Monday, March 23, 2026

The Gospel of Passion Monday

Gregory DiPippo

Yesterday, the Roman Rite began the season of Passiontide, in which the focus of the liturgy shifts from penance, fasting, and the preparation of the catechumens for baptism to meditation on the Lord’s impending suffering and death, before His glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Mass chants of the season are mostly taken from Psalms which are evidently about the Passion, and were understood as such by the Fathers, as for example today’s introit, the beginning of Psalm 55: “Miserére mihi, Dómine, quoniam conculcávit me homo: tota die bellans tribulávit me. – Have mercy on me, o Lord, for a man hath trodden me down; all the day he hath made war and troubled me.” A treatise known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, which seems to have been read very closely by the unknown composers of many Gregorian chants, explains this verse as follows: “In the one who is a man and makes war, the Psalm shows the attack of the devil and of the other wicked spirits, at whose inspiration the Lord suffered.”

The Man of Sorrows, ca. 1434, by the German painter and Dominican friar Master Francke (ca. 1380- ca. 1440)
The epistle, however, is the third chapter of the book of Jonah, in which the prophet enters the city of Nineveh and preaches to them the fast commanded by God as an act of repentance. Placed on this first feria of Passiontide, it serves as an important reminder that although the tenor of the liturgy has shifted, Passiontide is still very much a part of Lent, and Lent is kept by fasting.

The Gospel, John 7, 32-39, then explains in a very beautiful and subtle way what exactly the liturgy is now looking forward to, and not just in Passiontide, but in what comes from it, and extends beyond it through the Easter season. “The rulers and Pharisees sent ministers to apprehend him”; this foretells our Lord’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of Holy Thursday. Jesus’ words to those sent to arrest Him, “Yet a little while I am with you, and then I go to him that sent me,” remind us that we are now very close to the day on which He will die, but also to the time of His Ascension, in which He will brings our human nature, glorified in the Passion and Resurrection, before the throne of God. “You shall seek me, and shall not find me, and where I am, thither you cannot come,” refers to the absence of the Lord’s body from the tomb. The response of the Jews to this, as they say, “Whither will he go, that we shall not find him? will He go unto the dispersed among the gentiles, and teach (them)?”, is a prophecy of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, through which the Lord will indeed, in the person of His Apostles, go among the gentiles and teach them.

The conclusion of the Gospel therefore speaks of the baptism of the catechumens both at the Easter vigil, and, according to the ancient tradition of the Church, at the vigil of Pentecost as well. On the latter, the Communio of the Mass is taken from this passage. “And on the last, and great day of the festivity (here, symbolically, on the last day of Lent, i.e. Holy Saturday), Jesus stood and cried, saying, ‘If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink. He that believeth in me, as the scripture saith, “Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Now this He said of the Spirit which they should receive, who believed in him: for as yet the Spirit was not given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”
Communio, Jo. 7 Ultimo festivitátis die dicébat Jesus, ‘Qui in me credit, flúmina de ventre ejus fluent aquae vivae’; hoc autem dixit de Spíritu, quem acceptúri erant credentes in eum, allelúja, allelúja. (On the last day of the feast, Jesus said, ‘He who believes in Me, from within him there shall flow rivers of living water.’ He said this, however, of the Spirit, Whom they who believed in Him were to receive, alleluia, alleluia.

The final verse reminds us, as we walk with the Lord in His sufferings, that He is indeed glorified at the end of them, not only in the Resurrection, but in the establishment of His Church, and the fulfillment of the mission which He gave to it to go forth and baptize all nations.
From the Friday of the third week of Lent to the last day of Passion week, most of the Roman Rite’s Gospel readings are taken from St John. They are, however not arranged in the order of the Gospel itself.
In the lectionary of the post-Conciliar Rite, not one of these remains in its traditional place. The Gospels of the Samaritan woman, the blind man and the raising of Lazarus have all been moved to Sundays in year A, on the basis of a completely erroneous belief, one that rests on no evidence of any kind, that their analogous position in the Ambrosian Rite attests their supposed original order in the Roman Rite. (Someone managed to realize that within the three-year lectionary system, that this means that these crucial passages would be omitted from Lent altogether in two years out of three. A provision is therefore made that they can be resumed on any of the following ferias of the same week in such years, but this is not mandatory.) The rest have been rearranged as part of a semi-continuous series of readings from John which follows the order of the Gospel, but the selection of passages is very different, and no part of today’s reading remains in Lent on either a Sunday or a feria. The official description of the new lectionary claims that this new selection of readings “corresponds more fully to the characteristics of Lent.”
I imagine that many of our readers have read the proposal made by Geoffroy Kemlin, abbot of Solesmes, and sent to the Holy Father, recently published in an English translation on Rorate Caeli, that the Ordo missae of St Pius V be incorporated into the post-Conciliar missal, so that those who celebrate the traditional Roman Rite can benefit from all the worst features of the post-Conciliar Rite: the prefaces, eucharistic prayers and lectionary. In an interview that follows, Abbot Kemlin states that “the current lectionary called for by Vatican II is far richer than the old one.”
I pass over the fact that Vatican II most certainly did not call for the historical lectionary of the Roman Rite to be thrown in the trash and replaced with a new one of the Consilium ad exsequendam’s devising, although the good abbot of all people should know this. But to refer to the new lectionary as “richer” is an embarrassingly shallow assessment. Yes, it does have more readings. But as has been pointed out over and over again for nearly sixty years now, there is hardly a page of it that does not cheapen or substantially mispresent the meaning of the Word of God by censoring it of so-called difficult passages, or shortening it for the sake of mere convenience. (The Gospel of Lazarus, e.g., which was read this past Sunday, can optionally be cut down by omitting 18½ of its 45 verses, more than 40% of it. Next Sunday, the Passion of St Matthew can be optionally cut down to a pitiable 44 verses out of the traditional 141, a bit more than 30%.)
An unimportant part of Lord’s Passion, depicted by the Italian painter Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), ca. 1730.
But there is the graver issue that the men who created the Roman Mass, including its lectionary, were poets and scholars of the very highest and finest literary sensibility, as evidenced, for example, by the careful selection of the Gospel reading for today, and the subtle way it lays out a program for the rest of Passiontide, and connects it to the Easter season. The notion that their work so desperately needed improving upon that almost no part of it should be left undisturbed would, in a happier age, rightly have been censured as scandalous and offensive to pious ears. The notion that the men who sat on the Consilium ad exsequendam were the ones to do it is laughable. To paraphrase one of Evelyn Waugh’s best sayings, “To see this committee fumbling with our rich and delicate lectionary is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.”
I therefore offer as a counter-proposal that the lectionary of the post-Conciliar Rite be further enriched by the optional use of the Roman lectionary, so that the whole Church may benefit from the marvelous work of these ancient poets and scholars, our forefathers in the Faith, as Vatican II actually wanted.

Posted Monday, March 23, 2026

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