TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
It’s still months away, but parish ministers, especially if they are involved in the catechumenate, have their eyes on Lent and the Easter Triduum. Until fairly recent times, the last few days before
Easter were shaped by an awareness of the Passion, but the faithful were left to their own devices about how to engage with these mysteries. A thousand years ago, the Easter Vigil as a solemn and central moment of initiation had vanished. By the early 1950s it was a minor moment in parish life, celebrated on Holy Saturday morning, usually with only the priests and a handful of invited guests. Most people understood it as necessary only for blessing the paschal candle and preparing the Easter water. People who were children during World War II sometimes remember that
the weekly noontime test of the air-raid sirens on Holy Saturday signaled the end of Lent.
Today, of course, we see Holy Saturday as entirely within the paschal fast, and hardly the time for children to be tearing through the plastic grass looking for jelly beans and chocolate eggs. These
memories point to a total collapse of the once-central liturgies of the Christian year. This impoverishment of the liturgy was mostly an accident of history. The root cause was the loss of Lent as a time focused on the final formation of catechumens for the Easter sacraments.
By 1880, scholars began to piece together a vision of what once had been, and slowly, at first in a handful of monasteries in Europe, pieces of the tradition were rediscovered and celebrated.
—Rev. James Field, Copyright © J. S. Paluch Co.
TRADICIONES DE NUESTRA FE
Los retablos de metal son famosos en muchas partes de Latinoamérica. Estos pequeños retablos o laminitas contienen imágenes de Cristo, la Santísima Trinidad, María, los ángeles u otro santo/a pintados sobre lámina, madera u otro material para decorar los altares familiares de los hogares
hispanos. Aunque los retablos no siempre siguen las normas del arte cristiano, los retablos latinoamericanos son bellos ejemplos de la mezcla de culturas amerindias, europeas y africanas. Pero no todos los retablos son pequeños. En muchas iglesias coloniales de Latinoamérica
se encuentran retablos gigantescos hechos de mármol o madera, cubiertos de oro y joyas que recuerdan los grandes retablos europeos, pero con el color y folclor latinoamericano.
Originalmente, los retablos europeos eran pequeños y móviles, de tal manera que se podían colocar sobre un altar para la celebración de la Misa. Cuando la Iglesia fue construyendo sus propios templos, los retablos empezaron a formar parte de la decoración de los santuarios y tomaron dimensiones impresionantes. Los retablos pequeños pasaron a los hogares de los fieles,
quienes quieren tener a Cristo y sus santos como parte de su diario vivir.
—Fray Gilberto Cavazos-Glz, OFM, Copyright © J. S. Paluch Co., Inc.