An invitation to look at the cross and be amazed by God´s love

ROME.- For a second year, due to the pandemic of Covid19, the Holy Father will celebrate the Holy Week rites with a very limited number of people present, the Vatican announced.

Pope Francis  will celebrate at the Altar of the Cathedra, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, and with him will also be present a number of cardinals, the Superiors of the Secretariat of State, and a limited number of faithful. The Holy See Press Office has published the schedule of the Pope that is offered below.

Image of the Crucified that presided the Way of The Cross in 2020 ( Vatican News Photos)

During the celebration of Palm Sunday, on  March 28, the Pope recalled the love of Christ and how He experienced “our deepest sorrows: failure, loss of everything, betrayal by a friend, even abandonment by God”.

By experiencing in the flesh our deepest struggles and conflicts, he said,  he redeemed and transformed them. “His love draws close to our frailty; it touches the very things of which we are most ashamed,” Pope Francis said.

He invited the faithful to ask for the grace to be amazed because “a Christian life without amazement becomes drab and dreary”.

Pope Francis during the 2020 Celebration of the Way of the Cross

He explained that it is not possible to talk about the joy of meeting Jesus “unless we are daily astonished and amazed by his love, which brings us forgiveness and the possibility of a new beginning?”

As he commented “when faith no longer experiences amazement, it grows dull: it becomes blind to the wonders of grace; it can no longer taste the Bread of life and hear the Word; it can no longer perceive the beauty of our brothers and sisters and the gift of creation. It has no other course than to take refuge in legalisms, in clericalisms and in all these things that Jesus condemns in chapter 23 of the Gospel of Matthew.”

2020 Celebration of Easter with the Pope alone

Pope Francis has  invited the faithful “to lift our eyes to the cross, to gaze upon Jesus on the cross and say to him: “Lord, how much you love me! How precious I am to you!”.

(You may read here the full text of the homily).

The Schedule of Holy Week with Pope Francis as published by the Holy See Press Office is below and it includes the links to follow each event through Vatican Media Live.

PALM SUNDAY
28 March 2021

Holy Mass and Procession – at 10:00

HOLY THURSDAY
1 April 2021

Chrism Mass – at 10:00
Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper – at 18:00 (To be presided at by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals)

HOLY SATURDAY
3 April 2021

Easter Vigil – at 19:30

HOLY WEDNESDAY
31 March 2021

General Audience – at 9:30

GOOD FRIDAY
2 April 2021

Passion of the Lord – at 18:00
Way of the Cross – at 21:00
 

 EASTER SUNDAY
4 April 2021

Holy Mass – at 10:00
Urbi et Orbi – at 12:00

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