When can we start doing what we gave up? I noticed some started doing it today (Good Friday) which seems wrong since we fast. I thought it was Easter Sunday.
Lent ends with the beginning of the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday. You are free from your "give ups" from then until Good Friday, a day of fast and abstinence. With the beginning of the Great Easter Vigil, the season of Easter begins.
Good Friday liturgy from St Peter's - perhaps only the London Oratory does the 1970 version better. It may take over half an hour to chant the Passion in Latin with polyphonic turba choruses, but the elderly Pope and the congregation stood throughout. Tract and Gradual were from the Graduale Romanum rather than the Lectionary, so we were spared the mock-operatic responsorial psalm in Italian which mars most papal Masses.
A pity the Victoria Improperia were curtailed to accommodate Allegri's Miserere (which isn't in the liturgy for this day). But any such quibbles must be set aside since most Catholics watching this might well wonder why their parish experience is so different, so less solemn, and so less reverential.
Pope Francis was not centre stage, and his reticent liturgical style seems appropriate to a celebration in which the cross of Christ is the focus.
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When can we start doing what we gave up? I noticed some started doing it today (Good Friday) which seems wrong since we fast. I thought it was Easter Sunday.
Lent ends with the beginning of the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday. You are free from your "give ups" from then until Good Friday, a day of fast and abstinence. With the beginning of the Great Easter Vigil, the season of Easter begins.
Good Friday liturgy from St Peter's - perhaps only the London Oratory does the 1970 version better. It may take over half an hour to chant the Passion in Latin with polyphonic turba choruses, but the elderly Pope and the congregation stood throughout. Tract and Gradual were from the Graduale Romanum rather than the Lectionary, so we were spared the mock-operatic responsorial psalm in Italian which mars most papal Masses.
A pity the Victoria Improperia were curtailed to accommodate Allegri's Miserere (which isn't in the liturgy for this day). But any such quibbles must be set aside since most Catholics watching this might well wonder why their parish experience is so different, so less solemn, and so less reverential.
Pope Francis was not centre stage, and his reticent liturgical style seems appropriate to a celebration in which the cross of Christ is the focus.
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