Powerful gestures. Simplified rituals. A week that has revealed the style of the new pope.

First Holy Week for Francis

by Sandro Magister

Powerful gestures. Simplified rituals. 

A week that has revealed the style of the new pope. 

But has also raised some questions that have gone unanswered 

The first Holy Week of Pope Francis has revealed his style even more. In celebration, in preaching, in presence.

The decision to celebrate the Mass "in coena Domini" of Holy Thursday among the inmates of the juvenile detention facility of Casal del Marmo, washing the feet of twelve of them, including those of a Muslim young woman, is likely to serve as a lesson. It has fallen, moreover, on terrain already fertile, because gestures of this kind are not rare. On Good Friday, in Lyon, France, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin went to pray among a group of Romani expelled from a camp dismantled by the authorities. In São Paulo, Brazil, Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer took the passion of Jesus in procession through the notorious neighborhood of Carcolandia.

What rather remains without answer is the question about two apparently contrasting attitudes assumed by pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio at the debut of his pontificate.

At Casal del Marmo, he was not afraid to offer to non-Christian young people as well the celebration of the Mass, “culmen et fons" of the life of the Church.

While at the audience of March 16 with journalists he declined to speak the words and make the gesture of blessing, “since many of you," he said, “do not belong to the Catholic Church, others are not believers.”


In preaching, Pope Francis has confirmed his concentration on a few essential words, in a form that is certainly effective from the point of view of communication.................

As for the “ars celebrandi," in the liturgies of Holy Week at St. Peter's there was noted a more elevated respect for the symbolism and the splendor of the rituals than that seen at work in the Mass for the beginning of the pontificate.

Here as well, however, with abbreviations that were not always understandable. In particular, it was not clear why at the Easter Vigil, after the singing of the Exultet, the biblical readings were cut to the bone and the first was literally mutilated, with the account of the six days of creation limited to the creation of man alone.

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