From memory to mystery: The ancient origins of Holy Week
Monday, April 14, 2025
*Fr. Richard Vigoa
There is something astonishing about Holy Week. Each year, we walk the familiar path-palms waving, feet washed, a cross lifted high, and a tomb waiting for dawn. And yet, every year, something feels new. What we are experiencing is not a re-enactment. It is a return. A return to the very heart of the Church’s faith: the Paschal Mystery.
But this journey is not a recent invention. Holy Week is as old as the Church herself, emerging not as a program or plan, but as the instinctive, organic response of Christians to the saving events of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
The earliest historical records of Holy Week celebrations come from the 4th century. One of the most vivid testimonies is the Peregrinatio Egeriae (The Pilgrimage of Egeria), a travel journal written by a Spanish nun around the year 381. In it, she documents her visit to the Christian communities of Jerusalem, where the faithful observed an elaborate and highly devotional series of liturgies stretching from Palm Sunday to Easter. She describes, in loving detail, how the bishop would read the Gospel at the very place it happened - Gethsemane, Calvary, the Mount of Olives - bringing the scriptures to life in time and space. It was, even then, a week set apart.
But even before Egeria’s pen touched parchment, the seeds of Holy Week were already sprouting in the soil of early Christian memory. As early as the 3rd century - and possibly before - there are indications that the Church in places like Egypt, Cappadocia (modern-day Turkey), and Armenia were gathering for commemorations of Christ’s Passion. These weren’t full-fledged Holy Weeks as we know them today, but they were clearly the early flowering of what would become the Church’s most solemn and sacred time.
By the 5th century, these traditions had made their way westward. In Rome and throughout Europe, the Church began to shape the celebration of the Triduum - the Great Three Days - into a distinct liturgical unit. Palm processions, the washing of feet, the veneration of the Cross, the lighting of the new fire -all these elements were added gradually, harmonizing East and West, Scripture and tradition, time and eternity.
Liturgical historians have noted that the development of Holy Week was not primarily theological but mystagogical - that is, it was intended to draw the faithful into the mystery they were celebrating. Holy Week was - and remains - not just a recollection of what Jesus did, but an invitation to enter into what He is doing now, in His Body, the Church. In this sense, the week is not about dramatization but participation.
Today, the Church’s rites retain the ancient shape of those early centuries. From the solemn entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the stillness of Holy Saturday, we walk in the footsteps of countless generations. The readings, chants, symbols, and silences are saturated with centuries of meaning. And yet, the power of Holy Week is not in its antiquity - it is in its immediacy. Christ still dies. Christ still rises. And He does so for us, here and now.
As we prepare once again to enter these sacred days, we do so as heirs of a great tradition. Not simply of texts and rituals, but of faithful memory - a memory passed down through time, tested by persecution, shaped by councils, nourished in monasteries, refined through reform, and carried forward by ordinary believers.
This is the week that shaped the Church.
This is the week that defines us.
Let us live it with reverence, with joy, and with wonder.
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