The Stations of the Cross, generally celebrated at 3 p.m. on Friday, consist of moving behind a wooden cross, carried by the pastor and then by the faithful, throughout "14 stations". They are often materialized in churches, with paintings representing the different stages of the agony of Christ until his death on the cross. And give rise, each time, to a specific meditation, followed by a prayer.
The office of the cross, at the end of the afternoon, offers a reading of the Gospel telling the passion of Christ, then a veneration of a wooden cross that the faithful come to kiss as a sign of respect. Following a Eucharistic communion but without consecration, the consecrated hosts are those of the day before. They were kept in a reserve, symbolically outside the place of worship proper. The liturgy is extremely sober, without greetings or flourishes. Silence plays an essential role.
All magnificence is banished
On the morning of Good Friday, the office of darkness will also have finished stripping the church of all its facings already partly removed after Holy Thursday mass, to leave only the altar naked, all the crosses being hidden under a veil. The tabernacle - place of conservation of the consecrated hosts "real presence" of Christ in the Catholic faith - is empty, door open, to let see this "absence". Lighting should be reduced to what is strictly necessary. All magnificence is banished. The purpose of all of this is to signify the destitution of the agony and death of the abandoned Christ of all his disciples and the desolation of his grieving faithful in the Church.
The visit to a church that day strikes by this emptiness. Thus the former archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, of Jewish origin, tells that he had entered, not Christian, in a church on Good Friday and that he had then been mysteriously struck by this "absence of Christ ”, a mystical experience of the feeling of the absence of a presence of God, which will then lead him to recognize it as Christ“ present ”in the Catholic Eucharist. Then leading him to request Catholic baptism.
The Church also requires Good Friday to all adults - with the exception of pregnant women, the sick, the elderly - "fasting and abstinence" as for all Lent Fridays. Meat abstinence and fasting by skipping a minimum meal and voluntarily depriving yourself of something that you particularly like to consume.