March 2021

The feasts of Holy Week—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter—are fulfillments of the three spring Jewish feasts with which they originally coincided. We refer to the three great liturgies of Holy Week—the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday evening, Good Friday services, and the Easter Vigil—as the Holy Triduum. In the year of Christ’s death, the Jewish Passover on 14 Nisan would have begun at sundown on Thursday, the same evening as the celebration of the Last Supper and been completed at sundown on Good Friday, the day of His death.

Lent is the season for turning away from sin and living a life more conformed to the will and plan of God. Penitential practices are a means to that end. Like diet and exercise for the athlete, prayer, mortification, and almsgiving are ways for the Catholic to grow in faith and get closer to Jesus.  

It took the Church nearly 1,500 years (in 1481) to establish a liturgical feast for St. Joseph and nearly 1,900 years (in 1889) to publish the first encyclical about him. This encyclical came just after he was officially raised up to a great status in devotion by Bl. Pius IX, who officially declared him the protector of the universal Church in 1870. Every subsequent pope has published a significant teaching on St. Joseph, and many of them have inscribed that teaching in the official liturgical practice of the Roman Rite.

Every year in Lent the Church directs our thoughts to Jesus on the Cross. This is the sacred center of everything we believe and celebrate as Catholic Christians. Take away the Cross and you take away our salvation. Take away our salvation and everything “good” about the good news of the gospel evaporates.

As a zealous Evangelical high schooler, Scott Hahn would challenge his Catholic classmates with this question: “Where in the New Testament do you find the sacrifice of the Mass?” Not having a clear understanding of Scripture, his classmates could not refute Scott’s question and some became convinced that their Catholic faith had no biblical foundations.