of the interior motivation that should be bringing us there. Not to downplay at all the importance of any of the Holy Days, but is there any doubt that what the Church celebrates on Holy Thursday—Jesus’ self-giving in the Eucharist—is more important than what we mark on the Solemnities of All Saints Day, Mary Mother of God, and the Immaculate Conception? Is there any question that the celebration of the Lord’s death is more important than the Solemnity marking the Assumption? Is there any dispute that the Easter Vigil trumps everything, including the celebration of the Lord’s Nativity and His Ascension?

Lent is a season of conversion and the way we live Holy Week should be the crown of that conversion process. May each of us respond to God’s help to dare to make it not only the holiest week of our year but even, until now, the holiest week of our life!


Rev. Robert T. Cooper, Pastor
 

The holiest week of the calendar year begins with Palm Sunday when the Gospel account of Jesus riding triumphantly into the city of Jerusalem is read before the priest even processes to the altar.  The Passion account is read after the Gospel Acclamation, with the entire congretation reading together, entering into Christ's passion.  Holy Week has begun.
 

The summit of the Liturgical Year is the Easter Triduum—from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday. Though chronologically three days, they are liturgically one day unfolding for us the unity of Christ's Paschal Mystery.

The single celebration of the Triduum marks the end of the Lenten season, and leads to the Mass of the Resurrection of the Lord at the Easter Vigil.

The liturgical services that take place during the Triduum are:

• Mass of the Lord's Supper
• Good Friday of the Lord's Passion
• Mass of the Resurrection of the Lord

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