Today’s Paschal Triduum reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

For so many of the Catholic faithful, the celebration of Holy Thursday arrives in the midst of a whole year of “fasting” from the Eucharist. This has been a fast imposed in the interest of public health, but it constitutes, in the order of truth, the greatest of all the pandemic deprivations.

Normally, fasting means the voluntary sacrifice of lesser goods for the purpose of attaching ourselves more firmly to a greater good. What can it possibly mean, then, to “fast” from the greatest of all goods? It means to do without something so much at the heart of our Catholic life that we are left, in its absence, as mere shadows of our true selves. In this respect, there are no substitutes. If we have reason to be grateful for our technology, the “watching” of Mass is so far from the real thing as to belong to a different order of reality.

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