Holy Week

Holy Week is the last week of Lent and the most solemn week of the Christian year. It opens on Palm Sunday and runs to Easter. Inside it sits the Easter Triduum, which is the still centre of the whole calendar.

Palm Sunday carries a deliberate shock. The liturgy begins outside with branches and a procession welcoming Christ into Jerusalem as king, and then, minutes later, the Passion is read in full and the same crowd’s voice becomes the one calling for his death. The Church puts both in the same hour on purpose. It is not a story about other people.

The Triduum is often miscounted as three separate days. It is one liturgy in three movements, and it does not stop in between. It begins on Holy Thursday evening with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which ends with no dismissal because it has not finished. It continues on Good Friday with the celebration of the Lord’s Passion, which likewise has no opening rite, because it is a continuation. It comes to rest at the Easter Vigil, which begins in darkness with a fire and a single candle and ends in a lit church with the Alleluia sung again after forty days of silence.

Holy Saturday is the quietest day in the calendar. No Mass is celebrated during the day. The altar is bare, the tabernacle is empty and open, and the Church simply waits at the tomb. It is the one day of the year that is deliberately shaped like absence.

Good Friday is a day of both fasting and abstinence in the Latin Church, on the same terms as Ash Wednesday: one full meal, up to two smaller ones that do not together equal a second, and no meat. Fasting binds ages eighteen to fifty-nine, abstinence from age fourteen.

Many Catholics extend the fast through Holy Saturday until the Easter Vigil. That is an ancient custom and is encouraged, but it is not an obligation.

The Triduum liturgies are not days of obligation in the way Sundays are, which surprises people given how central they are. Easter Sunday itself is. Attending the Triduum is a matter of wanting to be there.

Holy Communion is not distributed on Holy Saturday during the day except as Viaticum for the dying. On Good Friday no Mass is celebrated anywhere in the world, and Communion is given from hosts consecrated the evening before.

In Spanish, with the customs of Mexico and Latin America: Semana Santa 2027.

If you go to only one thing all year beyond Sunday Mass, make it the Triduum, and go to all three parts rather than picking one. They are built to be experienced in order and each one is incomplete without the others. Going only to Easter Sunday is arriving for the last page.

Get the times from your own parish early. Triduum times vary far more than ordinary Sunday times, the Vigil often starts after sunset and runs long, and parishes publish their schedule weeks ahead.

Bring children to the Vigil if you can bear the hour. Fire, darkness, water, bells, and light are the parts of the faith that need no explanation to a child, and the Vigil is made almost entirely of those.

Go to confession before Holy Thursday rather than during the Triduum. Most parishes schedule extra times in the preceding week for exactly this reason.

And keep Holy Saturday empty on purpose if you can. Do not fill it with shopping. The one day the Church deliberately leaves silent is worth actually spending in silence.