Good Friday

When I was growing up, often on Good Friday my father would get off work early, and my mother would be waiting for him to arrive home so that they could go to the Italian market to finish off the Easter holiday food shopping. Years later, I remember some office staff asking the Department Chair for time off from 12 to 3 because it was Good Friday, which he happily agreed to, and they then happily enjoyed at the local mall. While for most of American history Good Friday was probably a regular workday for most people, it has often enjoyed this residual quasi-holiday character, rooted in its sometime status as a holyday/holiday in Europe.

Pope Urban VIII had already recognized in 1642 that Good Friday was becoming an ordinary workday. Pius XII's Holy Week reform in 1955 referenced that and sought to boost attendance by moving the Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday services to evening and Good Friday to afternoon. There was, as I recall, an actual increase in attendance at such ceremonies in the immediate aftermath of the 1955 reform - until both the novelty wore off and other social changes had their inevitable effects. When I was a pastor, attendance at the official liturgical services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, while nothing to brag about, was certainly respectable, Better attended and much more popular, however, were the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, possibly a matter of scheduling but more likely because so much simpler and shorter than the liturgical rites. 

Meanwhile the Good Friday liturgy has increasingly in the U.S. become more a mournful commemoration of Christ's crucifixion and death and less part of the unitary celebration of the paschal mystery, which it originally was. (This transformation has occurred mainly at the level of popular piety and is reflected, for example, in the kind of songs sung often in place of the traditional chants on Good Friday, but also in the liturgy itself in the displacement of the two readings traditionally read on Good Friday for more than a millennium, Hosea 6:1-6 and Exodus 12:1-11, both of which evoke the larger paschal mystery more than just Jesus' death.)

Last year, of course, I celebrated Good Friday in an empty church. It will be interesting to see what attendance is like in churches this year and which sorts of services are favored by more people. 

(Photo: The 1903 Hewit Crucifix, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.)

Holy Thursday

"On this day the sacrifice of the sacred Body and Blood of the Lord was initiated as a celebration by the Lord himself. On this day the holy chrism is consecrated throughout the world; on this day too pardon is granted to penitents, those at enmity are reconciled, those who are aggrieved are pacified" (Letter of Pope Sylvester, 4th century).

The Rite of Reconciling Penitents remained in the Roman Pontifical until the 20th century, but the reality had long since lapsed centuries earlier with the decline of public penance and the rise of private confession. In The Liturgical Year, volume 6, Gueranger gave a detailed description of the ancient ritual and of the Papal Blessing that used to be given from the inner loggia of Saint Peter's on this day.

But if the Reconciliation of Penitents long ago passed into. history the other two ancient aspects of Holy Thursday have successfully survived into the present. While a separate Chrism Mass had long since disappeared, over the centuries the blessing of the Oil of the Sick, the Oil of Catechumens, and the Sacred Chrism had become an integral part of the Pontifical Mass of the Lord's Supper celebrated at the Cathedral on Holy Thursday morning. Pope Pius XII's Holy Week reform in 1955 recreated the ancient Chrism Mass and assigned it to Holy Thursday morning, while moving the traditional Mass of the Lord's Supper from morning to early evening both in the cathedral and in parish churches. The Chrism Mass was radically revised as part of Paul VI's post-conciliar liturgical reform and has since acquired an unprecedented degree of popularity, particularly among clergy.

For the most part, "private" Masses have been prohibited on this day, with all priests encouraged to participate (and, since Vatican II, to concelebrate) at the one solemn community Mass., which since 1955 has been celebrated in the evening. Generally this has been my favorite of the Holy Week services, and I will especially miss celebrating it this year.

Other than the unfortunate transfer of the reading from Exodus 12 from Good Friday to Thursday, the other significant alteration in the post-conciliar Mass of the Lord's Supper was the elimination of verses 20-22 and 27-32 from the traditional reading from 1 Corinthians. The omitted verses frame and contextualize the institution narrative, which is all that now remains of the traditional reading. In recent years, as divisions within both the Church and society have increased (with the latter amplifying and further fueling the former), I have regularly referred to those missing verse in my Holy Thursday homilies to better relate Saint Paul's challenge to his contemporaries to our present situation. So, for example, as I said two Holy Thursdays ago in 2019:

Saint Paul wrote that earliest written account of what happened at that most memorable meal in all of human history not just to tell us a nice story about something that happened a long time ago. It was its present effect that Paul cared most about, and so Paul was in fact complaining, criticizing the Corinthians’ behavior in the present, telling them that they were missing the main point of the Lord’s Supper – receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood in an unworthy way, doing so to their peril. In giving this instruction, Paul wrote, I do not praise you. Your meetings do more harm than good. I hear that when you meet as a church there are divisions among you. When you meet, then, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper.

What an indictment! Saint Paul’s more complete account and discussion about the Last Supper was actually a challenge to the Corinthians - as, through them, it is intended to be a challenge now for us. Saint Paul highlighted the Corinthians’ conflicts, dissensions, and factions – in effect, their unfortunate failure to be changed by the Eucharist. Then as now, in 1st-century Corinth among those to whom St. Paul’s account of the Last Supper was originally addressed, all was not well in the Church. The social, economic, and class distinctions, the inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions, endemic in ordinary Roman society were making themselves felt within the Corinthian Church community, so much so that even the celebration of the Lord’s Supper still seemed to mirror those same social, economic, and class distinctions, inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions.

But those things that matter so much to us in the secular world, Paul insists, should have absolutely no significance whatever within the community of Christ’s body, in which Jesus’ death and resurrection have not only transformed our individual relationships with him but must also change our relationships with one another.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them - any more than we can, when we come to Mass. That is why what happens here is so important, intended as it is to enable us to leave here different from how we came, to enable us to go beyond our individual self-enclosed limits and so bring something new to the world, something new and different from what we brought here with us from the world. For Jesus’ command to his disciples to do as he did is an invitation to a whole new way of life, made possible for us by what Jesus himself has already done on our behalf.

Back at the Last Supper, in the scene that follows next in John’s Gospel [John 13:27-30], Satan is said to have entered Judas, who, then, after taking a morsel of food from Jesus, left the Supper. How many times has Pope Francis warned us about the danger posed by Satan! The Devil, Pope Francis warned just about a year ago, “poisons us with the venom of hatred, desolation, envy, and vice” [Gaudete et Exsultate].

How well might Judas have benefited, had he heeded such a warning! Instead, we are told, he went out into the night – leaving behind Jesus and his disciples, the community that could have been his, in order to commit himself instead to Satan’s cause.

What was that morsel of food Judas had received from Jesus? Was it the Eucharist? What a warning there is for us in that! What a reminder of Saint Paul’s warning words to the Corinthians that we will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord for how we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

So too, for us now, as for Judas at the Lord’s Supper, how we depart from here may matter much more than how we arrive. What have we heard here, and what has happened to us here that has made us different from how we came? What kind of community have we become, thanks to the Lord’s Supper? In the constant competition for our attention and our loyalty, whose cause have we here committed ourselves to? What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of people do we want to become? What will we take with us from here to challenge and change this conflicted and divided world?

(Photo: Altar of Repose, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, Holy Thursday 2019.)

Impending Doom

"I'm going to reflect on the reoccurring feeling I have of impending doom," CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently said, adding, "we have so much reason for hope, but right now I'm scared."

And well we might all be, because, given the chance to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, if only we persevere with what needs to be done to get us to the end, so many instead have opted to try to break out through the tunnel walls, risking the flood of another covid surge. So we hear about and see pictures of people traveling here, there, and everywhere, "partying" (a contemporary word that seems to cover a multitude of bad behaviors) and otherwise endangering themselves and everyone else. And it is not just youthful "spring breakers" who are to blame. however much they may be a big part of the problem. Of course, the obvious question about "spring breakers" is, why are they still having "spring break" at all? Given the obvious malignancy of allowing "spring break" in a time of pandemic, why are schools and institutions of so-called higher learning not keeping students home, in class, or glued to zoom sessions instead of encouraging them to roam around the country causing such mischief? It is not just "spring breakers" who are to blame, but all those who have enabled that despicable and destructive custom to continue.

"Spring break" aside, there is also the widespread political problem of irresponsible officials abolishing mask mandates and otherwise encouraging risky behavior. How public health precautions like mask-wearing and getting vaccinated became politicized is something historians will look back on as undoubtedly one of the main contributors to the length and severity of this pandemic. That this has become a particular problem in this country is, of course, unsurprising, since it is one of the axioms of the classical liberal tradition (intellectually rooted in Hobbes and Locke and associated with important strains of American political thought and popular culture) that identifies as among the highest human values irresponsible individual freedom and liberty from government, which is understood as essentially coercive. So much of our political tradition has been rooted in the equating of government action with compulsion and coercion, and the consequent exaltation of individual private liberty at the expense of the common and public good. For some, the very point of refusing to wear a mask, for example, seems to be to display one's contempt for the common and public good. 

And that is how, even with the light already visible at the end of the tunnel, we risk flooding and drowning in the next surge.

Revealing Numbers

The title of an article by Sarah Pulliam Bailey in Monday's Washington Post put it starkly: "Church membership in the U.S. has fallen below the majority for the first time in nearly a century" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/03/29/church-membership-fallen-below-majority/) 

The article is based on a recent Gallup poll, according to which 47% responded that they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, while 48% said religion was important. This was the first time since Gallup first asked the church membership question in 1937 that the number has fallen below 50%. (In 1937, it was 73%).

To a large extent, this just confirms a pre-pandemic evolution in American society which many have long been observing. The picture, of course, varies somewhat generationally.  According to Gallup's data cited in the article, 66% of those born before 1946, 58% of baby boomers, 50% of Generation X, and 36% of millennials belong to a church. The article quotes Ryan Burge, who is both a Baptist pastor and a political scientist and also the author of The Nones: Where They Came From. Who They Are, and Where They're Going, who wonders "How do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked when Christians are half what it was. Who picks up the slack, especially if the government isn't going to?"

A good question, which we cannot answer inasmuch as it is about the future. Questions about the present are another matter. The article also cites Tara Isabella Burton, author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, who points to two particular trends among younger Americans. The first "points to broader shifts suggesting a larger distrust of institutions" and disillusionment with religious leaders, for example, white conservative Christians who aligned with Donald Trump. The second refers to "how people are mixing and matching from various religious traditions to create their own." She suggests that already existing trends in American religious life have been exacerbated "in Internet culture that celebrates ownership - the idea that you can re-create a meme or narrative ... curating your own experience."

Bot these tendencies should be very familiar to anyone who has been following the evolution of religious practice in the United States in recent decades. In my experience and observation, the second tendency has been around for a while. We see it increasingly even among churchgoers and especially around occasions which attract more marginal churchgoers such as weddings and funerals. The first tendency, rooted in a dangerously increasing distrust o institutions, has also been around a while, but it has been significantly exacerbated by the politicization of religion in recent decades. This the Post article also cites Shadi Hamid's recent Atlantic article that argued that religion is increasingly being replaced for many by politics. Recent events have, of course, highlighted how, many conservative Christians, for example, "are being less defined by their faith than by s set of more narrow concerns." Recognizing that Americans require "structures of belief and belonging," Hamid also asks what will replace religious affiliation.

At this point, no one can confidently predict what will actually happen once the pandemic is really behind us. We do know, however, that these worrisome trends preceded the pandemic. And we also know, from the way 2020 played out economically socially, and politically, that what was first and foremost a health crisis dramatically revealed existing economic, social, and political inequities and consequent crises. So it seems plausible to expect that this year's unexpected experience in the religious realm is revealing unanticipated - but actually already anticipatable - crises for religion as well.

(Photo: Floor Mosaic at Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, NY, depicting ancient Athens and the opening words of Saint Paul's speech to the Athenians: "I perceive that in every way you are very religious.")

Holy Week

Today's Gospel reading (John 12:1-11) is all that survives from the ancient liturgy for today. It is an especially appropriate Gospel for this first weekday of Holy Week. Mary of Bethany's lavish gesture in anointing Jesus' feet with expensive aromatic nard six days before Passover suggests a link between Mary's extravagant gesture and the Church's elaborate ceremonial in Holy Week. This story serves as a great introduction to what we do as Church during Holy Week - with intensely dramatic, emotionally affecting, deliberately over-the-top ceremonies, extravagant in the best sense of the word. Not unlike Mary with her expensive perfumed oil, the Church pulls out all the stops this week - and for a good reason. Not for nothing was this week once (not so long ago) called The Great Week.

Of course, thanks to the pandemic and the necessary precautions we have had to adopt, last year's Holy Week's ceremonies were reduced to a minimalistic residue. This year, presumably, will see something more than last year's minimalism but less than the extravagant ceremonial this week properly calls for.

The Church has a great story to tell - better by far than any TV mini-series - and an important one, which needs to be told with all the ritual riches in the Church's treasury. Right now however, it is increasingly minimally heard and minimally seen.

(Photo: Palm Sunday at Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY)