Facing away, Franciscan horseshoe theory, and a moon, if you can keep it
The Good Friday Pillar Post
Happy Good Friday friends,
I intend this to be a short newsletter, since this of all days is better spent in contemplation before the Cross than reading (or writing) my opinions on anything.
For myself, the great temptation of the day is to give in to a kind of pious sentimentality, to consider the Cross only as mawkish spectacle and Christ as a figure somehow deserving of, or interested in, my pity.
The sufferings of Christ, of course, deserve my real focus. But that focus ought not stop at the objective horror of what he underwent on Calvary, but instead look through the pain of the Passion to the heart of the day — that this is how he loves me, and how much.
To watch someone you love suffer is, as anyone with a passing experience of it will tell you, a suffering of its own. But to watch someone suffer for love of you is a special kind of excruciating experience. For this reason Isiah’s Song of the Suffering Servant observes that “before him we turn away our face.”
And, at bottom, when I do want to turn my face away from Christ it is not out of horror at what he endured but at the crushing weight of his love, and the reality of my daily practical indifference to it.
Love demands a response, always. And the question of the day, for me, is whether the love of Christ inspires me in turn to love others as he has loved me.
Can I, in venerating his Cross this afternoon, embrace and venerate my own? Does the promise of the resurrection and the outpouring of unmerited grace offered to me translate into a willingness to suffer in turn for those I claim to love?
As St. Paul says, this is the true measure of my conversion — am I willing to die for the person in front of me and the people around me? Not out of some moral obligation, but transformed by the reality of Christ’s love for me.
Do the crosses of my life bring life, or do I look away from them as mere instruments of scandal and pain? That’s what I am thinking about today. But first, and hopefully briefly, here’s the news.
The News
This Good Friday, we are joined by Southwark’s Archbishop John Wilson, who has a reflection on the day, the tradition of Dismas, the penitent thief, and Jacques Fesch, a French criminal guillotined in 1957, at the age of 27, after having a religious conversion on death row.
Key to understanding the lives and deaths of both men, the archbishop writes, is to understand the central question of Good Friday for all of us: Will God forgive me for what I have done?
Being able to hear the answer from Christ on the cross is the great transformative message of our salvation, he writes.
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Pope Leo XIV is in the midst of celebrating his first Paschal Triduum as pope.
Along with the familiar plans and liturgies, Pope Leo has already made some tweaks to the way things are done to better reflect his vision of the petrine ministry — some historical firsts, others a return to how things used to be.
Read all about the pope’s Easter plans right here.
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Samuel Carden, an Australian high school student preparing for graduation, still remembers the shock on some of his family members’ faces when he told them he would be entering the Catholic Church at Easter this year.
This year, he is one of about 60 adults in the Australian Diocese of Sandhurst who will enter the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil — part of a national and global upward trend.
Writing for us this week, Peter Rosengren takes a look at what this growing counter-cultural swing towards the faith looks like in Australia, and what are the questions driving people to the Church for answers.
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Sticking with the global baptism boom, in a report this week, Luke Coppen takes a look at the latest figures from France, where new records are being set this Easter, too.
A 32-page report from the country’s bishops tries to grasp what is going so right, and what to expect from the influx of new Catholics.
Read all about that right here.
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When Father Jon Fincher returned from seminary in Rome, he wanted to bring a taste of the eternal city back with him to Oklahoma.
But instead of bringing new pasta recipes to parish dinners, he brought back with him observance a historic tradition without much local traction — St. Philip Neri’s Seven Churches Visitation, which dates back to the 1500s, when the saint began leading a pilgrimage to Rome’s seven basilicas’ altar of repose.
For the past five years, the Diocese of Tulsa has organized its own Holy Thursday Seven Churches pilgrimage, outlining an itinerary of churches with tabernacles of repose at which pilgrims might pray after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.
On the pilgrim trail this year is our own Jack Figge, and you can read all about it right here.
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A priest in Iceland says allegations that he violated a law banning conversion therapy are the result of a misunderstanding during a recent interview he gave.
Amid a national controversy in Iceland, Fr. Jakob Rolland, chancellor of the Diocese of Reykjavík, told The Pillar that he did not advocate trying to change a person’s sexual attraction, but instead was explaining Church teaching on sexual activity.
The Franciscan horseshoe
I’m looking forward to watching and reading Pope Leo’s first Easter as Bishop of Rome. As the Pascal Triduum is the apex of the liturgical year, there’s no more open window into a pope’s pastoral vision than how he leads the Church through the liturgies of Holy Week.
So far, Leo’s shown himself to have an especially vivid sense of the priesthood of the papacy.
The sight of him personally carrying the cross at the Coliseum today seems likely to become an indelible image of his pontificate. And there is a special significance and solemnity to his decision to revert to the traditional practice yesterday of washing the feet of 12 of his diocesan priests, having only recently ordained most of them himself.
In the podcast this week, JD and I talked a bit about the special symbolism of a bishop washing the feet of his priests, mirroring the leadership of service and communion modeled by Christ with his disciples at the Last Supper.
And we talked a bit about how, to be sure, there are many ways of making the same gesture at the diocesan and parish level — and endless permutations of people whose feet one might wash.
Francis, of course, opted to spend most years in prisons or detention centers, bringing the gesture of loving service to the “existential peripheries” which were his special focus.
For myself, I don’t especially assign relative moral weight to any particular articulation of the event, provided that it is sincerely done and rooted in love, not performative messaging. Though, as I mentioned to JD, I do think it is helpful — preferable even — if pastors, and especially popes, pick a form and stick with it, year in and year out, so that novelty doesn’t become a perennial distraction.
Sidecar to that, I certainly expected that anything Leo chose to do that differed from how Francis did things was bound to attract attention, and reasonably so since, as I said, each pope’s choices tell us something about them and the prism through which they consider each facet of the Triduum.
But I confess I have been surprised at the directness and outright hostility some have directed at Pope Leo for electing to celebrate the Triduum, most especially the washing of the feet.
We’ve seen similar for other reversions to tradition by the new pope — I recall one relatively prominent twitter denizen getting very het up about the pope blessing lambs on the feast of St. Agnes because it was anti-Laudato Si or something.