Photo: Fr Robert McCulloch SSC
A holy memory from my early childhood remains with me. I was five years old. I remember going with my father one morning through the mud and slush of early 1950s suburban Melbourne, Australia, to St Patrick’s Church in Mentone. For such a small child, it was a long ceremony. Much later, I realised that I was attending the Easter Vigil ceremonies, then celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday. Was I, as a small child, experiencing what the Russians felt when they came to Constantinople in 988 AD searching for faith and finding it in the celebration of the Divine liturgy? Who says children don’t know?
Fast forward to a scene in Talisayan in 1972, to a smallish but mountainous rural parish of 25,000 Catholics in the southern Philippines. After the 3 pm liturgy on Good Friday, the statues of the Passion lie on small carriages outside the church, waiting to be drawn in a mourning procession through the town.
Devotees surround each statue, ready to push the carriage, especially the Virgin Mary draped in black and with her heart pierced by a sword. The carriage with the statue of the Dead Christ is left alone. But, as the procession moves off, several black-clothed men with bowed heads appear and begin to push this carriage. They are the thugs, the social trespassers, the havoc-makers of the town.
The age-old traditional custom draws them to push the carriage and publicly ask forgiveness from their Crucified Christ and the townspeople. No one in the procession says anything, but everyone knows that this is the time for soul-healing and forgiveness.
I begin hearing confessions in the church immediately after the procession. After about 9 pm, when the church seems empty and mostly dark, I’m sure these same violent social trespassers come for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The townspeople forgave them when they pushed the Dead Christ through the town, and now they come to the church to confess and be forgiven by their Christ.
Fast forward again to Easter 1980 in Narowal, a big rural parish in northern Pakistan, up where Punjab meets India and Kashmir. After three celebrations of the Easter Vigil ceremonies on Holy Saturday night and Masses all through Easter morning, I get on my motorcycle for the next eight days of the Easter Octave - three or four Masses each day for a few Catholic families in one place and a hundred families in another. “Thank you, Father, for coming. How could we celebrate Easter without Holy Mass?” are the frequent cries.
Fast forward again to Easter in the Sindh at Badin in southeast Pakistan in 1985. Most Catholics are agricultural laborers, for whom the Muslim landlords will allow only one day for an Easter holiday. They are able to come to the church on Holy Saturday evening, and they come in their hundreds with catechumens who would be received into the church that night and with many seekers and inquirers.
From early evening all through the night of Holy Saturday, the ceremonies and events from Holy Thursday until Easter are celebrated in one continuous rite. There are also catechesis, films, rest periods, a good meal, as Our Lord shared with His apostles on Holy Thursday night, and tea. We provide everyone with a thin mattress and a quilt as the night weather is always cold at Easter time in Badin on the fringes of the Thar Desert.
Everyone’s feet are washed during the commemoration of the events of Holy Thursday, the women by the sisters and catechists’ wives, the men by the priests and the catechists. In profound silence, tubs of muddy water are continually replaced as most people had walked there barefooted. And later, there is the lighting of the Easter candle with drums beating, fireworks exploding, and shouts of joy.
Then, the catechumens are received into the Church with their commitment and promise to present someone else for instruction during the coming year and reception at the next Easter.
Now fast forward to Rome since 2011. Although I have never much cared to go to St Peter’s for the Holy Week and Easter Vigil ceremonies, coming on Easter Sunday to St Peter’s Square at noon with hundreds of thousands of cheering Romans and fervent pilgrims to receive the Urbi et Orbi blessing from the Holy Father is not to be missed.
Nonetheless, I much prefer to go to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and join with the ordinary Romans as they celebrate the Holy Days and Easter in “their basilica”. The organ seems to play more loudly, the trumpets seem to blast more joyously, and the choir seems to sing with more gusto and verve at Santa Maria Maggiore to celebrate Easter with the people of Rome.
As a consultor since 2016 to the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments at the Vatican, I think this is about the sensus fidelium: the mind of the faithful. It is about how the people of God in many places and conditions know instinctively that these Holy Days and Easter should be celebrated and how to celebrate them. Even a little five-year-old boy knew, now so many years ago.
Columban Fr Robert McCulloch is Rector of Collegio San Colombano in Rome.
Listen to "Reflection - The mind of the faithful "
Related links
- Read more from The Far East - March/April 2023
