Pope at Audience: ‘Easter Triduum is center of Christian faith’

By Devin Watkins

Pope Francis in his catechesis at the Wednesday General Audience reflected on the Paschal Triduum, calling it the center “of our faith and vocation in the world”.

The Triduum, or “three days”, begins with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Thursday evening and ends on Easter Sunday. The Holy Father said Christians are called to live the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection as “the matrix of their personal and communitarian lives”.

Climax at Easter kerygma

Pope Francis said the climax of the Church’s liturgical year is proclaimed at Mass on Easter Sunday in the Sequence: “Christ, my hope, is arisen; into Galilee he will go before his own.” He called this both “a proclamation of joy and hope” and “an appeal to responsibility and mission”.

The Triduum, he said, prepares us to receive this proclamation. “It is the center of our faith and our hope. It is the kerygma, which continuously evangelizes the Church, which in turn is sent out to evangelize.”

Pope Francis said the Paschal Triduum renews baptized Christians in “the meaning of their new condition”. “In Baptism,” he said, “we are raised with Jesus and we die to the things and logic of this world.”

Share the sufferings of others

He said this new condition must be lived out concretely day-by-day.

“A Christian – if they truly let themselves be washed by Christ and stripped by him of ‘the old man’ to walk in newness of life – even though they remain a sinner, cannot be corrupted. [The Christian] can live no more with death in their soul, nor can they be a cause of death.”

Pope Francis said the world becomes “the space to live our newly resurrected lives.”

We are called to do this, he said, “on our feet, with our head held high. Thus can we share the humiliation of those who today, like Jesus, still suffer nakedness, need, loneliness, and death”.

The Holy Father said that it is thanks to Jesus and with Him that we become “instruments of redemption and hope, as well as signs of life and resurrection.”

Virgin Mary our model

He concluded by inviting all Christians “to live well the Holy Triduum” and to be “ever more inserted into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection”.

May the Virgin Mary, said Pope Francis, “accompany us on this spiritual journey, she who followed Jesus in his passion, was present with Him under the Cross, and received in her mother’s heart the joy of the resurrection.”