A few links on this somber Good Friday.
5 Ways to Worship This Triduum and Easter: Here are livestreaming options, from several time zones, for this year’s Sacred Triduum and Easter liturgies.
Writer Maggie Gallagher is Executive Director of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, which was founded by Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Cordileone. Under Gallagher’s direction, the institute has sponsored many popular events related to the Church and the arts (such as the “René Girard and the Catholic Artist” event reviewed here) and has commissioned several notable works of sacred art, including composer Frank La Rocca’s Mass of the Americas and James Matthew Wilson’s poem cycle River of the Immaculate Conception. The institute receives no Church funding, and Gallagher has taken a 50% pay cut during this time of sheltering in place when planned programs were necessarily put on hold and donations have diminished. While sheltering in place, Gallagher has pulled together a useful guide with schedules and links—for all of us who are acutely feeling deprived of participation at Masses and other Triduum services during Holy Week and face an unprecedented church-less Easter.
Good Friday meditation on Christ’s Passion with the Crown of Thrones at Notre-Dame de Paris
Starting at 11:30 a.m. local time in Paris (5:30 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S.), probably before you read this, Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit will lead a meditation on Christ’s Passion from the nave of Notre-Dame Cathedral with the Crown of Thorns exposed for veneration behind the Pietà. The anniversary of the devastating fire is coming up this coming week on April 15, and many held their breath until they learned that the reliquary of the Crown of Thorns was rescued.
Vespers of April 15, 2019 at Notre-Dame de Paris
Of historical interest! One liturgical year ago, on Monday of Holy Week 2019, an unusual Vespers service was sung at Notre-Dame de Paris just before the fire. So what you can see in the linked video is how the cathedral looked during the very last event held at the cathedral—only minutes before it went up in flames. The service was held on April 15, 2019. If I’ve got the times right, Vespers started at 5:45, lasted 27 minutes (length of the video), and ended just a few minutes before the fire started at 6:20. They could have barely have left the cathedral by then!
