It’s time to include people of color in the U.S. church’s models of holiness.

Testaments
By Alice Camille
Last fall in the month of All Saints, I rode the Amtrak from Providence, Rhode Island to Baltimore, Maryland. I was heading to a celebration of the life of Mother Mary Lange. Who’s that, you ask? She’s one of the Six. And if you have to ask, “Who are the other five?” then you have to hear the story.
It started when I was asked to cowrite a book about U.S. saints. The publisher wanted to include all the American saints, plus the beatified (those one miracle short of sainthood).
It’s not as clear-cut as it sounds. The trouble is defining what’s meant by an “American” saint. We were to cover U.S. saints only, not Canadian, not Central or South American. But should that list include those who ministered on the soil of this country before 1776? And does “U.S. soil” include Guam and Puerto Rico before, or even after, they became part of our national story?

Finally, we agreed on 12 saints: missionaries Isaac Jogues, Jean de Lalande, and René Goupil as well as Mohawk Kateri Tekakwitha. The five foundresses Elizabeth Ann Seton, Rose Philippine Duchesne, Theodore Guérin, Frances Xavier Cabrini, and Katharine Drexel. Philadelphia Bishop John Neumann and the healing presences of Father Damien De Veuster and Mother Marianne Cope. In addition, we admitted three who’d attained the title of Blessed: Franciscan Junípero Serra (since canonized and once more controversial), Redemptorist Francis Xavier Seelos, and Puerto Rican layman Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago. Alas, Blessed Charlie, as the last fellow is popularly called, was sacrificed to the limitations of page count. Sadly too, as his is an illuminating chapter of U.S. Catholic history.
Kateri Tekakwitha was the lone person of color left in the book after the ejection of Blessed Charlie. This bothered us mightily at the time: the whitewashing of U.S. models of holiness. It wasn’t that the canonization pipeline hadn’t identified worthy candidates of color to nominate. A considerable number of Black, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Catholics languish on the backlogs of sanctity awaiting recognition.
As we traveled the country visiting places where the saints and beatified had worked, we found informal shrines to others whose stories were as compelling as the ones we were commissioned to tell. We resolved to also promote their stories until their names were as well known as the folks with their own holy cards.
Mother Mary Lange is on our wish list for formal sainthood. Right now she bears the title Servant of God (step one of formal recognition of her cause in Rome). Her birth date at the end of the 18th century in Cuba is uncertain. But she lived into her 90s and died in 1882. Hers was a difficult era of history for a dark-skinned woman. That’s saying something, since no era has been especially easy for someone like her.
Elizabeth Lange emigrated to the United States in the early 19th century, settling in Baltimore as a free woman of color in a slave state. Public education wasn’t open to Black children, so Lange opened a free school in her home entirely self-financed. Sulpician Father James Hector Nicholas Joubert noticed her efforts and encouraged her to found an order of sisters to carry out this ministry.
The Oblate Sisters of Providence became the first Black religious community in the nation. Lange took the name Sister Mary. She and three other women continued to educate girls of color with financial and institutional support from Father Joubert. The sisters also offered night classes to adults, nursed the sick during a cholera epidemic, and opened a home for children orphaned by the Civil War.
Father Joubert died in 1843. Without him, ecclesial support evaporated. The sisters became destitute, and their ministries suffered. White priests (there were no Black ones) refused to provide sacraments or spiritual counsel to Mother Lange’s community. The sisters were spat on and pushed into the street by passersby. Many left the order. Yet Mother Lange persisted until she became blind and enfeebled in her final years. Her community survives today.
Meeting today’s Oblates in Baltimore and hearing them tell the history personally was deeply thrilling. I expressed interest in sharing Mother Lange’s life more broadly, and each time I mentioned this, whichever sister I was addressing immediately insisted: Tell the stories of all Six. Promote the Six. We need the Six.
These generous women were not merely trying to get their immensely impressive foundress canonized. They were just as vocal concerning Venerable Pierre Toussaint (1766–1853), whom I’ve privately dubbed the Holy Hairdresser.
Toussaint was an enslaved Haitian with a gift for coiffure. Transplanted with a white family to New York City, this gracious man refused to see color when it came to assisting those in want. He made lucrative earnings doing hair for high society. He used his income to support Black schools and whites-only orphanages as well as impoverished priests and countless other individuals in need. When the white widow whose household he served fell on hard times, Toussaint supported her financially. This remains astonishing. Only then did she offer Toussaint his liberty.
Also among the Six is Venerable Henriette Delille (1813–1862), Creole foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family. These New Orleans sisters offered an education to free mixed-race children by day and enslaved people by night — ever walking the precarious color line. Of its bitter restrictions, these Creole sisters were themselves well versed. They also provided shelter for destitute Blacks, cared for the sick, and served the poor of New Orleans. Despite their good works, due to prejudice these sisters were forbidden to wear a religious habit in public until a decade after Mother Henriette’s death.
U.S. Catholics should know Lange, Toussaint, and Delille. We should also know Servant of God laywoman Julia Greeley (born between 1833 and 1848, died in 1918), an illiterate enslaved woman who became a one-woman St. Vincent de Paul to the poor of Denver. She begged from the rich families and gave to the poor ones. Conscious of their shame in accepting aid from a Black woman, she brought help to white families only after dark.
More of us know Venerable Augustus Tolton (1854–1897), the first Black priest recognized as Black ordained in the United States. (Earlier, the Healy brothers had passed for white.) After every seminary in the country refused to admit Tolton, he went to Rome to prepare for ordination. He faced fierce bigotry, lack of ecclesial support, and financial distress. His priesthood ended too soon, a result of the poor health care options available to Black Americans.
Servant of God Thea Bowman (1937–1990) rounds out the Six. Converting to Catholicism and joining the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration was no easy matter for Bertha Bowman. She faced racism within the community, yet overcame it with a radiance and confidence that sprang from a rich Black heritage, the civil rights awakening, and the Second Vatican Council. Sister Thea became a worldwide evangelizer, writer, and gospel singer, challenging church leadership to consider its complicity in racism. Through her final debilitating years living with cancer, she proclaimed the gospel while bald and in a wheelchair, never diminishing her message of what it means to be Black and Catholic.
Do we really need more saints? Actually, we need millions more! But let’s start with these. Let’s fight for the Six.

(This article appeared in the November issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 85, No. 11, pages 47-49) and was reprinted with permission. Visit www.uscatholic.org.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In his book, The Second Mountain, David Brooks suggests that a key to sustaining fidelity in any vocation is to build a structure of behavior for those moments when love falters. He’s right.
Anybody who has made a commitment to be faithful for the long haul inside a marriage, a friendship, a faith community or a vocation to serve others, will need more than initial enthusiasm, bare-footed sincerity, affective energy and good resolutions to sustain himself or herself on that road. It’s one thing to have a honeymoon with someone, it’s another to be in a marriage over many years. It’s one thing to be an enthusiastic neophyte on a spiritual journey, it’s another thing to remain faithful inside that journey for seventy or eighty years. And it’s one thing to go out for a season and serve meals to the homeless, it’s something else to be Dorothy Day.
So the question is: how do we sustain our initial enthusiasm, sincerity, affective energy and good resolutions through the boredom, heartbreak, misunderstanding, tiredness and temptations all of us will undergo in our lives, whether that be in our marriage, our vocation, our church life, our prayer life or our service to others?

That question was put to me recently, speaking to a group of young seminarians, I shared that I had just celebrated forty-eight years of ministry. The seminarians peppered me with questions: What’s the secret? How do you get through the rough times? How do you sustain good intention, good will and good energy year after year? How do you sustain your prayer life over forty or fifty years?
I answered with an insight from Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, whenever he officiated at a wedding, would tell the couple: Today you are very much in love and think your love will sustain your marriage. It can’t. But your marriage can sustain your love. I advised the seminarians in the same way: don’t trust your present enthusiasm and good energy to sustain your priesthood; let your priesthood sustain your enthusiasm and energy. What’s at stake here?
A genuine commitment in faith, love or service becomes a ritual container, an ark, like Noah’s, that existentially locks you in. And the fact that you’re locked in is exactly what makes the commitment work. You enter naïvely, believing that your good feelings and affective energies will sustain you. They won’t. Inevitably they will be worn down by time, familiarity, boredom, misunderstanding, tiredness, wound and new obsessions that emotionally tempt you elsewhere. So how can you sustain yourself in a commitment through periods of dryness? David Brook’s answer is a good one – by building a structure of behavior for exactly those moments.
How do you do that? Through routine, ritual and habit. Anchor your person and your commitment in ritual habits that steady and hold you beyond your feelings on any given day. Set rituals for yourself, certain ritual behaviors, which you will do regularly no matter how you feel.
For me, as a priest, some of these are pre-set. As a priest, you are to daily pray the Office of the Church as a prayer for the world, no matter how you feel. You are to celebrate the Eucharist for others regularly, irrespective of whether or not this is personally meaningful to you on any given day. You are to do some private prayer daily, particularly when you don’t feel like it. The list goes on. These rituals give you structure and healthy routines, and they are needed because in the priesthood as in every other vocation, there are times of fervor when feelings are enough to sustain you; however there are also desert times, bitter times, angry times, times when love falters. It’s then that a structure of behavior can steady and sustain you.
The same holds true for marriage. Couples have to build a structure of behavior for those times when love falters. To name one such ritual: a wife and husband need to have some ritual expression of affection when they wish each other a good day as they part each morning, no matter their emotions and feelings on a given day. That ritual is a container, an ark, which locks them in and holds them together until a better season and better feelings return. Ritual can sustain love when it falters.
In understanding this, we need beware of “Job’s friends,” that is, beware of the various books and gurus on spirituality, prayer and marriage that give you the impression there’s something wrong with you if your enthusiasm and emotional affectivity are not the glue that daily sustains you in your commitment. Simply put, these are books written by spiritual novices and marriage manuals written by someone confusing a honeymoon for a marriage.
Enthusiasm and good feelings are wonderful, but they can’t sustain you through a marathon. For a marathon you need to have long-practiced strategies to carry you through the long tiring miles in the middle and at the end.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

From the hermitage
By sister alies therese
“Abba Pambo asked Abba Anthony (The Father of Hermits 4thC), ‘What ought I to do?’ Abba Anthony replied, ‘Have no confidence in your own virtuousness. Do not worry about a thing once it has been done. Control your tongue and your belly.’”

Actually, the hermits were trying to get some clarification as to whether they were being ‘good hermits’ or not, so Abba Anthony’s friend Abba Nisteros the Great replied: ‘Not all works are alike. For Scripture says that Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him; Elijah loved solitary prayer and God was with him; and David was humble, and God was with him. Therefore, whatever you see your soul desire according to God, do that thing, and you will keep your heart safe.’” (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Ward, SLG).
Conceivably these folks might have been married, asking how to make a perfect marriage or maybe priests or a bishop asking how to do perfect works. We all want to know, from someone with perhaps more experience than our own, how to do the works of the Gospel perfectly.
Equally, they might just have been trying their hearers with the notion that they can indeed become perfect on their own if they just knew how to do it! Not possible. Many opportunities to be compassionate and hospitable come our way with or without ‘titles’ or ‘important’ jobs. Gratitude, for example, is a work of compassion we can all share in. The Scriptures mention so many and no one person can do them all!
Compassion is not a virtue, but a way of life. Hospitality calls us to receive others as Christ. You are probably familiar with Exodus 20:15ff where the Scriptures give us an outline of a compassionate life. Who do we see there as most compassionate? Well, God. ‘… and if they cry out to Me, I will surely hear their cry.’ (21) Perhaps it is also just another way of saying that our Christian way of life is: Love of God, Love of neighbor? That includes those with whom you disagree!
A compassionate life has been shown in many and varied ways in our Christian Catholic life. We can look to founders of religious orders that focused on education of the poor, healing the sick, or living a life of prayer. We look to first-responders, nurses, doctors, those who put their lives on the line. We only have to look to Ephesians 4ff to get some ideas about how these might be lived in the community. Paul in prison, (after mentioning all sorts of horrid things we do) says this: ‘in place of these, be kind to one another, compassionate and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ.’ (32)
Our days have been difficult. Political squabbles have caused families to cease speaking to one another and anger has flourished. Election outcomes have distanced many. Christians still persecuted; do we pray for their persecutors?
We might focus on the compassion of Jesus, hanging from the Cross, midst great anguish, focuses on the thief next to Him: ‘a single good word made the thief pure and holy, despite all his previous crimes, and brought him into Paradise.’ (Luke 23:42) [Philokalia #90, page 319]
How can we learn one single, good ‘word’ for someone who comes to us; that may all they need to hear? In this time of pandemic, in this month remembering those who have died/served, in this time of Thanksgiving, in this time of Christ the King, in this beginning of Advent we have many ‘words’ to learn. Can we draw forth from God in humility what we need and then share that with whomever the Lord brings onto our path?
Another place in our devotional life is the 6th and 8th Stations, – Veronica, who in her compassion for Jesus gently wipes His face. The women weep over their children. Are the children in cages, the 550+ still separated from their parents, those who live on Death Row at Parchman (or anywhere in our prisons) are their faces being wiped in gentleness and compassion? The COVID patients still dying and the many who suffer while recovering. Who speaks a word of compassion into their ears encouraging them to stick it out? Who brings a word of compassion to their families? Who speaks a word of compassion to you when you feel abandoned, lost or that God is far away? Remember, ‘the treasury of compassion is inexhaustible’ (Faustina, Chaplet, Closing Prayer).
Amma Syncletica puts it plainly: ‘Whatever people say by the grace of the Spirit, therefore, that is useful, springs from love (compassion) and end in it. Salvation, then, is exactly this – the two-fold love of God and of our neighbor.’ (Life, Bongie, 1996)
Blessings.

(Sister alies therese is a vowed Catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life. Her days are formed around prayer, art and writing. She lives and writes in Mississippi.)

Reflections on Life
By Melvin Arrington
The sixth Fruit of the Spirit, called “goodness” in a majority of the Bible translations commonly used by Protestants, is rendered as “generosity” in two of the most popular versions favored by Catholics: the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), and the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (NRSVCE). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1695), the Holy Spirit prompts us to do good works, “to act so as to bear the fruit of the Spirit by charity in action.” Simply put, the easiest way for people to see Christ in our lives is through our generosity.
Generosity has everything to do with giving, whether it’s your time, talents, or treasure. Donations must always be made out of love, and not to call attention to yourself. And to anyone who might be tempted to boast about how much he has contributed, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen applies this cautionary remark: “never measure your generosity by what you give, but rather by what you have left.”

When we give alms, it must be for the right reason; it must be for the benefit of the recipient, not the giver. There’s really no charity involved in making a donation of something you no longer want, especially if the purpose of the gift is to gain a tax benefit or to free up space in a closet in order to stockpile new possessions. As someone once said, real charity doesn’t care whether the gift is tax deductible or not.
When we donate our time, we make an offering of ourselves. Self-giving by its very nature is a sacrificial act because we’re denying ourselves to attend to the needs of others. Archbishop Sheen says the poor widow who gave two mites “emptied herself to fill the emptiness of others.” There’s just something innately beautiful about a sacrifice.
When we offer up ourselves in love we become more like Christ, who freely gave Himself up for us. Our Lord literally divested Himself of everything He had: His clothing (“He was stripped of His garments”); His mother (He gave her to John and, by extension, to us saying, “Behold, your Mother”); His life itself when He suffered and died on the Cross; and even His very Spirit (“Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.”)
Christ surrendered everything, so we should all deny ourselves in at least some fashion. Bishop Robert Barron has written and spoken often about how generosity enlarges the human soul, transforming it from the pusilla anima (the little or petty, that is, pusillanimous soul) into one that is generous and compassionate, the magna anima (the great soul), from which our word “magnanimous” is derived.
If liberality is characteristic of the magnanimous soul who cheerfully presents himself as an offering, then miserliness and selfishness shift the focus from giving to receiving, thereby reversing the direction from outward to inward. The selfish, self-centered, ego-driven person is ultimately concerned only with self-aggrandizement. His gods are possessions, power, pleasure and prestige. He constantly has to feed his ego by acquiring and possessing. He becomes so caught up in the material world that matters of the spirit get shoved aside.
American artist Paul Cadmus (1904-99) in a painting titled “Avarice,” one of a series depicting the Seven Deadly Sins, aptly illustrates the pitfalls and consequences of a life devoted solely to material gain. The old man portrayed in this work, a stooped skeletal figure bearing the burden of his possessions on his shoulder, struggles to hold onto a single golden object that appears to be slipping away from him. The expression on his face tells the whole story: the goods of this world can’t fulfill the deepest longings of the human heart. Why cling so tightly to wealth? Why refuse to share with the poor when, as the saying goes, “you can’t take it with you?” A life that has no concern for the welfare of others and has no room for faith and matters of the spirit will never come to know abundant life.
For those struggling with their faith and seeking to escape the ego trap, acts of charity can be a remedy. When someone asked the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins for advice on how he could learn to believe, Hopkins responded simply, “give alms.” By providing for the needs of our neighbor we can gain a better understanding of God’s love for us.
Experience teaches us that an authentic act of generosity blesses the giver even more than the recipient. Why do we derive more pleasure from giving than from receiving? Perhaps it’s because what’s perceived as a reduction in physical or monetary assets becomes, through the charitable act, an increase in spiritual goods. The more we give away, the more we gain.
The vast expanse of our world, in all its beauty and goodness, testifies to the boundless generosity of God. Everything we have has been bestowed on us from our loving God. Everything! And so, we give generously because we have received so many showers of blessings. We should never hoard these heavenly favors or use them solely for our own purposes but rather to glorify Him and serve Him by sharing our resources with those who need them more than we do. In the words of St. Ambrose, the rich man who gives to the poor does not bestow alms; rather, he pays a debt. That’s the Christian perspective on giving. What a beautiful concept!

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of St. John Oxford.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
One size doesn’t fit everyone. This isn’t just true for clothing, it’s also true for spirituality. Our challenges in life change as we age. Spirituality hasn’t always been fully sensitive to this. True, we’ve always had tailored instruction and activities for children, young people, and for people who are raising children, carrying a job, and paying a mortgage, but we’ve never developed a spirituality for what happens when those years are over.

Why is one needed? Jesus seemingly didn’t have one. He didn’t have one set of teachings for the young, another for those in mid-life, and still another for the elderly. He just taught. The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, and his invitation to take up his cross are intended in the same way for everyone, irrespective of age. But we hear those teaching at very different times in our lives; and it’s one thing to hear the Sermon the Mount when you’re seven years old, another when you’re twenty-seven, and quite another when you’re eighty-seven. Jesus’ teachings don’t change, but we do, and they offer very specific challenges at different times of our lives.
Christian spirituality has generally kept this in mind, with one exception. Except for Jesus and an occasional mystic, it has failed to develop an explicit spirituality for our later years, for how we are meant to be generative in our senior years and how we are to die in a life-giving way. But there’s a good reason for this lacuna. Simply put, it wasn’t needed because up until this last century most people never lived into old age. For example, in Palestine, in Jesus’ time, the average life expectancy was thirty to thirty-five years. A century ago in the United States, it was still less than fifty years. When most people in the world died before they reached the age of fifty, there was no real need for a spirituality of aging.
There is such a spirituality inside the Gospels. Even though he died at thirty-three, Jesus left us a paradigm of how to age and die. But that paradigm, while healthily infusing and undergirding Christian spirituality in general, was never developed more specifically into a spirituality of aging (with the exception of some of the great Christian mystics).
After Jesus, the Desert fathers and mothers folded the question of how to age and die into the overall framework of their spirituality. For them, spirituality was a quest to “see the face of God” and that, as Jesus makes clear, requires one thing, purity of heart. So for them, no matter your age, the challenge was the same, trying to achieve purity of heart. Then in the age of the persecutions and the early Christian martyrs, the idea developed that the ideal way to age and die was through martyrdom. Later, when Christians were no longer physically martyred, the idea took hold that you could take on a voluntary type of martyrdom by living the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They believed that living these, like the quest for purity of heart, taught you all you needed to know, no matter your age. Eventually this was expanded to mean that anyone who faithfully responded to the duties in his or her life, irrespective of age, would learn everything necessary to come to sanctity through that fidelity. As a famous aphorism put it: Stay inside your cell and it will teach you all you need to know. Understood properly, there’s a spirituality of aging and dying inside these notions, but until recently there was little need to draw that out more explicitly.
Happily, today the situation is changing and we’re developing, more and more, some explicit spiritualities of aging and dying. Perhaps this reflects an aging population, but there’s now a burgeoning body of literature, both religious and secular, that’s taking up the question of aging and dying. These authors, too numerous to mention, include many names already familiar to us: Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Kathleen Dowling Singh, David Brooks, Cardinal Bernardin, Michael Paul Gallagher, Joan Chittister, Parker Palmer, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Paul Kalanithi, Erica Jong, Kathie Roiphe and Wilkie and Noreeen Au, among others. Coming from a variety of perspectives, each of these offer insights into what God and nature intend for us in our later years.
In essence, here’s the issue: today, we’re living longer and healthier late into life. It’s common today to retire sometime in our early sixties after having raised our children, superannuated from our jobs, and paid our mortgages. So what’s next, given that we probably have twenty or thirty more years of health and energy left? What are these years for? What are we called to now, beyond loving our grandkids?
Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, were invited to set out for a new land and conceive a child long after this was biologically impossible for them. That’s our call too. What “Isaac” are we called to give birth to in our later years? We need guidance.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

Spirit and truth
By Father Aaron Williams
The liturgical celebration of Good Friday is one with a very interesting history. I remember being told when I was younger that the simplicity of the Good Friday service was a window into how the Mass looked on any day in the ancient church. But, a careful study of history shows a much more interesting story.

As far back as St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, we have records which show that the ancient church used to not celebrate any liturgy on Good Friday at all. Instead, a single liturgy was offered beginning at sundown on Holy Saturday and lasting until dawn, and within this one celebration was marked both the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ (interestingly enough denoted by a shift in vestment color during the service from violet to white). I will address the matter of the Holy Saturday Mass in a future column, but suffice it to say that there was no Good Friday service early in the church because the entire mystery was celebrated in a single service on Saturday night.
By the end of the fifth century, you see a movement to begin offering a service on Good Friday, but with an emphasis on this service not being a Mass. Instead, it was designed as a service of scripture readings and psalms which concluded with the adoration of a cross. Eventually by around the seventh century, it became common for a particle of the Sacred Host from the night before to be reserved and received by the Priest alone at the Good Friday service. The particle would be received with unconsecrated wine to further underscore that what was happening was not a Mass.
The medieval church gave this service the title “Mass of the Pre-Sanctified,” which was a borrowed title from the Eastern Church which celebrates all through Lent the “Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Gifts,” which is essentially a Mass without a consecration where the priest receives communion from the reserved Sacrament.
The structure of this service was as follows. The priest entered wearing a black mourning chasuble. Interestingly enough, the deacons also wore chasubles for this service, but with a deacon stole. The priest and ministers prostrated themselves in silence and then, after saying a prayer, were seated for the reading of lessons. At the time of the Gospel, the deacon would remove his chasuble and read the Passion narrative from St. John wearing only a stole. When this was finished, the priest would change into black cope and go to the altar where he offered the solemn intercessions — similar to the intercessions in today’s Good Friday liturgy where each intercession is preceded by a period of kneeling for silent prayer. When this is completed, he changed back into chasuble and the cross is brought forward and adored. Afterwards, the priest and deacon went to the Sepulchre — the altar of repose from the previous night — and with solemn festival, the ministers brought the Sacrament back into the church to be placed on the altar. Incense was used and bells were rung as a prelude to the Resurrection. The priest incensed the Sacrament and the altar while kneeling. Then, plain wine was poured into his chalice and he received the Host with the plain wine. Afterwards all departed.
This service remained essentially unchanged until 1955 when the reforms of Pope Pius XII were instituted. At this point, a rubric was given that enough hosts were to be consecrated the night before so that the faithful may receive communion on Good Friday as well. The name of the service was changed to “The Solemn Liturgical Action of the Preparation Day” — a reference to the Jewish term for Friday as a preparation for the Sabbath. The structure of the service remained similar, but the procession with incense was omitted and the deacons wore black dalmatics. The Passion Reading was also shortened to remove the Last Supper, and the burial of Christ.
The Roman Missal of 1970 left the liturgy of Good Friday essentially untouched from its 1955 form. The only changes were aesthetic: the ministers wear red instead of black vestments, and the liturgy is now called “The Solemn Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion.”
What we can learn from this history is that the church, for centuries, has been intentional about making the Good Friday service simple and lacking any sort of ornamentation or “bells and whistles.” The rubrics in the Missal denote that the use of instruments is forbidden on Good Friday, and that all singing is to be done a cappella. The use of simple songs with refrains are much preferred to more difficult works or ‘solo-pieces.’ The liturgy should be intentionally stark — to underscore the emptiness the church feels at the death of Christ, reminding us of the separation we had from God due to original sin.
Parishes should try to avoid any sort of emotionalism. A lot of places today like to turn Good Friday into a praise and worship concert with light effects and loud music, but this doesn’t do justice to the church’s vision for Good Friday. We are meant to feel the difference between what happens on Good Friday and what normally happens at Mass. Here, simplicity is key. The more elaborate ideas can be left for Easter.

(Father Aaron Williams is the administrator at St. Joseph Parish in Greenville)