Hello, and welcome to Catholic Answers Live. I'm Sy Kelly at your host on this holy Thursday, which you have very blessed holy Thursday and as you can tell, it's a special episode of Catholic Answers Live and that's mostly occasioned by the fact that on many of the stations most of the stations that we're on will be preempted today because of liturgical broadcasts and that kind of thing that are involved in the tridum that's if you're not familiar with that word, we'll talk about what that word means tridum with our guest father Sam.

We're going to take a little bit of time to wish you a very blessed holy Thursday and also to talk a bit about holy Thursday and then we'll come back tomorrow on Good Friday and do the same thing for the same keys. Thank you for being with us.

You're very welcome. We're glad to be here.

So maybe I should just start with the word I already introduced tridum. What is that? What's the tridum?

Tridum just means three days. So it refers to the sometimes the sacred tridum or the paschal tridum, the Lord's Passion. It's just this three days, Monday Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, which are the kind of central, you know, defining events of the Christian life.

They're the kind of central defining liturgies of our liturgical life. And what's interesting, of course, is that the paschal tridum, it's really like a single liturgy that kind of stretches out over three days.

It's not really three separate things, but it is a single kind of celebration of the mysteries of our salvation. And you can see that actually in some in some of the formal aspects of the liturgy itself.

So for example, on Holy Thursday, after the mass ends, it's the mass of the Lord's Supper. And after it ends, well, it doesn't really end. That's part of the thing. There's no dismissal, like you normally have.

Basically, assuming you're in a church where the Good Friday liturgy will be celebrated, typically there's an extra quantity of the sacrament, which is reserved so that the faithful can have Holy Communion on Good Friday.

And that is processed out of the church to a kind of suitable resting place, sometimes referred to as an altar of repose, or even a garden of repose, maybe a side chapel in a larger church, or maybe someplace else.

And then the church is stripped bare of all of its ornaments and all that kind of stuff. Maybe Psalm 22, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is recited or sung. And that's really it.

So the kind of service ends in kind of darkness and silence. And I think that's intentional. And then when you begin again on Good Friday, there's not, there's not the usual kind of entrance rights, actually.

And we can talk about this in a minute or tomorrow, I guess when we are talking about Good Friday, but it's not your typical beginning. And again, it kind of ends in silence without any real dismissal.

Yeah. And then it kind of picks up finally then with the new fire at the Easter vigil on Saturday night. And then, and then that's when you get, you know, the first mass of Easter and things are complete.

All of this long liturgy of the Tridum is connected to, first of all, the life of Christ himself in which his, he accomplished a great deal in that very short period of time.

But then it also follows the life of the early church, which in writing the Gospels, for example, you'll see that the, the passion of the Lord, all these things that happened in just the last four days or last, I mean, I shouldn't say it that way because Friday is the last day of his earthly life. But in, in that period where he's in Jerusalem, they take up a ridiculous amount of the Gospels.

If you were thinking of the Gospels as a biography, you'd say, well half of it is the last few days of his life.

Yeah, I mean, if Jesus, you know, so Jesus, 33 years on earth, I mean, the first 30 years are, we sometimes refer to that as his hidden life.

Yeah. And that we get these little glimpses, we get the nativity, we get the finding at the temple. And then nothing, you know, really, you know, just kind of hanging out in Nazareth, maybe making some tables or something.

Right. You know, that's a mel Gibson, making a table. Come on, you got that from a movie. Probably.

Yeah, I mean, we don't know. It's all kind of speculation. And there, you know, there are some kind of apocryphal stories about that time as well.

But, but really the Gospels, of course, focus on mainly on Jesus in his public ministry.

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