In the Catholic Church, the Paschal Triduum, the three days preceding the feast of Easter, is marked by a series of liturgical offices.
These three days refer to the Passion, Death, Burial and Resurrection of Jesus.
These days begin on Maundy Thursday evening with the Mass of the Lord's Supper and end with the office of Vespers on Easter evening.
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What is the meaning of Good Friday?
On Good Friday, the church celebrates the Passion of Christ, that is, his arrest, condemnation and death on the Cross.
What liturgy for Good Friday?
The
Stations of the Cross
, usually celebrated at 3 p.m. on Fridays, involves moving behind a wooden cross, carried by the pastor and then by the faithful, throughout "14 stations".
They are often materialized in churches, by 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 recounting the passion of Christ, then a veneration of a wooden cross that the faithful come to kiss as a sign of respect.
A
Eucharistic communion
follows but without consecration, the consecrated hosts are those of the day before.
They have been kept in a reserve, symbolically outside the actual place of worship.
The liturgy is extremely sober, with no salutations or frills.
Silence plays an essential role here.
On the morning of Good Friday,
the office of darkness
will have finished stripping the church of all its facings, already partially removed after Mass on Holy Thursday, leaving only the bare altar, 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 this "absence" be seen.
Lighting must be reduced to what is strictly necessary.
All magnificence is banished.
All this is meant to signify the destitution of the agony and death of the abandoned Christ of all his disciples and the dejection of his faithful, in mourning, in the Church.
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Visiting a church that day strikes with this emptiness.
This is how the former Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, of Jewish origin, recounts that he had entered a church, a non-Christian, on Good Friday and that he had then been mysteriously struck by this "absence of Christ", 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.
Leading him then to seek Catholic baptism.
Why fast on Good Friday?
The Church asks every adult on Good Friday - with the exception of pregnant women, the sick, the elderly - "fasting and abstinence" as for all Fridays of Lent.
Namely, abstinence from meat and fasting by skipping at least one meal and voluntarily depriving yourself of something that you particularly like to eat.
This fast is part of a process of penance and conversion.