Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
	It’s still months away, but parish ministers, especially if they are involved in the catechumenate, have their eyes on Lent and the Easter Triduum. Until fairly recent times, the last few days before Easter were shaped by an awareness of the Passion, but the faithful were left to their own devices about how to engage with these mysteries. A thousand years ago, the Easter Vigil as a solemn and central moment of initiation had vanished. By the early 1950s it was a minor moment in parish life, celebrated on Holy Saturday morning, usually with only the priests and a handful of invited guests. Most people understood it as necessary only for blessing the paschal candle and preparing the Easter water. People who were children during World War II sometimes remember that the weekly noontime test of the air-raid sirens on Holy Saturday signaled the end of Lent.
	Today, of course, we see Holy Saturday as entirely within the paschal fast, and hardly the time for children to be tearing through the plastic grass looking for jelly beans and chocolate eggs. These memories point to a total collapse of the once-central liturgies of the Christian year. This impoverishment of the liturgy was mostly an accident of history. The root cause was the loss of Lent as a time focused on the final formation of catechumens for the Easter sacraments. By 1880, scholars began to piece together a vision of what once had been, and slowly, at first in a handful of monasteries in Europe, pieces of the tradition were rediscovered and celebrated.
—Rev. James Field