“I am a servant of Christ, my God, and trusting in Him, I have come among you voluntarily, to bear witness concerning the Truth.” (Attributed to St George, soldier & martyred pre-315 AD)
Each day during the Easter Octave is treated by the liturgy and lectionary of the Church to be an extension of the strange and revolutionary newness of Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Each day of this week is considered a luminous and special time.
The readings for Mass this week take us through the Gospel of St John and the Acts of the Apostles. Each reading forms a stepping stone through the very different ways each of the Apostles and feminine disciples of Jesus grapple with the empty tomb and the post-resurrection Christ.
It is timely and satisfying that this week our organiser and talented lecturer Mark Makowiecki completed his delivery of the pilot of a very well-received TMC biblical course, “Reading with John”, after four months (eight fortnightly seminars). Congratulations Mark!
The importance of sound biblical reading is especially evident this week. We hear Saints Peter and John racing to the tomb, the Maries announcing their astonishment and the disciples who in despair and failure are on the road to Emmaus.
Each biblical account is considered not merely a commemoration of the meaningful historical past, as is ANZAC Day tomorrow in Australia; rather it is a time in which we realise that the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ must be resurrected in fresh reality in each of our souls and lives today.
The liturgical readings reflect not only the experiences of the early disciples but also give us an insight into the realities of the Church at her roots: the role of being a witness to the truth, theological reflection on redemption and the gift of the Eucharist.
In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI described the eruption into time that is unique to an Easter Octave audience: “Christ’s Resurrection is a landing place on the way to a life no longer subjected to the transience of time, a life steeped in God’s eternity.”
He continues: “Easter, therefore, brings the newness of a profound and total passage from a life subjected to the slavery of sin to a life of freedom, enlivened by love, a force that pulls down every barrier and builds a new harmony in one’s own heart and in the relationship with others and with things.”
There is a prescient and poignant fittingness to Pope Benedict’s insights for this year’s Easter Octave, since it began with the sudden though not entirely unexpected death of Pope Francis early in the morning of Easter Monday.
In many ways the radical inbreaking of Easter is a common thread between three of the papacies in this millennium’s Catholic Church.
Pope St John Paul II died on Low Sunday at the end of the Easter Octave, April 2, 2005. His decline from Parkinson’s disease was drawn out and painfully evident to all the world. Tens of thousands of the faithful kept vigil beneath his apartment windows and around the world.
By contrast, Pope Benedict XVI was born in an out-of-the-way town at the absolute dawn of the Easter season. He recounts how he was born and baptised at the Easter Vigil, Holy Saturday, April 16, 1927 – a liturgical and theological time especially meaningful for the ressourcement movement in theology of which he was a key figure.
Pope Benedict reflects with his distinctive Christian existential awareness: “The more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: We are still awaiting Easter; we are still not standing in the full light, but walking toward it in full trust.”
Pope Francis, who had fought a particularly public yet dangerous and gruelling period of illness and appeared to be recovering, died quietly and quickly from stroke and heart failure at Eastertide 20 years after Pope John Paul II.
It seems true to say that whatever their many and often great differences, each of the last three Popes aimed to liberate the Church and the faithful from one or other form of “slavery” in the name of the risen Christ.
The dramatic presence and huge output of Pope John Paul II strove over his long pontificate to battle with the “culture of death” and to redraw the world’s application and understanding of human dignity with a Christocentric core: theological, moral, social and cultural.
The intricate theology of Pope Benedict XVI wove a rich tapestry of liturgical sensitivity and tradition with the scriptural and doctrinal revival of the Second Vatican Council, in order to immerse Christians and other seekers in the liberating reality of Easter Redemption.
Pope Francis seemed far less doctrinal, philosophical or liturgical in his interests or sensitivities than his predecessors. Unfortunately, given the role of the papacy, this sometimes sowed a whirlwind of confusion and secular misappropriation rather than the liberating simplicity he may have wanted.
However it was clear – in his last months particularly – that Pope Francis strove heroically to provide a sense of the liberating “touch of Christ” to the ordinary people he encountered, especially to those he saw as outcast: the sick, prisoners, refugees or those caught up in war.
This was evident in his Easter Sunday appearances just hours before his death.
Whatever his bigger visions for his papacy, his stated aim to shake the conventional trees of Church culture seemed to stem from a desire to liberate people from props that were enmeshed in economic, social or cultural structures. This is an austere but genuinely Ignatian aim.
Pope Francis wrote during Lent in 2024 using an allegory with the Exodus of the Israelites and with some insight, “there remains in us an inexplicable longing for slavery. A kind of attraction to the security of familiar things, to the detriment of our freedom.”
It seems fitting during this Easter Octave to pray for the gift of divine light through the intercession of that ancient and immensely popular champion and martyr, St George (whose feast day was yesterday, April 23), as patron of two disparate yet one-time collaborators in liberating financial reform for the Church: Cardinal George Pell and Pope Francis (Jorge Bergoglio), R.I.P.
May the Church respond to the light of the Holy Spirit in the weeks ahead for a new leader, successor of St Peter and “servant of Christ”.
Wishing you the light for the Easter Octave.
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
Featured image attribution: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han)
Image was expanded and taken from Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
