Reading this, I feel that peculiar ache which comes when the soul recognizes a home it has not yet fully entered. For what you describe is not merely a critique of modernity’s amnesia, but an invocation of something far deeper—a summons to remember that Christianity was once a living current, not a cultural relic; a breath caught up in fields of dew, woodsmoke, and bells, not reduced to slogans and scheduling conflicts.
It is no small thing you name here: the loss of Easter is not the loss of a season, but the slow forgetting of our true citizenship. For in the old world, Easter was not an interlude; it was the atmosphere itself—the air the soul breathed for fifty bright days. To recover it would not merely be to correct a liturgical oversight; it would be to reawaken the buried knowledge that the Resurrection was not an event but a world, a world we were meant to inhabit even now.
This, too, touches on the marrow of incarnational mysticism, which is my main theme in Desert and Fire: that the eternal breaks not in some disembodied future, but into bread, into firewood, into the worn handle of a scythe glinting in the dawn. In those years when you lived as a peasant might have lived, you did more than reject modernity—you slipped through a tear in the veil and glimpsed what the saints and mystics have always known: that God’s glory is not an ornament laid atop the world but the very grain of its being.
It is a strange and terrible irony that we, who pride ourselves on having conquered time, have forgotten how to live in it. We rush past Easter like men stumbling over buried treasure. We kneel out of habit, not joy. We mourn where we ought to dance. And somewhere beneath the plastic surface of things, the stones themselves cry out.
But still, even now, a remnant remembers. In the glint of sunlight on old wood, in the shy gladness of students who have not yet learned to disbelieve in wonder, in the fierce, stubborn clinging to the ancient songs sung not for effect but because they are true—there, the breath of Easter lingers. And if one listens closely, if one dares to live as though the Resurrection were the deepest fact and not a pious metaphor, one might yet hear the ancient music swelling under the dead noise of the age.
You have heard it, and borne witness to it here. And in doing so, you remind us that the task is not merely to remember Easter, but to live it—to become, even in this late and weary hour, inhabitants of that hidden world where every day is a Sunday, and every scythe-blade gleams with the dew of a death already conquered.
Beautiful reflections, Steve, thank you. You're completely right: Easter is so much more. In a sense, it is everything—the one Day that weaves together the truth and joy and goodness of all other days. And yet, as you said, we rush past it "like men stumbling over buried treasure."
You point to the larger question about the Divine Mercy devotion: the cheerfulness with which the modern church just barges into the liturgical year with its bright ideas. A perpetual Lent indeed. It means that the most devoted Catholics are continually mournful and even depressed. The others, the weak reeds so to speak, are just oblivious -- they have neither Lent nor Easter. No wonder they love sports so much! At least they can celebrate!
Not to forget the fact the devotion was condemned, faustina’s writings placed on list of banned books, and the lack of wounds on the image. As a priest once said “no wounds, no mercy”
There’s a reason why Christi retained the 5 wounds in his glorified body after the resurrection and a devotion which does not include them is of dubious origin as a result
Err…. Didn’t Jesus Himself though tell St Faustina though to start the Novena on Good Friday? (Diary entry 1209, albeit disclaimers around the non mandatory nature of believing private revelation etc)
Yes, I understand that it starts on Good Friday. I confess I have never understood how the liturgical depth of Good Friday with all its Psalms and prayers would need anything else.
I am not sure myself, but I think it may be heavily connected with the time and place of its history ….?
when I visited Auschwitz several years ago, I got absolute chills when I realised that the closest town to this terrible place was krakow, where sr Faustina had received the visions just a few years before the outbreak of ww2. The Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow is spectacular and has this overwhelming sense of Divine Providence in both it’s time and proximity to Auschwitz. I think of it often and Jesus’s words to Sr Faustina, “before I Come as the Just Judge I will come as the King of Mercy” (diary entry 83).
Rudolph Hoss, the commander of Auschwitz, spent considerable time in krakow (and Warsaw and wadowice, the home of JP2) while in prison and awaiting trial and his execution for his crimes.
The story is that he had a profound reversion to his childhood catholicism and asked to see a priest for Confession before his execution, and that the only priest available (given they had all been executed) was one who had miraculously survived Auschwitz and who spoke German and could therefore hear his confession.
Thank you both for these comments. Not being a priest or a theologian, I don't feel qualified to speak in a general way about the propriety and legitimacy of the Divine Mercy devotion. (As you pointed out, CoffeeFroth, we're dealing with a private revelation here, so it's a devotional gray area.) However, to be consistent with my own spirituality and medievalist disposition, I must opine that the Divine Mercy devotion is not compatible with Easter Week. To support that opinion I have the words of Dom Guéranger himself, who knew more about traditional Catholic liturgy and spirituality than I ever will; he said this about the Sunday previously celebrated only as the Octave Day of Easter: "Such is the solemnity of this Sunday, that not only is it of a Double rite, but no Feast, however great, can ever be kept upon it."
Hoss wrote all this down (it’s publicly available) and his sorrow acknowledging what he had done, and I believe he remains the highest ranking nazi official to ever apologise for the crimes against the Jewish people (and that he wrote a letter of apology which is on display in the Holocaust Museum in New York).
So… I have often wondered about the priest who heard his confession and the gravity of granting him absolution and given how much of this occurred in and around krakow where sr Faustina had lived, it seems like there is a mysterious and profound connection to Divine Mercy and this real time example of it.
All of which is a long way of saying: I don’t think it takes from Good Friday; but I wonder if it provides a very real way back for those outside the Church who have forgotten about Good Friday?
Excellent article, Robert! I can't help but feel that the loss of authentic joy at Easter in modern Catholicism is directly linked to the loss of penance in the modern Church during Lent. The intensely penitential character of Lent in the past helped the faithful to enter more deeply into the sufferings and Passion of Christ, and this in turn helped them to experience the joys of the Easter season more fully.
In a certain sense, we cannot experience the full joys of the Resurrection unless we have experienced the full sorrows of the Passion.
It is because of this that I believe that, paradoxically, the solution to recovering the authentic Mediaeval experience of Easter joy is to return to an authentic Catholic spirit of penance (and not just during Lent -- also through the recovery of Ember days, etc.), instead of the token two days of mandatory fasting (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) that we have in current Church legislation.
Learn to suffer with Christ, and we will be able to rejoice with Him as well. But a weak penitential Lent will always lead to a subdued sense of joy at Easter.
I 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 agree, Father, and Dom Guéranger makes the same point in his writings on Easter. I have experienced in my own life how the joy of Easter flows much more naturally and strongly when one adopts a more "medieval" approach to Lenten penance.
I don't know if you have read my article about Lenten fasting (link below), but I wrote it specifically to help people feel more comfortable with the practical aspects of a long-term traditional fast (i.e., a fast with serious reduction of food intake). I think there is a widespread assumption that traditional fasting is overwhelmingly difficult or even dangerous to one's health, and I wrote this article to help people understand that from a physiological perspective, traditional Lenten fasting is still feasible (and even beneficial) for the vast majority of the adult population.
I heartily agree, Father. But what pastors will lead us in this? How likely is it that our new pope will? This is hard to do on one's own; we need the example and support of the whole local community, and that's not something I see anywhere.
I think the days when the faithful could simply rely on their priests and bishops (and even the pope) to lead them on the straight and narrow path to holiness are largely gone, sadly.
But if God allows for this vacuum of Faith to occur in the Church, He will also provide for the spiritual needs of the faithful.
One thing that separates us Catholics from the various false churches is that we have 2000 years of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium to keep us on the right path. And no one can force us to deviate from these things. We also have the grace of the Sacraments, of devotion to Our Lady (the Rosary) and the Saints, and many other things.
God will provide, especially if we implore Him sincerely and put all our hope in Him. We should never lose heart. These are the kind of times that made martyrs in the history of the Church. And renewal will come about one day, through the blood of the modern-day martyrs.
I am amazed to see that, despite all the confusion and error in the Church today, Our Lord is still raising up holy souls that stay the true course.
Thanks for this, I have been thinking similar thoughts this week. The divine office changes for Holy Week and, in the traditional office, is also different for the Easter octave - much shorter, shorn of some usual elements, until the Sunday after Easter, when it resumes its normal shape but with lots of Alleluias. It is a counterbalance to Holy Week, or should be and clearly a time of rest after the labours of the previous week. I don't do Divine Mercy Sunday because, as you say, it is out of place. We should be all about joy and rejoicing at this time, instead we resume the old treadmill. In England we do have a public holiday on Easter Monday but after that everyone goes back to work. I wish we had the medieval approach to work and Holy days!
You're right, the liturgical shift from Holy Week to Easter Week clearly signals a sense of rest and relaxation. Years ago one of my Oratorian confrères pointed out that the monks of old had to put in a lot of labor to learn all the Holy Week chants; the relative brevity of Easter chants gave them more time and mental space to enjoy the triumph of the Risen Christ.
Really enjoyed reading this. I am a recent convert to the Catholic church after growing up Protestant (my husband and I, with our two children, entered the church last year at Pentecost) but we have been attending a Byzantine Catholic church and have found the eastern expression so satisfying in this regard. They take fasting very seriously, and the liturgy during Lent is a full two hours (which feels very penitential with two toddlers!!). By the time we get to Easter, they go all out with the Easter hymns, bells, decorating the church with flowers, etc. It felt like such a relief to get to Easter this year and then to really celebrate! Obviously this can't even compare with over a month of feasting and celebrating, but I've really enjoyed the way that the Byzantine tradition maintains some of these older traditions, which shape the year quite powerfully.
Thank you for this comment, Jessica. I agree with everything you said about Byzantine Easter. I've attended the Byzantine liturgy many times and have long appreciated the special outpouring of joy and exultation in the Byzantine Easter service. In fact, my experiences with Byzantine Easter helped to open my eyes to what a truly Christian Easter celebration should be. I'm glad that you have the opportunity to practice the Faith amidst the poetic richness and venerable antiquity of the Byzantine rite.
Welcome home! My family is Byzantine Catholic. We switched rites a few years ago, not out of lack of love for the Roman church-- our children are immersed in both-- but because of a great love for the liturgy and spiritual practices in the Byzantine church. This comment captures that well! It really is such a joyful time and it's almost impossible not to "feel" that Easter joy we are called to when at Divine Liturgy!
In my family and in my extended circle, I am the only Christian. Any kind of outward attachment to the faith is more or less verboten : anything, anything but that! It is a long story. In any case, your discussion of the Easter season and our incapacity to rejoice resonated powerfully with my experience : there is not more feasting possible, in the truest sense at least. And while Christmas sadly for us is always an unfortunate, joyless affair - yet another thing that "needs to be done"-, Easter remains the most difficult season to live through. Everything has been hollowed out. I know I should be joyful, but I can only repeat in my heart with our Lord, over and over again : "If you knew the gift of God". So it always feel like a (even more interiorized and subtle) Lent after Lent.
Thank you for the comment. I completely understand your sentiments, which in my experience are now very common. I certainly am not immune to them. I am instinctively a realist and have had very close contact over many years with the appalling ruination of contemporary society, so I have no illusions about the state of the world. But I have also found that modern technology, modern modes of thought, and modern lifestyles amplify negativity and dispel joy in ways that are harmful and deceptive—and unnecessary. I'll repeat what I said above in another comment: There were plenty of problems in the Middle Ages, but medieval Christians dedicated multiple centuries to building the richest culture and most magnificent civilization in history, and they simply could not have done this without joy, and lots of it. But this joy I speak of is not a vague feeling of contentment because everything is fine. It is a deep and abiding awareness that life is fundamentally good, and it’s fundamentally good because Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.
Joy in those circumstances is tough--I completely understand, Jean-Michel. A quiet confidence is a reasonable goal, one you no doubt have in faith. It will speak its own peace.
You point to the spiritual schizophrenia of this age. For those of us who aim to rediscover our spiritual roots and forgotten our patrimony, we find we live in a time where it seems impossible to live a truly Catholic life. The prince of the power of the air has so saturated our bandwidth with modernity that as much as we may long to live the true Easter season, we find ourselves lost in a culture who has all but erased God.
Interiorly I can receive Easter graces but as soon as I remove myself from recollection or gaze at the turbulence of the time, I feel the deep need to make reparations for the height of sin our world has built into a second tower of Babble. The chair of Peter is empty. How does one celebrate Easter in the midst of such chaos?
I don’t desire to be a depressed or dismal person and sour God’s glory but how do we recapture Easter in this current moment? I deeply desire to but struggle to grasp joy.
Much could be said on this topic. A book, multiple books, could be written on modernity's broken relationship with joy and celebration and leisure. But for me, it's also very simple: the essence of life is what's happening close to us, not far from us. Springtime—warmth, sunshine, new leaves, flowers, birdsong—is close, especially if you live in the country, but even if you live in the city; our children are close; our local parish is (hopefully) close; God is close (actually inside us); the Truth is close (if it dwells in our minds); the Resurrection is close, because it is the foundation and fulfillment of every Christian life. In the Middle Ages, this mode of living was inescapable, because advanced technology is what makes faraway things seem close, and there was no advanced technology in the Middle Ages. There is joy in what is close to us, but we so easily overlook it because our eyes are straining to see—through technological contrivances—all the strife and confusion and ugliness that is far away.
Let me be honest with you, Ruth. I don’t really care if the chair of Peter is empty. It’s the pope’s job to govern the Church, not mine, and it’s the cardinals’ job to elect a new pope, not mine. The pope affects our lives far less than we imagine. In the Middle Ages, did most Christians even know the pope was dead until after the next one was elected? News comes slowly when it travels by foot and hoof. I wonder what percentage of medieval peasants could even tell you the name of the current pope. Why would they care? They were too busy pruning their fruit trees, singing folk songs, watching their children grow up, chatting with their neighbors, building a new barn, going to Sunday Mass, praying in their simple little village church as the Easter sun was setting and the hardness of life grew a little softer in the twilight.
You ask, “How does one celebrate Easter in the midst of such chaos?” There is no chaos. That’s an artifact of technology. It’s a result of artificially condensing the miseries of the faraway into the reality of the close. There is always some place out there where sin has prevailed, where God has been erased, where war is raging, where churchmen are heaping disgrace upon the Mystical Body of Christ. But there’s no chaos in my soul, and there’s no chaos in my home, and there’s no chaos at my local church. There are problems, yes, but there were problems in every village of Christendom too, and that didn’t stop medieval folks from being so enchanted with human life that they built—with their hands, and their beasts of burden, and the simplest of machines—the most stable and spiritual and culturally magnificent civilization in history. That’s what I call joy: not a vague feeling of contentment because everything is fine, but a deep and abiding awareness that life is fundamentally good, and it’s fundamentally good because Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.
I share your sentiments exactly, Ruth. I know this is a time of joy, but I experience a "dark joy" in the best of times. Hard to celebrate when loved ones have rejected all semblance of the faith they were carefully taught, when little ones world-wide face such horrors, when pernicious powers strip the last vestiges of belief from the public square. Yes, I know who "wins" in the end, but we're not there yet. We're still "mourning and weeping in a vale of tears." I live a rigourous Lent and therein feel quite at home with the needs of the world; I rejoice now with the Risen Lord, but know there's much work to do before we rest in Him.
Thank you so much for this post, Robert. Without having your amazing background, I still understand your comments. Now I know why I resist saying the Divine Mercy chaplet so soon after Easter. It’s as if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. I feel much better about my resistance~ ha! I loved the “perpetual Lent” description of our current life within the cogs of the machine. When I saw “Brother Sun Sister Moon” when it debuted in 1972, I remembered especially the organ belting out the Easter Sequence and St Francis was getting hot under the collar, so to speak, because he was being called inwardly for Something more. Although it was a heavily romanticized story of the real thing, I just loved the pomp and largeness of the medieval church and how the film conveyed so deeply the religious aspect to life then. Your post makes me think more deeply about what I can do to prolong that Easter joy.
Thank you for this wonderful comment, Shannon, and I'm so glad that this article resonated for you! I feel very strongly that the timing of the Divine Mercy novena is wrong. If Sister Faustina thinks that Our Lord told her that the entire Church should pray the novena during Easter Week, I think she is mistaken. I'll repeat what I wrote above in another comment: Dom Guéranger himself, who knew more about traditional Catholic liturgy and spirituality than I ever will, said this about the Sunday previously celebrated only as the Octave Day of Easter: "Such is the solemnity of this Sunday, that not only is it of a Double rite, but no Feast, however great, can ever be kept upon it."
I have often thought how this Sunday would be the perfect day for Egg hunts. Instead they are often done on Palm Sunday or worse, during the Triduum or during Holy Week. What a pity that even churches rush to finish Easter celebrations even before the octave is over.
There is so much time to celebrate Easter during the Octave and then during the long Easter season until Pentecost—why start before Easter has even arrived?!
Dear Mr. Keim, your remarks about the Divine Mercy devotion seem to me quite on point.
I am not too much of an expert about those private revelations, but a priest once shared with me his opinion that, in complying with Jesus' request for the institution of that feast, it was overlooked that, liturgically, Easter is an 8-day feast, and that therefore "the" Sunday after Easter is actually... the “Second Sunday after Easter” in the Traditional Calendar.
And how does the introit of that Sunday begin? “MISERICORDIA DOMINI plena est terra, alleluia.” Of course, that Sunday is already known as Good Shepherd Sunday, but what better occasion to celebrate the divine mercy of that Lord who like a good shepherd goes in search of his scattered sheep? Adding that character and title to this Sunday would have been less disruptive to the balance of the times of the liturgy, while also avoiding the inconvenience of a Novena that ponders the Lord's Passion during a full week when our minds should be captured by His glorious Resurrection (we are not rationalists, of course, and the two things are not mutually exclusive, but it is one thing to be occupied all week with that Novena, and quite another to begin it, as it were, on the octave of Good Friday, after one has had time to bask in the Easter delights).
This is a very interesting comment, Carlo, thank you. I had never thought about the possibility that the placement of the novena is based on a misinterpretation of "the Sunday after Easter." And I agree, moving the novena back one week would produce significantly less spiritual dissonance.
Wow, Bob! This article was so interesting to see you in action and to learn another side of celebrating Easter and the season before and after it and to learn about other ways of trying to understand this celebration we all enjoy!
Thanks for putting many of my feelings into words.
I’ve often thought about ways to introduce more piety and celebration to Easter. Can you point us toward any more medieval Easter customs which might be worth reviving in our time?
Thank you for this comment. Unfortunately, there is limited historical information on how exactly a medieval town or village would have celebrated Easter. To some extent, though, the information is not necessary, because much of the celebrating would have simply been an Easter-themed version of typical medieval merrymaking: village dances, processions, feasting, etc. I'll explore this aspect of the topic more in my Tuesday post.
Robert, have you read this book? ‘Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages” by James Monti. I haven’t read it yet, but the table of contents looks very interesting and includes a section on each sacrament, then a section on the liturgical year (Including Easter, of course), and another section on other rites of the church, including the rite of consecration of virgins, which piqued my interest, as I have wanted to see what the original rite was like before it was revised in the 70s.
Somebody commented on our Easter Friday livestream about how different things would be if we kept proper penitential fasts. I commented that I usually don't take up something specific in Lent, but that Lent always seems to find me anyway (this year, with a physical injury). What you say about how we live a perpetual Lent explains my response: I get to Lent, and I can't think of a way to observe it...because I constantly already am. Somehow, with the "Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism" we ended up with nothing but asceticism, no joy.
Very well said, and I also have noticed (repeatedly) that "Lent seems to find me." The Protestant/capitalistic work ethic absolutely is a recipe for demoralizing (rather than liberating) asceticism, and if I may use a strong word, I think that it can create a sort of collective social psychosis leading to emotional malaise and spiritual stultification. Those most severely affected—and I myself, because of my natural temperament, am vulnerable to this—may even respond to joy and (true) leisure with a sense of fear or deep unease.
Reading this, I feel that peculiar ache which comes when the soul recognizes a home it has not yet fully entered. For what you describe is not merely a critique of modernity’s amnesia, but an invocation of something far deeper—a summons to remember that Christianity was once a living current, not a cultural relic; a breath caught up in fields of dew, woodsmoke, and bells, not reduced to slogans and scheduling conflicts.
It is no small thing you name here: the loss of Easter is not the loss of a season, but the slow forgetting of our true citizenship. For in the old world, Easter was not an interlude; it was the atmosphere itself—the air the soul breathed for fifty bright days. To recover it would not merely be to correct a liturgical oversight; it would be to reawaken the buried knowledge that the Resurrection was not an event but a world, a world we were meant to inhabit even now.
This, too, touches on the marrow of incarnational mysticism, which is my main theme in Desert and Fire: that the eternal breaks not in some disembodied future, but into bread, into firewood, into the worn handle of a scythe glinting in the dawn. In those years when you lived as a peasant might have lived, you did more than reject modernity—you slipped through a tear in the veil and glimpsed what the saints and mystics have always known: that God’s glory is not an ornament laid atop the world but the very grain of its being.
It is a strange and terrible irony that we, who pride ourselves on having conquered time, have forgotten how to live in it. We rush past Easter like men stumbling over buried treasure. We kneel out of habit, not joy. We mourn where we ought to dance. And somewhere beneath the plastic surface of things, the stones themselves cry out.
But still, even now, a remnant remembers. In the glint of sunlight on old wood, in the shy gladness of students who have not yet learned to disbelieve in wonder, in the fierce, stubborn clinging to the ancient songs sung not for effect but because they are true—there, the breath of Easter lingers. And if one listens closely, if one dares to live as though the Resurrection were the deepest fact and not a pious metaphor, one might yet hear the ancient music swelling under the dead noise of the age.
You have heard it, and borne witness to it here. And in doing so, you remind us that the task is not merely to remember Easter, but to live it—to become, even in this late and weary hour, inhabitants of that hidden world where every day is a Sunday, and every scythe-blade gleams with the dew of a death already conquered.
Beautiful reflections, Steve, thank you. You're completely right: Easter is so much more. In a sense, it is everything—the one Day that weaves together the truth and joy and goodness of all other days. And yet, as you said, we rush past it "like men stumbling over buried treasure."
You point to the larger question about the Divine Mercy devotion: the cheerfulness with which the modern church just barges into the liturgical year with its bright ideas. A perpetual Lent indeed. It means that the most devoted Catholics are continually mournful and even depressed. The others, the weak reeds so to speak, are just oblivious -- they have neither Lent nor Easter. No wonder they love sports so much! At least they can celebrate!
Not to forget the fact the devotion was condemned, faustina’s writings placed on list of banned books, and the lack of wounds on the image. As a priest once said “no wounds, no mercy”
There’s a reason why Christi retained the 5 wounds in his glorified body after the resurrection and a devotion which does not include them is of dubious origin as a result
Err…. Didn’t Jesus Himself though tell St Faustina though to start the Novena on Good Friday? (Diary entry 1209, albeit disclaimers around the non mandatory nature of believing private revelation etc)
Yes, I understand that it starts on Good Friday. I confess I have never understood how the liturgical depth of Good Friday with all its Psalms and prayers would need anything else.
I am not sure myself, but I think it may be heavily connected with the time and place of its history ….?
when I visited Auschwitz several years ago, I got absolute chills when I realised that the closest town to this terrible place was krakow, where sr Faustina had received the visions just a few years before the outbreak of ww2. The Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow is spectacular and has this overwhelming sense of Divine Providence in both it’s time and proximity to Auschwitz. I think of it often and Jesus’s words to Sr Faustina, “before I Come as the Just Judge I will come as the King of Mercy” (diary entry 83).
Rudolph Hoss, the commander of Auschwitz, spent considerable time in krakow (and Warsaw and wadowice, the home of JP2) while in prison and awaiting trial and his execution for his crimes.
The story is that he had a profound reversion to his childhood catholicism and asked to see a priest for Confession before his execution, and that the only priest available (given they had all been executed) was one who had miraculously survived Auschwitz and who spoke German and could therefore hear his confession.
Thank you both for these comments. Not being a priest or a theologian, I don't feel qualified to speak in a general way about the propriety and legitimacy of the Divine Mercy devotion. (As you pointed out, CoffeeFroth, we're dealing with a private revelation here, so it's a devotional gray area.) However, to be consistent with my own spirituality and medievalist disposition, I must opine that the Divine Mercy devotion is not compatible with Easter Week. To support that opinion I have the words of Dom Guéranger himself, who knew more about traditional Catholic liturgy and spirituality than I ever will; he said this about the Sunday previously celebrated only as the Octave Day of Easter: "Such is the solemnity of this Sunday, that not only is it of a Double rite, but no Feast, however great, can ever be kept upon it."
Hoss wrote all this down (it’s publicly available) and his sorrow acknowledging what he had done, and I believe he remains the highest ranking nazi official to ever apologise for the crimes against the Jewish people (and that he wrote a letter of apology which is on display in the Holocaust Museum in New York).
So… I have often wondered about the priest who heard his confession and the gravity of granting him absolution and given how much of this occurred in and around krakow where sr Faustina had lived, it seems like there is a mysterious and profound connection to Divine Mercy and this real time example of it.
All of which is a long way of saying: I don’t think it takes from Good Friday; but I wonder if it provides a very real way back for those outside the Church who have forgotten about Good Friday?
Sorry for the long answer!
That's very well said, Leila.
Excellent article, Robert! I can't help but feel that the loss of authentic joy at Easter in modern Catholicism is directly linked to the loss of penance in the modern Church during Lent. The intensely penitential character of Lent in the past helped the faithful to enter more deeply into the sufferings and Passion of Christ, and this in turn helped them to experience the joys of the Easter season more fully.
In a certain sense, we cannot experience the full joys of the Resurrection unless we have experienced the full sorrows of the Passion.
It is because of this that I believe that, paradoxically, the solution to recovering the authentic Mediaeval experience of Easter joy is to return to an authentic Catholic spirit of penance (and not just during Lent -- also through the recovery of Ember days, etc.), instead of the token two days of mandatory fasting (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) that we have in current Church legislation.
Learn to suffer with Christ, and we will be able to rejoice with Him as well. But a weak penitential Lent will always lead to a subdued sense of joy at Easter.
I 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 agree, Father, and Dom Guéranger makes the same point in his writings on Easter. I have experienced in my own life how the joy of Easter flows much more naturally and strongly when one adopts a more "medieval" approach to Lenten penance.
I don't know if you have read my article about Lenten fasting (link below), but I wrote it specifically to help people feel more comfortable with the practical aspects of a long-term traditional fast (i.e., a fast with serious reduction of food intake). I think there is a widespread assumption that traditional fasting is overwhelmingly difficult or even dangerous to one's health, and I wrote this article to help people understand that from a physiological perspective, traditional Lenten fasting is still feasible (and even beneficial) for the vast majority of the adult population.
https://viamediaevalis.substack.com/p/a-very-practical-study-of-traditional
Thank you. No, I haven't read it, but I'll take a look for sure.
I heartily agree, Father. But what pastors will lead us in this? How likely is it that our new pope will? This is hard to do on one's own; we need the example and support of the whole local community, and that's not something I see anywhere.
I think the days when the faithful could simply rely on their priests and bishops (and even the pope) to lead them on the straight and narrow path to holiness are largely gone, sadly.
But if God allows for this vacuum of Faith to occur in the Church, He will also provide for the spiritual needs of the faithful.
One thing that separates us Catholics from the various false churches is that we have 2000 years of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium to keep us on the right path. And no one can force us to deviate from these things. We also have the grace of the Sacraments, of devotion to Our Lady (the Rosary) and the Saints, and many other things.
God will provide, especially if we implore Him sincerely and put all our hope in Him. We should never lose heart. These are the kind of times that made martyrs in the history of the Church. And renewal will come about one day, through the blood of the modern-day martyrs.
I am amazed to see that, despite all the confusion and error in the Church today, Our Lord is still raising up holy souls that stay the true course.
Thanks for this, I have been thinking similar thoughts this week. The divine office changes for Holy Week and, in the traditional office, is also different for the Easter octave - much shorter, shorn of some usual elements, until the Sunday after Easter, when it resumes its normal shape but with lots of Alleluias. It is a counterbalance to Holy Week, or should be and clearly a time of rest after the labours of the previous week. I don't do Divine Mercy Sunday because, as you say, it is out of place. We should be all about joy and rejoicing at this time, instead we resume the old treadmill. In England we do have a public holiday on Easter Monday but after that everyone goes back to work. I wish we had the medieval approach to work and Holy days!
You're right, the liturgical shift from Holy Week to Easter Week clearly signals a sense of rest and relaxation. Years ago one of my Oratorian confrères pointed out that the monks of old had to put in a lot of labor to learn all the Holy Week chants; the relative brevity of Easter chants gave them more time and mental space to enjoy the triumph of the Risen Christ.
Really enjoyed reading this. I am a recent convert to the Catholic church after growing up Protestant (my husband and I, with our two children, entered the church last year at Pentecost) but we have been attending a Byzantine Catholic church and have found the eastern expression so satisfying in this regard. They take fasting very seriously, and the liturgy during Lent is a full two hours (which feels very penitential with two toddlers!!). By the time we get to Easter, they go all out with the Easter hymns, bells, decorating the church with flowers, etc. It felt like such a relief to get to Easter this year and then to really celebrate! Obviously this can't even compare with over a month of feasting and celebrating, but I've really enjoyed the way that the Byzantine tradition maintains some of these older traditions, which shape the year quite powerfully.
Thank you for this comment, Jessica. I agree with everything you said about Byzantine Easter. I've attended the Byzantine liturgy many times and have long appreciated the special outpouring of joy and exultation in the Byzantine Easter service. In fact, my experiences with Byzantine Easter helped to open my eyes to what a truly Christian Easter celebration should be. I'm glad that you have the opportunity to practice the Faith amidst the poetic richness and venerable antiquity of the Byzantine rite.
Welcome home! My family is Byzantine Catholic. We switched rites a few years ago, not out of lack of love for the Roman church-- our children are immersed in both-- but because of a great love for the liturgy and spiritual practices in the Byzantine church. This comment captures that well! It really is such a joyful time and it's almost impossible not to "feel" that Easter joy we are called to when at Divine Liturgy!
Modern man cannot celebrate because he cannot suffer.
Blessed Feast 🚪of the Sunday of the holy glorious and All-Laudable Apostle Thomas!
Grace and peace to you Amigo. ☦️ 🪨⛪📿🕯️
➕ IC XC Nika ➕
⛲ Christ is RISEN! 🔥
(& no kneeling until ❇️ Pentecost ✅ 😏)
In my family and in my extended circle, I am the only Christian. Any kind of outward attachment to the faith is more or less verboten : anything, anything but that! It is a long story. In any case, your discussion of the Easter season and our incapacity to rejoice resonated powerfully with my experience : there is not more feasting possible, in the truest sense at least. And while Christmas sadly for us is always an unfortunate, joyless affair - yet another thing that "needs to be done"-, Easter remains the most difficult season to live through. Everything has been hollowed out. I know I should be joyful, but I can only repeat in my heart with our Lord, over and over again : "If you knew the gift of God". So it always feel like a (even more interiorized and subtle) Lent after Lent.
Thank you for the comment. I completely understand your sentiments, which in my experience are now very common. I certainly am not immune to them. I am instinctively a realist and have had very close contact over many years with the appalling ruination of contemporary society, so I have no illusions about the state of the world. But I have also found that modern technology, modern modes of thought, and modern lifestyles amplify negativity and dispel joy in ways that are harmful and deceptive—and unnecessary. I'll repeat what I said above in another comment: There were plenty of problems in the Middle Ages, but medieval Christians dedicated multiple centuries to building the richest culture and most magnificent civilization in history, and they simply could not have done this without joy, and lots of it. But this joy I speak of is not a vague feeling of contentment because everything is fine. It is a deep and abiding awareness that life is fundamentally good, and it’s fundamentally good because Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.
Joy in those circumstances is tough--I completely understand, Jean-Michel. A quiet confidence is a reasonable goal, one you no doubt have in faith. It will speak its own peace.
You point to the spiritual schizophrenia of this age. For those of us who aim to rediscover our spiritual roots and forgotten our patrimony, we find we live in a time where it seems impossible to live a truly Catholic life. The prince of the power of the air has so saturated our bandwidth with modernity that as much as we may long to live the true Easter season, we find ourselves lost in a culture who has all but erased God.
Interiorly I can receive Easter graces but as soon as I remove myself from recollection or gaze at the turbulence of the time, I feel the deep need to make reparations for the height of sin our world has built into a second tower of Babble. The chair of Peter is empty. How does one celebrate Easter in the midst of such chaos?
I don’t desire to be a depressed or dismal person and sour God’s glory but how do we recapture Easter in this current moment? I deeply desire to but struggle to grasp joy.
Much could be said on this topic. A book, multiple books, could be written on modernity's broken relationship with joy and celebration and leisure. But for me, it's also very simple: the essence of life is what's happening close to us, not far from us. Springtime—warmth, sunshine, new leaves, flowers, birdsong—is close, especially if you live in the country, but even if you live in the city; our children are close; our local parish is (hopefully) close; God is close (actually inside us); the Truth is close (if it dwells in our minds); the Resurrection is close, because it is the foundation and fulfillment of every Christian life. In the Middle Ages, this mode of living was inescapable, because advanced technology is what makes faraway things seem close, and there was no advanced technology in the Middle Ages. There is joy in what is close to us, but we so easily overlook it because our eyes are straining to see—through technological contrivances—all the strife and confusion and ugliness that is far away.
Let me be honest with you, Ruth. I don’t really care if the chair of Peter is empty. It’s the pope’s job to govern the Church, not mine, and it’s the cardinals’ job to elect a new pope, not mine. The pope affects our lives far less than we imagine. In the Middle Ages, did most Christians even know the pope was dead until after the next one was elected? News comes slowly when it travels by foot and hoof. I wonder what percentage of medieval peasants could even tell you the name of the current pope. Why would they care? They were too busy pruning their fruit trees, singing folk songs, watching their children grow up, chatting with their neighbors, building a new barn, going to Sunday Mass, praying in their simple little village church as the Easter sun was setting and the hardness of life grew a little softer in the twilight.
You ask, “How does one celebrate Easter in the midst of such chaos?” There is no chaos. That’s an artifact of technology. It’s a result of artificially condensing the miseries of the faraway into the reality of the close. There is always some place out there where sin has prevailed, where God has been erased, where war is raging, where churchmen are heaping disgrace upon the Mystical Body of Christ. But there’s no chaos in my soul, and there’s no chaos in my home, and there’s no chaos at my local church. There are problems, yes, but there were problems in every village of Christendom too, and that didn’t stop medieval folks from being so enchanted with human life that they built—with their hands, and their beasts of burden, and the simplest of machines—the most stable and spiritual and culturally magnificent civilization in history. That’s what I call joy: not a vague feeling of contentment because everything is fine, but a deep and abiding awareness that life is fundamentally good, and it’s fundamentally good because Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.
I share your sentiments exactly, Ruth. I know this is a time of joy, but I experience a "dark joy" in the best of times. Hard to celebrate when loved ones have rejected all semblance of the faith they were carefully taught, when little ones world-wide face such horrors, when pernicious powers strip the last vestiges of belief from the public square. Yes, I know who "wins" in the end, but we're not there yet. We're still "mourning and weeping in a vale of tears." I live a rigourous Lent and therein feel quite at home with the needs of the world; I rejoice now with the Risen Lord, but know there's much work to do before we rest in Him.
Thank you so much for this post, Robert. Without having your amazing background, I still understand your comments. Now I know why I resist saying the Divine Mercy chaplet so soon after Easter. It’s as if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. I feel much better about my resistance~ ha! I loved the “perpetual Lent” description of our current life within the cogs of the machine. When I saw “Brother Sun Sister Moon” when it debuted in 1972, I remembered especially the organ belting out the Easter Sequence and St Francis was getting hot under the collar, so to speak, because he was being called inwardly for Something more. Although it was a heavily romanticized story of the real thing, I just loved the pomp and largeness of the medieval church and how the film conveyed so deeply the religious aspect to life then. Your post makes me think more deeply about what I can do to prolong that Easter joy.
Thank you for this wonderful comment, Shannon, and I'm so glad that this article resonated for you! I feel very strongly that the timing of the Divine Mercy novena is wrong. If Sister Faustina thinks that Our Lord told her that the entire Church should pray the novena during Easter Week, I think she is mistaken. I'll repeat what I wrote above in another comment: Dom Guéranger himself, who knew more about traditional Catholic liturgy and spirituality than I ever will, said this about the Sunday previously celebrated only as the Octave Day of Easter: "Such is the solemnity of this Sunday, that not only is it of a Double rite, but no Feast, however great, can ever be kept upon it."
It was lovely to read this...learning more about you...
I have often thought how this Sunday would be the perfect day for Egg hunts. Instead they are often done on Palm Sunday or worse, during the Triduum or during Holy Week. What a pity that even churches rush to finish Easter celebrations even before the octave is over.
There is so much time to celebrate Easter during the Octave and then during the long Easter season until Pentecost—why start before Easter has even arrived?!
Dear Mr. Keim, your remarks about the Divine Mercy devotion seem to me quite on point.
I am not too much of an expert about those private revelations, but a priest once shared with me his opinion that, in complying with Jesus' request for the institution of that feast, it was overlooked that, liturgically, Easter is an 8-day feast, and that therefore "the" Sunday after Easter is actually... the “Second Sunday after Easter” in the Traditional Calendar.
And how does the introit of that Sunday begin? “MISERICORDIA DOMINI plena est terra, alleluia.” Of course, that Sunday is already known as Good Shepherd Sunday, but what better occasion to celebrate the divine mercy of that Lord who like a good shepherd goes in search of his scattered sheep? Adding that character and title to this Sunday would have been less disruptive to the balance of the times of the liturgy, while also avoiding the inconvenience of a Novena that ponders the Lord's Passion during a full week when our minds should be captured by His glorious Resurrection (we are not rationalists, of course, and the two things are not mutually exclusive, but it is one thing to be occupied all week with that Novena, and quite another to begin it, as it were, on the octave of Good Friday, after one has had time to bask in the Easter delights).
This is a very interesting comment, Carlo, thank you. I had never thought about the possibility that the placement of the novena is based on a misinterpretation of "the Sunday after Easter." And I agree, moving the novena back one week would produce significantly less spiritual dissonance.
Wow, Bob! This article was so interesting to see you in action and to learn another side of celebrating Easter and the season before and after it and to learn about other ways of trying to understand this celebration we all enjoy!
Thanks for putting many of my feelings into words.
I’ve often thought about ways to introduce more piety and celebration to Easter. Can you point us toward any more medieval Easter customs which might be worth reviving in our time?
Thank you for this comment. Unfortunately, there is limited historical information on how exactly a medieval town or village would have celebrated Easter. To some extent, though, the information is not necessary, because much of the celebrating would have simply been an Easter-themed version of typical medieval merrymaking: village dances, processions, feasting, etc. I'll explore this aspect of the topic more in my Tuesday post.
Robert, have you read this book? ‘Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages” by James Monti. I haven’t read it yet, but the table of contents looks very interesting and includes a section on each sacrament, then a section on the liturgical year (Including Easter, of course), and another section on other rites of the church, including the rite of consecration of virgins, which piqued my interest, as I have wanted to see what the original rite was like before it was revised in the 70s.
I have not read it, but I agree, it looks extremely good!
Somebody commented on our Easter Friday livestream about how different things would be if we kept proper penitential fasts. I commented that I usually don't take up something specific in Lent, but that Lent always seems to find me anyway (this year, with a physical injury). What you say about how we live a perpetual Lent explains my response: I get to Lent, and I can't think of a way to observe it...because I constantly already am. Somehow, with the "Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism" we ended up with nothing but asceticism, no joy.
Very well said, and I also have noticed (repeatedly) that "Lent seems to find me." The Protestant/capitalistic work ethic absolutely is a recipe for demoralizing (rather than liberating) asceticism, and if I may use a strong word, I think that it can create a sort of collective social psychosis leading to emotional malaise and spiritual stultification. Those most severely affected—and I myself, because of my natural temperament, am vulnerable to this—may even respond to joy and (true) leisure with a sense of fear or deep unease.