Holy Saturday in Ss. Peter & Paul’s Parish Athlone
Holy Saturday
The Church will be open for private prayer today from 10.30am to 6.30pm, (for those living within 2km), please practice social distancing if visiting.
The Easter Vigil Mass will be held at 8pm via live stream. Click here for live stream
Holy Saturday is a day of patient waiting when we, as Church, prayerfully reflect on the passion and death of Christ and await his resurrection. It is a day of fast as we ready ourselves for the feast of Easter.
The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night
The Easter Vigil is rich in symbol and ritual action. While we will not experience it in quite the same way this year, it typically unfolds as follows, in four parts.
The celebration begins around the light of the Easter fire. The fire is blessed, the Easter Candle is lit and this light is shared before we sing our great proclamation of Easter, the Exsultet.
In the second part of the night we vigil with the stories of our salvation, the great stories from the Old Testament proclaimed in the light of our Easter faith and culminating in the proclamation of the resurrection in the Gospel reading.
Now in the third part we are ready to do what our whole Lenten journey has been about – to welcome new members in baptism and to renew our own baptism before we complete our celebration of the vigil with the Liturgy of the Eucharist in which we receive the nourishment and grace of the Body of Christ to sustain us in the Christian journey.
On this greatest of nights in the life of the Church we keep vigil with the Lord. Although this year’s Vigil cannot be celebrated in all its richness, in the darkness of these days we can dare to rejoice. Because, through the resurrection, the risen Lord has conquered all darkness and overcome the power of death.
Scripture tells us
The angel spoke; and he said to the women, ‘There is no need for you to be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said he would.’ (Matthew 28:5-6)
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