Priests Must Hold Fast To Tradition as the Church Goes Through This Agony
The following was written and published in French by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on Holy Thursday. The following is an unofficial English translation.
NEC SENESCAT TEMPORE
Homily of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday
On Thursday of Holy Week, the Church honors with the utmost solemnity some of the most important mysteries of our religion. In ancient times, this blessed day began with the reconciliation of public sinners who had atoned for their sins during Lent. Vivo ego, dicit Dominus: nolo mortem peccatoris, sed ut magis convertatur, et vivat.
But for the sinner not to die, but rather to be converted and live, it is indispensable that the Sacrifice of the New and Eternal Covenant, the Holy Mass, be perpetuated in an unbloody manner; and for this eternal Sacrifice to be celebrated, it requires the Priesthood, and thus the Episcopate to transmit it in the line of Apostolic Succession; and with the Priesthood, the Oils and Chrism of the anointing of Priests and Kings, Prophets and Martyrs. In short, it is necessary that the Messiah – the Χριστός, the Lord’s Anointed – gloriously risen and ascended to Heaven after suffering and dying on the Cross, perpetuate His presence in Holy Church, His Mystical Body, until the day of His return at the end of time.
On this blessed day, we remember the Last Supper, the institution of the priesthood, the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament.
The evening liturgy takes us back to the Upper Room, where the Apostles received His spiritual testament from the Lord, before the agony of Gethsemane and the arrest by the Sanhedrin. And while the days before and after Maundy Thursday offer us the Gospels of the Passion and the outward signs of mourning, today the Church dresses in white, intones the Gloria and concentrates on contemplating these last hours that the Redeemer spends with His disciples.
Never as in this crucial phase in the history of the Church and of humanity can we feel and share the apprehension of the Apostles, their disorientation at seeing their feet washed by the Master, their awareness of an imminent destiny, the sleep that seized them during the Agony in the Garden of Olives, the fear that led them to flee, Peter’s triple denial in the Praetorium, the despair that led Judas to take his own life, the silent presence of John and the holy women on the ascent to Calvary and at the foot of the Cross.
In the space of a few hours, the ritual banquet of the Jewish Passover, anticipating the only Mass celebrated before the Sacrifice on Golgotha, gives way to the apparent triumph of the executioners, the arrest of the Lord, a trial conducted with fraud and false witnesses, His condemnation to death on the infamous scaffold reserved for slaves, the outrages of the crowd stirred up by the scribes and
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