Inde etiam Moysi famulo tuo mandatum dedisti,
ut Aaron fratrem suum prius aqua lotum
per infusionem hujus unguenti
constitueret Sacerdotem. 

Præf. ad cons. Chrisma 

On Holy Thursday the Church honors with the greatest solemnity some of the most important Mysteries of our Religion. In ancient times this blessed day began with the reconciliation of public sinners who had expiated their sins during Lent. Vivo ego, dicit Dominus: nolo mortem peccatoris, sed ut magis convertatur, et vivat.

But so that the sinner may not die, so that he may convert and live, it is essential that the Sacrifice of the New and Eternal Covenant, the Holy Mass, be perpetuated in an unbloody manner; and in order for this perennial Sacrifice to be celebrated, the Priesthood is needed, and therefore the Episcopate that transmits it in the line of Apostolic Succession; and with it the Oils and the Chrism of the anointing of Priests and Kings, Prophets and Martyrs. In short, it is necessary that the Messiah – the Χριστός, the Lord’s Anointed – gloriously resurrected and ascended to Heaven after having suffered and died on the Cross, perpetuate His presence in the Holy Church, His Mystical Body, until the day of His return at the end of time.

On this blessed day we remember the Last Supper, the institution of the Priesthood, the Mass, and the Blessed Sacrament. The evening liturgy takes us back to the Cenacle, where the Apostles receive from the Lord His spiritual testament, before his agony in Gethsemane and his capture by the Sanhedrin. And while the days before and after Holy Thursday offer us the Gospels of the Passion and the external signs of mourning, today the Church dresses in white, intones the Gloria and focuses on the contemplation of these last hours that the Redeemer spends with His disciples.

Never as in this crucial phase of the history of the Church and of humanity have we been able to feel and share the apprehension of the Apostles, their disorientation at seeing their feet washed by the Master, their awareness of an impending destiny, the sleep that overtakes them during the Agony in the Garden of Olives, the fear that will lead them to flee, Peter’s triple denial in the Praetorium, the desperation that will lead Judas to take his own life, and the silent presence of John and the Pious Women in the ascent to Calvary and to the Foot of the Cross.

In the span of just a few hours, the ritual banquet for the Jewish Passover, in which was anticipated the only Mass celebrated before the Sacrifice of Golgotha, gives way to the apparent triumph of the executioners, to the capture of the Lord, to a trial conducted with fraud and false witnesses, to His condemnation to death on the infamous gallows reserved for slaves, to the outrages of the mob incited by the scribes and priests. We find all this in the humble signs of the Liturgy that ends sadly, in the rite of the stripping of the altars accompanied by the monotonous chant of Psalm 21, in the replacement of the sound of the bells with the austere noise of the crotalus.

We could say that the earthly life of the Savior – and by extension the entire history of Salvation – is enclosed in this day, in which the Lord allows the Twelve, and us with them, to enjoy a brief flash of solemn consolation and hope before the terrible hours of Good Friday.

On the day on which the Levites renew their priestly promises and their bond of unity with the Bishop, we must ask ourselves what is the model to which we want to conform our Priesthood. There are in fact many ways of understanding and living the priestly Ministry, but only one is in conformity with the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you (Jn 15:16), said the divine Master. And if he has chosen us, if he has chosen you, it is so that you may be as He wants you, and so that you may go and bear fruit and your fruit may remain (Jn 15:16). So that you may go, not so that you may remain. So that you may grow in holiness, and not wallow in your mediocrity, or worse, sink into sin. So that you may bear fruit. You are not trade unionists, nor propagandists, nor functionaries of a humanitarian organization, nor members of a philanthropic circle. You are not called to reassure souls, nor to indulge them, but to awaken them from their torpor, to admonish them, to spur them on, both in season and out of season – opportune, importune. You are no longer of the world, but in the world: the black garment you wear is a sign of separation and renunciation; an example for the good and a warning for sinners. You are not presidents of an assembly, but ministers of Christ, dispensers of the Mysteries of God (1 Cor 4:1). You are not actors on a stage, nor lecturers on a podium: you are priests, in whose gestures and from whose words those who listen to you must see and hear Our Lord, the High Priest, who opens His arms on the Cross to offer Himself to the Father. The Church, the Priesthood, the Mass, the Sacraments, the Liturgy, and the Gospel are not your property, nor a blueprint that God leaves you free to tamper with, distort, or “re-read” at your pleasure. Honor Sacred Tradition, therefore, not as cold ashes of a past now buried, but as a living flame that must set everything alight with supernatural Charity, starting with yourselves. Because if you are not the salt of the earth and the leaven of the dough, you will end up being thrown to the ground and trampled underfoot (Mt 5:13) by those you think you are pleasing.

Make the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass the principal reason for your life and your days, because on it depends the salvation of the Church, the world, and indeed your own salvation. Complete in your body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, as the Apostle says (Col 1:24), for the good of His Body which is the Church. Resistite fortes in fide (1 Pt 5:9), according to the admonition of Saint Peter. Be on guard so that your heart does not allow itself to be seduced and you turn away, serving foreign gods or prostrating yourselves before them (Deut 11:16). Adhere to the advice of the Commonitorium of Saint Vincent Lerins: In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. We hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone. This is the most certain rule of Faith, before an apostate Hierarchy that eclipses the true Church of Christ and before a usurper of the Supreme Pontificate. Learn to obey God before men, remembering that the destiny of the priest or Bishop is inextricably linked to that of his Lord:

If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said unto you, a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me (Jn 15:18-21).

The Church is preparing to face the passio Ecclesiæ, she who is the Mystical Body of Christ, and who like her Head must not only face torture in the individual members of the Martyrs, as has happened in the course of History, but also in the entire body, led before a new Sanhedrin that hates the Church just as it hates Christ. And in these blessed hours, we too are given the opportunity to celebrate the Priesthood with which we are invested: some in the fullness of the Episcopate, some in the participation of the different degrees of the Holy Orders that you have received. Gathered around the Calvary of the altar, we repeat the words and gestures that the Lord taught the Apostles, faithful to the mandate received: Hæc quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis (1 Cor 11:25). Each of us can say with Saint Augustine: Admiramini, gaudete, Christus facti sumus. (Tract. XXI). We have become Christ: the faithful, through Baptism; you sacred Ministers, in the ordained ministerial Priesthood; we Bishops, in the fullness of the Priesthood and in the Apostolic Succession. We repeat what we have been taught and commanded to do. We pass on intact – with the help of God and the assistance of the Holy Spirit – what we have received: Tradidi quod et accepi (1 Cor 1:3). Because we have nothing of our own to transmit, but everything of what Christ has given us: Dominus pars hereditatis meæ et calicis mei: tu es qui restitues hereditatem meam mihi (Ps 15:5), the Lord is my portion of inheritance and my cup: you are the One who restores me to possession of the inheritance that I had culpably lost. And if children, then heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Rom 8:17).

Our being heirs of God and co-heirs of Christ therefore requires our assimilation of the Royal Priesthood of Our Lord: a Priesthood that consists in offering the Divine Victim in the bloodless Sacrifice of the Mass; but also in offering ourselves, mystically, as victims in union with the Immaculate Lamb; and in being, like Christ the cornerstone, the mystical altar on which the rite is celebrated. Only in this way, dearest brothers, can we be worthy of hearing the Master repeat the consoling words that He addressed to the Apostles in the Cenacle:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for everything that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you (Jn 15:12-16).

Let us implore the Most Holy Virgin, the Regina Crucis, Mother of the High Priest, Mother of the Divine Victim, Tabernacle of the Most High, asking that we may be able to be truly friends of Christ, in doing what He commands us. In staying awake and praying during the agony of His Church; in being faithful to Him at the moment in which new Judases hand Him over to the Sanhedrin; in not fleeing out of fear, in not denying Him as Peter did. In loving one another as He loved us – Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor; in knowing how to give our life as He gave it for us. In sharing in His sufferings, in order to also share in His glory. And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

17 April 2025
Feria V in Cœna Domini