Holy Thursday 2026
Hebdomada Sancta, Feria V in Cœna Domini
Sacellum Immaculatae Conceptionis
Seminarium Sancti Philippi Neri
Gricigliano
2 April 2026
Epistola: 1 Cor 11, 20-32
Evangelium: Jn 13, 1-15
Sermon
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We celebrate tonight “the hour” of Our Savior, the accomplishment of the work for which He, God the Son, became Incarnate. We celebrate the consummation of Our Savior’s work, the fulfillment of the promise of salvation first made by God the Father[1] when we, through our First Parents Adam and Eve, had grievously violated the bond of love with Him Who had created us in His own image, after His own likeness,[2] breathing the life of the soul in us.[3] Tonight, we commemorate the act by which Our Savior crushed the head of Satan, restoring the bond of love with God, winning for us the grace to be His true sons and daughters in His only-begotten Son, Our Savior Jesus Christ.
Blessed Columba Marmion instructs us about the profound reality of “the hour” of Our Savior. In Christ in His Mysteries, he writes:
It is the hour wherein Jesus consummates the sacrifice that is to give infinite glory to His Father, to redeem humanity, and reopen to mankind the fountains of everlasting life. Moreover Our Lord Who, from the first moment of His Incarnation, delivered Himself up wholly to His Father’s good-pleasure, ardently desired to see arrive what He called “His hour” [Jn 13, 1.] … “I have a baptism whereby to be baptized – a baptism of blood – and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!” [Lk 12, 50.] Jesus longed for the hour to come when He might be plunged in suffering and undergo death in order to give life to us.
Certainly, He will not advance this hour. Jesus is fully submissive to His Father’s Will. St. John more than once notes that the Jews try to take Jesus by surprise and put Him to death; Our Lord ever escapes them, even by miracle, “because His hour was not yet come”. [Jn 7, 30; 8, 20.]
But when it does come, Jesus delivers Himself up with the greatest ardour, although He knows in advance all the sufferings that He is to bear in body and soul: “With desire I have desired to eat this Pasch with you, before I suffer”. [Lk 22, 15.] It has at last come, that hour so long awaited.[4]
Our Lord’s hour – His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension – is anticipated, in its totality, at the hour of the Last Supper. With the institution of the Sacraments of the Holy Eucharist and of the Holy Priesthood, Our Lord provided that the effect of His work, our salvation, would be present in all its reality for men of every time and every place until His return in glory on the Last Day. In his account of the Institution of the Holy Eucharist, Saint Paul concludes with the words: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”[5]
Pope Saint John Paul II, in his last Encyclical Letter, published on Holy Thursday in 2003, taught anew the essential unity of the Paschal Mystery and the Eucharistic Mystery:
The Church was born of the paschal mystery. For this very reason the Eucharist, which is in an outstanding way the sacrament of the paschal mystery, stands at the centre of the Church’s life. This is already clear from the earliest images of the Church found in the Acts of the Apostles: “They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:32). The “breaking of the bread” refers to the Eucharist. Two thousand years later, we continue to relive that primordial image of the Church. At every celebration of the Eucharist, we are spiritually brought back to the paschal Triduum: to the events of the evening of Holy Thursday, to the Last Supper and to what followed it. The institution of the Eucharist sacramentally anticipated the events which were about to take place, beginning with the agony in Gethsemane. Once again we see Jesus as he leaves the Upper Room, descends with his disciples to the Kidron valley and goes to the Garden of Olives. Even today that Garden shelters some very ancient olive trees. Perhaps they witnessed what happened beneath their shade that evening, when Christ in prayer was filled with anguish “and his sweat became like drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (cf. Lk 22:44). The blood which shortly before he had given to the Church as the drink of salvation in the sacrament of the Eucharist, began to be shed; its outpouring would then be completed on Golgotha to become the means of our redemption: “Christ … as high priest of the good things to come …, entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Heb 9:11-12). …
The agony in Gethsemane was the introduction to the agony of the Cross on Good Friday. The holy hour, the hour of the redemption of the world. Whenever the Eucharist is celebrated at the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, there is an almost tangible return to his “hour”, the hour of his Cross and glorification. Every priest who celebrates Holy Mass, together with the Christian community which takes place in it, is led back in spirit to that place and that hour.[6]
Tonight, we sacramentally return to the “hour” of the Last Supper, beginning the observance of the holiest days of the Church Year, of the completion of the work of our salvation, contained in its entirety in the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Communion.
Tonight is, therefore, also our “hour,” the “hour” of our union with Christ in His saving work, of our participation in the mystery of the Eucharistic Sacrifice by which we, in the words of Saint Paul, “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”[7] It is, in an altogether special way, the hour of priests and those called to the Holy Priesthood, called to be conformed to the person of Christ as Head and Shepherd of the flock with their entire being consecrated to Christ for the exercise of His pastoral charity, above all, in the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Reflecting on the entire Sacred Triduum as the “foundation and wellspring” of the Church, which is “as it were gathered up, foreshadowed and ‘concentrated’ for ever in the gift of the Eucharist,”[8] Pope Saint John Paul II taught us in his Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia with these words:
The thought of this leads us to profound amazement and gratitude. In the paschal event and the Eucharist which makes it present throughout the centuries, there is a truly enormous “capacity” which embraces all of history as the recipient of the grace of the redemption. This amazement should always fill the Church assembled for the celebration of the Eucharist. But in a special way it should fill the minister of the Eucharist. For it is he who, by the authority given him in the sacrament of priestly ordination, effects the consecration. It is he who says with the power coming to him from Christ in the Upper Room: “This is my body which will be given up for you … This is the cup of my blood, poured out for you…”. The priest says these words, or rather he puts his voice at the disposal of the One who spoke these words in the Upper Room and who desires that they should be repeated in every generation by all those who in the Church ministerially share in his priesthood.[9]
On this holy night, as we begin the Sacred Triduum, the “hour” of Our Eucharistic Lord, our “hour” as true participants in His saving work, may our minds be filled with holy wonder and immeasurable gratitude at the reality of the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Priesthood. May our hearts overflow ever anew with love of Our Eucharistic Lord, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
[1] Cf. Gen 3, 15.
[2] Cf. Gen 1, 26-27.
[3] Cf. Gen 2, 7.
[4] “La Passion marque le point culminant de l’œuvre qu’il vient réaliser ici-bas ; pour Jésus, c’est l’heure où il consomme le sacrifice qui doit donner une gloire infinie à son Père, racheter l’humanité, et rouvrir aux hommes les sources de la vie éternelle. Aussi Notre-Seigneur qui s’est livré tout entier au bon plaisir de son Père, depuis le premier moment de son Incarnation, désire-t-il ardemment voir arriver ce qu’il appelle “son heure”, [Jn 13, 1.] l’heure par excellence, “Je dois être baptisé d’un baptême – le baptême du sang, – et quelle angoisse me presse jusqu’à ce qu’il soit accompli”! [Lc 12, 50.] Il tarde à Jésus de voir sonner l’heure où il pourra se plonger dans la souffrance et subir la mort pour nous donner la vie.
Certes, il ne veut pas la devancer, cette heure ; Jésus est pleinement soumis à la volonté de son Père. Saint Jean note plus d’une fois que les Juifs ont tâché de surprendre le Christ et de le faire mourir ; toujours Notre-Seigneur s’est échappé, même par miracle, “parce que son heure n’était pas venue”. [Jn 7, 30 ; 8, 20.]
Mais quand elle sonne, le Christ se livre avec la plus grande ardeur, bien qu’il connaisse d’avance toutes les souffrances qui doivent atteindre son corps et son âme : “J’ai désiré d’un vif désir de manger cette Pâque avec vous, avant de souffrir ma Passion”. [Lc 22, 15.] Elle est enfin venue, l’heure attendue depuis si longtemps.” Dom Columba Marmion, “Le Christ dan ses mystères”, 1858-1923 Œuvres Spirituelles (Maredsous: P. Lethielleux, 1998), pp. 511-512. English translation: Dom Columba Marmion, O.S.B., “Christ in His Mysteries,” 1858 – 1923 Spiritual Writings (Maredsous Abbey: P. Lethielleux, 1998), p. 484.
[5] 1 Cor 11, 26.
[6] “Paschali nascitur Ecclesia de mysterio. Hac de causa Eucharistia, quae Mysterii Paschalis sacramentum per excellentiam est, in ipso corde ecclesialis vitae reponitur. Hoc ex primis Ecclesiae imaginibus percipitur quae nobis in Actibus Apostolorum praebentur: «Erant autem perseverantes in doctrina Apostolorum et communicatione, in fractione panis et orationibus» (2, 42). In «fractione panis» Eucharistia commemoratur. Post duo annorum milia pristinam illam Ecclesiae imaginem explere pergimus. Et dum in eucharistica Celebratione id facimus, mentis oculi ad Triduum Paschale reducuntur: ad id nempe quod vespere Feriae Quintae in Cena Domini, Ultimae Cenae tempore, et postea est actum. Etenim praecipiebat sacramentali modo ipsa Eucharistiae institutio eventus qui paulo post intercessuri erant iam ab ipsa agonia in horto Gethsemani. Conspicimus iterum Iesum qui de Cenaculo exit cum discipulisque descendit ut torrentem Cedron transeat atque in Hortum Olivarum adveniat. Eodem in Horto etiam hodie vivunt arbores quaedam olivae sane antiquissimae. Fortasse testes ipsae eorum fuerunt quae in earum umbra ea vespera contigerunt, cum Christus precans mortalem subiit anxietatem: «Et factus est sudor eius sicut guttae sanguinis decurrentis in terram» (Lc 22, 44). Quem paulo ante Ecclesiae commisit sanguinem veluti salutis potionem in eucharistico Sacramento, iam coeptus est effundi; effusio autem illius in Golgotha postea compleri debebat et nostrae redemptionis instrumentum fieri: «Christus […] advenit pontifex futurorum bnonorum […] neque per sanguinem hircorum et vitulorum, sed per proprium sanguinem introivit semel in Sancta, aeterna redemptione inventa» (Heb 9, 11-12).
Agonia in horto Gethsemani initium modo erat Crucis agoniae die Veneris. Hora sacra, hora mundi redemptionis. Quotiens apud Iesu tumulum Hierosolymitanum Eucharistia celebratur, modo quasi concreto ad eius reditur «horam», crucis horam et glorificationis. Eum in locum eamque ad horam spiritaliter omnis revertitur sacerdos Sanctam Missam celebrans, una cum christiana communitate quae illius est particeps.” Ioannes Paulus PP. II, “Litterae Encyclicae Ecclesia de Eucharistia, de Eucharistia eiusque necessitudine cum Ecclesia,” 17 Aprilis 2003, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 95 (2003) 434-435, nn. 3-4. [EdeE]. English translation: “Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia on the Eucharist in Its Relationship to the Church” in Pope John Paul II, Encyclicals (Trivandrum, Kerala, India: Carmel International Publishing House, 2005), pp. 4-5, nos. 3-4. [EdeE Eng].
[7] 1 Cor 11, 26.
[8] “… [f]undamentum … eius atque origo… at hoc quasi colligitur et antecapitur et «consummatur» sempiternum in eucharistico dono.” EdeE, 436, n. 5. English translation: EdeE Eng, p. 6, no. 5.
[9] “Haec nos cogitatio ad affectus perducit magni gratique stuporis. Etenim in Paschali eventu atque Eucharistia, quae illum per saecula exsequitur, exsistit re vera immensa ‘capacitas’, qua tota continetur historia uti destinata receptrix gratiarum redemptionis. Semper oportet hic stupor Ecclesiam pervadat in eucharistica Celebratione congregatam. Verum comitari debet praecipue Eucharistiae ministrum. Ipse enim, propter facultatem sibi in sacramento Ordinationis sacerdotalis concessam, peragit consecrationem. Ex potestate, quae a Christo in Cenaculo ei obtingit, ipse pronuntiat voces: “Hoc est Corpus meum quod pro vobis tradetur… Hic est calix Sanguinis mei qui pro vobis effundetur…”. Enuntiat haec verba sacerdos vel potius os suum suamque vocem praestat Illi qui in Cenaculo haec vocabula exprompsit, et qui voluit ut per aetates ab omnibus illis eadem iterarentur qui in Ecclesia ministeriale illius communicant sacerdotium.” EdeE, 436, n. 5. English translation: EdeE, pp. 6-7, no. 5.