What Holy Week is
Holy Week is the holiest week of the year, the last days of Lent and the Sacred Triduum, in which the Church accompanies Christ through the final days of his earthly life. It opens on Palm Sunday with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem — palms in hand, and then the reading of the Passion — and rises to its summit in the Sacred Triduum, the three days that are the very heart of the Christian year.
The Triduum is a single unbroken celebration in three movements: Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which remembers the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood; Good Friday, the solemn commemoration of the Lord’s Passion and death, when no Mass is celebrated (nor on Holy Saturday, until the Vigil); and Holy Saturday, kept in silence at the tomb until the great Easter Vigil breaks the darkness with new fire.
The chant of Holy Week
On Holy Thursday, as the Blessed Sacrament is carried in procession to the altar of repose, the Church sings Pange Lingua, ending in the Tantum Ergo — the Eucharistic hymn of St Thomas Aquinas, sung as the faithful keep watch. Good Friday brings the veneration of the Cross and its ancient reproaches; the whole week is steeped in the penitential Attende Domine.
This is the most solemn music of the year, stripped and grave. The bells fall silent after Holy Thursday and do not ring again until the Gloria of the Easter Vigil, when the whole Church breaks into Alleluia once more.
How to keep it
Keep Holy Week by keeping the Triduum. If there is one set of liturgies in the whole year to attend, it is these three: the Supper, the Cross, and the Vigil. To walk them in order — from the upper room to Calvary to the empty tomb — is to live the Gospel in three days.
When it falls
The dates shift each year with the date of Easter.
Last reviewed for accuracy on , against the Douay-Rheims Bible and the Church's own documents.