HOLY
436
HOLY
hour." The commemoration of Christ's triumphal
entry into the city took place the same afternoon.
Great crowds, including even children too young to
walk, assembled on the Mount of Olives and after
suitable hymns, and antiphons, and readings, they re-
turned in procession to Jerusalem, escorting the
bishop, and bearing palms and branches of olives be-
fore him. Special services in addition to the usual
daily Office are also mentioned on each of the following
days. On the Thursday the Liturgy was celebrated in
the late afternoon, and all Communicated, after which
the people went to the Mount of Olives to commem-
orate with appropriate readings and hymns the agony
of Christ in the garden and His arrest, only return-
ing to the city as day began to dawn on the Friday.
On the Friday again there were many services, and in
particular before midday there took place the venera-
tion of the great relic of the True Cross, as also of the
title which had been fastened to it; while for three
hours after midday another crowded ser\ ice was held
in commemoration of the Passion of Clirist, at which,
.iEtheria tells us, the sobs and lamentations of the peo-
ple exceeded all description. Exhausted as they
must have been, a vigil was again maintained by the
younger and stronger of the clergy and by some of the
laity. On the Saturday, besides the usual offices dur-
ing the day, there took place the great paschal vigil in
the evening, with the baptism of children and cate-
chumens. But this, as ^-Etheria implies, was already
familiar to her in the West. The account just sum-
marized belongs probably to the year 3SS, and it is of
the highest value as coming from a pilgrim and an eye-
witness who had evidently followed the services with
close attention. Still the observance of Holy Week as
a specially sacred commemoration must be consider-
ably older. In the first of his festal letters, written in
329, St. Athanasius of Alexandria speaks of the severe
fast maintained during " those six holy and great days
[preceding Easter Sunday] which are the symbol of the
creation of the world ". He refers, seemingly, to some
ancient symbolism which strangely reappears in the
Anglo-Saxon martjTologium of King Alfred's time.
Further he writes, in 331 : "We begin the holy week of
the great pasch on the tenth of Pharmuthi in which
we should observe more prolonged prayers and fast-
ings and watchings, that we may be enabled to anoint
our lintels with the precious blood and so escape the
destroyer." From these and other references, e. g., in
St. Chrysostom, the Apostolic Constitutions, and other
sources, including a somewhat doubtfullj' authentic
edict of Constantine proclaiming that the public busi-
ness should be suspended in Holy Week, it seems
probable that throughout the Christian world .some
sort of observance of these six days by fasting and
prayer had been adopted almost everj'where bj' Chris-
tians before the end of the fourth century. Indeed it
is quite possible that the fast of special severity is con-
siderably older, for Dionysius of Alexandria (c. A. D.
260) speaks of some who went without food for the
whole six days (see further under Lent). The week
was also known as the week of the drj- fast (i-npoipayla),
while some of its observances were very possil)ly in-
fluenced by an erroneous etymology of the word Pasch .
which was current among the Greeks. Pasch really
comes from a Hebrew word meaning "passage" (of
the destrojnng angel), but the Greeks took it to be
identical with iriffx"". to suffer.
Special Observances of Holy Week. — We may now touch upon some of the liturgical features which are distinctive of Holy W^eek at the present time. Palm Sunday comes first in order, and although no memory now remains in our Roman Missal of the supper at Bethany and the visit to the "Lazarium", we find from certain early Galilean books that the preceding day was once known as "Lazarus Saturday", while Palm Sunday itself is still sometimes called by the Greeks nvpiaKi) toO Aa^dpou (the Sunday of Lazarus).
The central feature of the service proper to this day,
as it was in the time of iEtheria, is the procession of
palms. Perhaps the earUest clear evidence of this
procession in the West is to be found in the Spanish
"Liber Ordinum" (see Ferotin, "Monumenta Litur-
gica", V, 179), but traces of .such a celebration are to
be met nath in Aldhclm and Bede as well as in the
Bobbio Missal and the Gregorian Sacramentary. All
the older rituals seem to suppose that the palms are
blessed in a place apart (e. g. some eminence or some
other church of the town) and are then borne in pro-
cession to the principal church, where an entry is
made with a certain amount of ceremony, after which
a solemn Mass is celebrated. It seems highly proba-
ble, as Canon Callewaert has pointed out (Collationes
Brugenses, 1907, 200-212), that this ceremonial em-
bodies a still living memory of the practice described
by -Etheria at Jerusalem. By degrees, however, in
the Middle Ages a custom came in of making a station,
not at any great distance, but at the churchyard cross,
which was often decorated with box or evergreens
(crujc buxata), and from here the procession advanced
to the church. Many details varying with the locality
marked the ceremonial of this procession. An almost
constant feature was, however, the singing of the
" Gloria laus ", a hymn probably composed for some
such occasion Ijy Theodulphus of Orleans (c. A. D. 810).
Less uniformly prevalent was the practice of carrying
the Blessed Sacrament in a portable shrine. The
earliest mention of this usage seems to be in the cus-
toms compiled by Archbishop Lanfranc for the monks
of Christ Church, Canterbury. In German}', and else-
where on the Continent, the manner of the entry of
Christ was sometimes depicted by dragging along a
wooden figure of an ass on wheels (the Palmescl), and
in other places the celebrant himself rode upon an ass.
In England and in many parts of France the venera-
tion paid to the churchyard cross or to the rood cross
in the sanctuary by genuflexions and prostrations be-
came almost a central feature in the service. Another
custom, that of scattering flowers or sprays of willow
and yew before the procession, as it advanced through
the churchyard, seems to have been misinterpreted
in course of time as a simple act of rest>ect to the dead.
Cnder this impression the practice of " flowering the
graves" on Palm Sunday is maintained even to this
day in many country districts of England and \\'ales.
With regard to the form of the blessing of the palms,
we have in the modern Roman Missal, as well as in
most of the older books, what looks like the complete
Proper of a Mass — Introit, Collects, (iradual. Preface,
and other prayers. It is perhaps not unnatural to
conjecture that this may represent the skeleton of a
consecration Mass formerly said at the station from
which the procession started. This view, however,
has not much positive evidence to support it and has
been contested (see Callewaert, loc. cit.). It is proba-
ble that originally the palms were only blessed with
a view to the procession, but the later form of bene-
diction seems distinctly to suppose that the palms
will be preserved as sacramentals and carried about.
The only other noteworthy feature of the present
Palm Sunday service is the reading of the Gospel of
the Passion. " As on Good Friday, and on the Tuesday
and the Wednesday of Holy Week, the Passion, when
solemn Mass is offered, is sung by three deacons who
impersonate respectively the Evangelist (Chronista),
Jesus Christ, and the" other speakers (Synagoga).
This division of the Passion among three characters
is very ancient, and it is often indicated by rubrical
letters in early manuscripts of the Gospel. One such
manuscript at Durham, which supposes only two
readers, can hardly be of later date than the eighth
centurj-. In earlier times Palm Sunday was also
marked by other observances, notably by one of the
most important of the scrutinies for catechumens
(see Catechumen, III, 431) and by a certain rclaxa-
