The Exsultet in English and Latin

The Exsultet is the Easter Proclamation, in Latin the Praeconium paschale, named like many Latin prayers after its first word: “Exsultet,” let it exult. It is sung once a year, at the Easter Vigil, which in 2027 begins after nightfall on Holy Saturday, March 27.

The Vigil opens in the dark. A fire is blessed outside the church and the paschal candle is lit from it; the deacon carries the candle in, singing three times “The Light of Christ,” while its flame is passed from hand to hand until the whole church holds small lights. Then, beside the candle on its stand, he sings the Exsultet. Without a deacon, the priest sings it, and if he cannot, a cantor. It is a song of praise built like the preface of the Mass: it calls heaven, earth and the Church to rejoice, tells the story of the Passover from Egypt to the empty tomb, and offers the candle to God as a pillar of fire for the night.

The Exsultet moves in four steps, and knowing them makes the long chant easy to follow by candlelight.

1. The call to rejoice. Angels, the earth and the Church are told to exult because their King has won. The deacon then asks the people to pray that he may sing the candle’s praise worthily.
2. The thanksgiving. After the dialogue of the preface, “Lift up your hearts,” the song thanks the Father and the Son, who paid Adam’s debt with his blood and is the true Passover Lamb.
3. This is the night. Five times the hymn says it: the night of the Red Sea, of the pillar that drove away the dark, of the baptized set free from sin, of Christ breaking the chains of death, and the night foretold in the psalm, “night shall be light as day” (Psalm 138:12). Between them stand the felix culpa and the blessed night that alone knew the hour of the Resurrection.
4. The candle offered. The candle is offered as an evening sacrifice made by the work of bees, a flame that loses nothing when it is shared. The hymn prays that it may burn all night until the morning star finds it, the star that never sets, Christ risen; then it prays for the Church and her pastors.

“O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer!” is the most famous line of the Exsultet. In Latin it is O felix culpa, and the line just before it is bolder still: “O truly necessary sin of Adam, which the death of Christ has blotted out!”

The Church is not calling sin good. Adam’s sin was a real loss, and a few lines earlier the hymn calls it a debt that Christ paid and a guilt his blood cancelled. The joy is in what God made of it. Saint Paul gives the rule: “And where sin abounded, grace did more abound” (Romans 5:20). When the Catechism asks why God did not prevent the first sin, it answers with Saint Leo the Great and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas cites this very line of the Exsultet: God allows evil only to bring a greater good out of it, and here the greater good is the Redeemer himself (CCC 412).

The Latin given here is the text of the Roman Missal before Pope Pius XII reformed Holy Week in the 1950s, printed as the 1875 book has it beside its English. Today’s Missal keeps the hymn with some changes; among them, the five grains of incense are no longer fixed in the candle during the song, and the old prayer for the Emperor, which the 1875 book already leaves out, gave way to a prayer for those who govern.

Nobody knows who wrote the Exsultet. Deacons were blessing the Easter candle with songs of praise by the fourth century: around 384 a deacon named Presidius asked Saint Jerome to write him one, and Saint Augustine mentions in The City of God that he had composed a praise of the candle in verse. Tradition has long linked the Exsultet with Saint Ambrose of Milan, and the Catholic Encyclopedia reports good grounds for thinking that the Easter proclamation of his Milanese rite is his in substance, or built on hymns of his; whether the Roman text owes him anything is not known.

The Roman text is younger. From the rhythm of its Latin prose the same encyclopedia placed it between the fifth and the seventh centuries, and its oldest copies are in three books from Gaul: the Bobbio Missal of the seventh century, and the Missale Gothicum and Missale Gallicanum Vetus of the eighth. From Gaul it passed into the Roman books through a supplement to the sacramentary loosely called Pope Adrian’s, probably drawn up under Alcuin. In Italy deacons sang it from Exultet rolls, long parchment scrolls painted with pictures and unrolled as they sang; the finest date to the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Holy Saturday is the quietest day of the Church’s year: no Mass is celebrated, and the Church keeps watch by the Lord’s tomb with prayer and fasting until the Vigil. A few ways to keep it:

• Keep the fast going from Good Friday until the Vigil if you can. It is not required, but it is an old custom, and the hunger makes the night’s feast mean more.
• Read the Exsultet in the afternoon, slowly and aloud, with your family, so that its images are already familiar when you hear it sung in the dark. One voice reads and everyone answers the R. lines. A lay reader skips the deacon’s own request, from “Wherefore, beloved brethren” through “And with thy spirit,” and goes straight on to “Lift up your hearts,” just as the Missal has a lay cantor do; where the text says “N.”, name the Pope and your bishop.
• Go to the Vigil after nightfall, and bring the children if you can. It counts for Easter Sunday, since a Mass on the evening before a feast fulfills the obligation (canon 1248).
• If you cannot go, because of illness, age or distance, light one candle at home after dark, read the Exsultet by its light, and then pray the prayer from the app in the next chapter. It is not the Vigil, and no one asks it to be: illness, the care of small children or another serious reason excuses you from Mass at Easter (CCC 2181), and your prayer at home that night is joined to the whole Church keeping watch. Ask your parish, too, to bring you Holy Communion during the Easter octave.
• Bring Easter water home. The water blessed at the Vigil serves the whole year: many families bless the Easter meal with it; see the holy water blessing.

The AngelGuard app’s meditation for the Easter Vigil, about thirty minutes long, walks through the four parts of the night and closes with the prayer that follows. It is printed here as the app prays it, with one line left out (see the note after it). Pray it on the night itself, before or after the Vigil, or on any day of the Easter season.