The Catholic Church established its most important liturgical period with Lent (40 days not including Sundays), which begins on Ash Wednesday, three days after Carnival Sunday, until the end of the Easter season with Pentecost Sunday, the day in which which commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, reunited with the Mother of the Lord and which marks the end of the Easter season, a period of seven weeks, that is, fifty days (hence the name of Greek origin ‘Pentecost ‘=50) and that this year it will be May 19.
Finally, ten days before Pentecost, that is, on a Thursday, the Feast of the Ascension is celebrated, which commemorates the ascension of Jesus Christ to Heaven, and ten days later, on another Thursday, next May 28 for this year, that of Corpus Christi, or Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, takes place.
This entire cycle does not have fixed dates within the calendar year that begins on January 1 and ends on December 31, but depends on the date on which Easter is celebrated, and this varies from one year to another, conditioning with this variation all the rest of the ecclesiastical calendar and with it the mobile festivities, that is, those that do not coincide every year on the same day.
ORIGIN OF THE JEWISH PASSOVER.
The variation in the date of Holy Week responds to the fact that the Liturgical Year does not adhere to the solar year, but to the lunar cycle, which formerly dominated the calendars. Thus, to this day, the months in the Jewish calendar are 29 days that alternate with 30 days, and Passover, originally Jewish, was celebrated when the first full moon occurred after the spring equinox in the North (autumn in the South), in memory of the night when Moses and the 12 tribes fled from Egypt; from there
spring to obtain the fertility of the livestock during the time of transhumance that began on those dates.”
“These rites consisted of the sacrifice of a young lamb with whose blood they painted the doors of the shops and which they then ate without breaking the bones of the animal, since they were considered a symbol of the resurrection and multiplication of the species.” During this Passover festival, the Jews gathered and ate roast lamb with bitter herb salads; They recited prayers and sang psalms.
THE FULL MOON, PROTAGONIST AND GUIDE OF THE HOLY WEEK.
At the emergence of the first Christians, they formed a small marginal group and were considered a sectarian dissidence of the Jewish religion, who celebrated their Easter on the same date as the Hebrew one, which aroused resistance and opposition from the majority towards the new religion.
According to the Gospels, Jesus and his disciples arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate this Hebrew Passover. The events followed one another and Jesus ended up being crucified, on a Friday, during the celebration of those religious holidays.
The Christian world, which followed the Julian calendar, established in the year 46 BC by the emperor Julius Caesar, did not consider the problem of the location of Holy Week in the Roman calendar until the year 325 AD, at the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, when the Church Fathers fixed it on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, March 21. Subsequent attempts at change and transformation into a fixed holiday (approved during the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965) have not been able to prevail.
The prominence of the moon in Holy Week has its reason for being in the description in the New Testament of the events that occurred around the death of Jesus, which indicates the presence of the full moon on the Friday of his crucifixion, in Jerusalem. . Hence the Church looks for a full moon to celebrate these dates.
Thus, Holy Week has always been closely linked to the full moon. For this reason, the days that make it up vary and each year they fall on different dates and, consequently, the moon marks the entire Christian liturgical calendar ever since.
CELEBRATIONS IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD.
That same starting point for ‘The Great Week’ (as Holy Week was previously known), continued in force after the Gregorian calendar was implemented in Europe, from the 16th century until the 20th century, when it was finally adapted throughout the world. .
However, there are two basic rules that these celebrations must comply with: the full moon can never coincide with Easter Sunday itself; In that case it will be the following Sunday. Another rule to respect marks the limits of the calendar, since it cannot begin before March 22 or after April 25, and only between both dates can its anniversaries take place.
Currently, each town, region or area of the Christian world has its own peculiar way of feeling and living these dates, from the deepest silence accompanying the heartfelt “steps” that emulate the suffering of Jesus and his Mother, the Virgin Mary, even the most thunderous noise that on many occasions tries to imitate the shaking that the Earth suffered on the afternoon of Good Friday, when Jesus Christ expired.
During Saturday, the second day of the Easter triduum (passion, death and resurrection of Christ), there is no Eucharistic celebration. The Church seeks to create a pause and invite silence next to the tomb of Christ, with the objective that believers meditate on his passion and death, his descent into hell and the promise of his return on the third day, Easter Sunday, with the which ends Holy Week.
Isabel Martínez Pita
EFE-Reports
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