En el corazón de la Iglesia In the Heart of the church Im Herzen der Kirche Foto: Archiv

ROME, Simon Donnelly. Today is Easter Monday, what the Italians call pasquetta, the ‘little Easter’ that follows yesterday, the great Easter day of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, who banished the darkness and replaced it with his everlasting light, through his suffering and death on the cross. We woke up this morning to an ethereal spring light on a gently greyish morning, where every bird north of the Equator seemed to have decided to chatter about spring right outside my window. A little intermittent spring drizzle keeps us company (suddenly turning into a giant spring hail shower this afternoon).

Rome is very quiet today (except for those excited birds that seem to have so much to sing about). We have time to reflect on the sequence of overwhelming events in the last three days here, as the disciples must have after the passover weekend of Jesus’ resurrection. We need the time to just be (not to do). Most of the seminarians have gone travelling for a few days, before the total onslaught of philosophy and theology begins again next Monday, leading up to the climax of June exams.

My memories of Good Friday in Cape Town are hot cross buns, and a slow, quiet morning at home. My memories from Johannesburg are Fr Kentenich's Stations of the Cross under the trees near the Aurum Patris shrine in Bedfordview. But this year, in Rome, things were different...

"This is my church, the church, the friends of the carpenter’s son..."

Good Friday morning we all hurtled down to Saint Peter’s to meet the two head ceremonieri (masters of ceremony) at the ‘altar of the confession’, that is, at the papal altar built over the tomb of the first pope, Peter the Apostle. The Basilica was an extraordinary site on Friday morning: thousands of tourists were still being allowed into the church, as they are every day, but only around the outside edges; the centre parts were cordoned off for preparations for the Easter triduum. Seminarians and deacons and priests of all shapes and sizes and colours (I mean their clothing!) were walking in and out, getting ready for our Friday dress rehearsal for the Passion that afternoon. Small tractor vehicles were driving around, pushing platforms and chairs into positions!

It is worth visiting St Peter’s and seeing the whole Vatican operation, for all the spiritual reasons, and to be forced  to get rid of your stereotype that Italy is chaotic. The Vatican — seemingly very Italian in its culture (and it is) — is able to put together and implement the most amazingly complex ceremonies, executed and celebrated with precision and dignity and gentless and holiness. I smiled with joy, realising once again: this is it! This is our faith! This is MY church, THE church, the friends of the carpenter’s son from Galilee, the followers of Him and of the fishermen from Galilee.

A morning at St. Peter’s

We began to have the order of things explained to us, when suddenly we were told to stand, and all conversation stopped: rows of canons and prelates began passing us into the main part of the church, singing: obviously a different (planned) liturgical event was interrupting our liturgy! We had noticed candles lit in one of the high balconies half way up the towering inside walls. A prelate emerged with a few servers, carrying a talk golden cross. We knelt, with the procession, to reverence, for a few silent moments, relics of the True Cross kept at Saint Peter’s. We united ourselves spiritually with these iconic fragments of the Lord’s cross, and then as quickly as it began, the prelates quietly processed out, and we continued with our dress rehearsal. Each of the 12 of us had small jobs in the Passion liturgy.

The church gathered at the tomb of the Apostle

That afternoon, we arrived at St. Peter’s in our (rather brightly coloured!) purple soutanes, on top of which we were to put the soft white cotta of any priest or deacon serving in a liturgical function in the Basilica. The sacristy for major events is enlarged, to include the small area behind the glass protection in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà. And so, for a good 20 minutes before the Passion began, we could stand at the very foot of the Pietà, looking up to the Lord’s dead body lying in His mother’s arms. It gave me a chance for a very personal meditation, before participating in the very Passion that was about to lead to the Lord’s crucifixion. Michelangelo’s statue is incredibly lifelike: the madonna holds her dead Son, as the sword of sorrow pierces her heart.

Cardinal Stafford, the celebrant, greeted us servers and cantors, spoke a few words to focus our hearts and minds on the Passion: a reflection on sin — ours and the world’s — and then we began. We processed in: St Peter’s was FULL, several thousand people, and they were utterly and totally silent, young and old together, locals and foreigners together, the Church from the world, gathered at the tomb of the Apostle. Behind the papal altar, near the Holy Spirit window (where Archbishop Robert Zollitsch celebrated Holy Mass for Schoenstatt pilgrims on the freezing winter morning of December 8, 2003, the day when the foundation stone of the new Rome shrine was to be laid).

‘Come back, Holy Father. Easter is not the same Easter without you’

I felt able to united myself in a very small way to the suffering of the Saviour: we stood for the singing of John the Evangelist’s Passion narrative, in Latin, which took 30 minutes: a real toll on my body, on all of us. An old shoulder injury reappeared, as a response to the strange muscular configurations that a server adopts, folding his hands while standing for so long. I wondered if I would be able to carry the candle that was afterwards to be my liturgical function.

A long, moving sermon by the papal household preacher, Franciscan Father Raniero Cantalamessa, followed the Passion reading. At the end he said, ‘Come back, Holy Father. Easter is not the same Easter without you’. We shed a few quiet tears for our pope, who we knew was watching us on a video connection from his room.

Praying in the languages of the world

Next were the long, moving Good Friday prayers for the Church and the world, as usual in an array of languages of the world: Italian, English, Polish, Russian, German, Portuguese, Filipino, Swahili, Arabic, Spanish. During this, we walked the great distance to the altar of the Blessed Sacrament, to retrieve our giant candles which would accompany one of our deacons carrying in the cross for veneration. There is always one of three or more Vatican ceremonieri at your elbow, to make sure nothing goes wrong. They are very very professional.

We then held our candles, standing next to Cardinal Stafford (who under normal circumstances would have been the Holy Father, John Paul II, who himself was suffering in his own agony, just 200 metres away, in his papal apartment). Those candle holders are heavy. Three times he sang ‘Behold, the wood of the cross, on which the Saviour of the world hung’, and we answered ‘Come, let us adore’. Then finally, could we put our candles up on the papal altar, stripped of its usual altar cloths.

We sang, and prayed, and received communion, and quietly left the Basilica, to walk out into the early spring night, full of sadness, but also a firm hope and happiness for what we now know will follow on the third day.