Palm Sunday

 I have something to put before you. But before I do so: Thank You for your Good Wishes. Pancreatic Cancer is not the best daily companion, but your prayers and good wishes really do help.

Presumably, it is not wicked to canvas views on liturgical changes. We had a lot of those between about 1910 and 1970; and, it seemed, we never stopped talking about the subject, like IV Formers discussing Girls (or Boys). But, strangely, we seem now to be within what one of my doctors calls stasis. And 1970-2024 seems a long time to be static, as well as silent, especially compared with those decades of incessant, officially encouraged change, which I have lived through!

I think Palm Sunday is the least successful of the liturgical confections devised for the post-Conciliar Holy Week.

This is because of the disparate sources out of which it was put together. 

(1) We had the assurances of fashionable Experts that the Essence of Palm Sunday was the Procession with the dramatic use of palm leaves ... everything else was to bow down before that, as if it were the Mikado's Daughter-in-law Elect. 

(2) We had the earlier lectionary choices made with Holy Week and Passiontide as the guiding principle, centred upon the Matthaean Passion Narrative, in mind. 

(3) And we had the old, Western, popular notion that those leaves, so neatly folded by those nice foreign ladies, would be sacramentals powerful to keep safe homes in which they were on view. Quicunque ex ea receperint, accipiant sibi protectionem animae et corporis : fiatque tibi, Domine, nostrae salutis remedium, tuae gratiae sacramentum ... omni adversitate effugata ... and vide the similar sentiments in all the old five prayers of blessing. 

I never have felt that all these elements have worked comfortably together.

Might we be better off with just two main options: (1) a joyful, popular celebration based upon the Lord's entry into Jerusalem and the use in Procession of the palm leaves; and (2) a celebration closer to the spirit of Holy Week, centred on the proclamation of the Matthaean Passion Narrative.

Reconsideration of Palm Sunday would, of course, be accompanied by the suppression of all those successive rites of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, leaving just the pre-Pacellian formulae for that Day, and the couple of new choices.

I think a lot of people could be happier.