SCRANTON – The liturgies of Holy Week began with the celebration of Mass for Palm Sunday, April 2, in parishes around the Diocese of Scranton.

At the Cathedral of Saint Peter, hundreds gathered as the Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, Bishop of Scranton, served as principal celebrant for the 12:15 p.m. liturgy.

“God is love, and the cross of Christ, which looms over the message of the scriptures this day, is the supreme proof, the historical demonstration of this reality,” Bishop Bambera said during his homily. 

The Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, Bishop of Scranton, begins the blessing of the palms in the Cathedral Prayer Garden April 2, 2023.

On Palm Sunday, the Church celebrates Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem to accomplish the Paschal Mystery of His death and resurrection. The Gospels record the arrival of Jesus riding into the city on a donkey, while the crowds spread their cloaks and palm branches on the street and shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David” and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

The bishop began the Mass by blessing palms in the Cathedral Prayer Garden and then processing down Wyoming Avenue to enter the Cathedral.

“We’re reminded in Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians that although He was God, Jesus emptied Himself and took the form of a slave, a servant,” Bishop Bambera explained. “He sought, according to His Father’s plan, to embrace the brokenness and suffering of our world in order to save us from ourselves and to give us a way forward in life.”

Bishop Bambera will also celebrate Masses for the Sacred Paschal Triduum at the Cathedral of Saint Peter.

On Holy Thursday, April 6, the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which marks the day on which Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist and the priestly Order, will be celebrated at 5:30 p.m.

On Good Friday, April 7, the Commemoration of the Passion and Death of the Lord will begin at 12:10 p.m.

Holy Saturday, April 8, is the day that the Church waits at the Lord’s tomb in prayer, meditating on His passion and death and awaiting His resurrection. Bishop Bambera will be the principal celebrant and homilist of the Easter Vigil Mass at the Cathedral beginning at 8 p.m.

On the Holy Night of Easter, many individuals who have participated in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) will become fully initiated Catholics by the celebration of their Baptism, Confirmation, and reception of the Eucharist for the first time. This year, 162 people are expected to celebrate in parishes throughout the Diocese. They join tens of thousands of other individuals throughout the world who will become members of the Church that night.

Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord is the most joyous day in the Church year. This joy overflows into the 50 days of the Easter season, which concludes on Pentecost Sunday. On Easter Day, Bishop Bambera will celebrate a Pontifical Mass at 10:00 a.m. at the Cathedral.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The unborn, migrants, the elderly and the disabled are “living icons” of Jesus that call Christians to draw close to those who feel abandoned just as Christ did on the cross, Pope Francis said.

In his homily for Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square April 2, the pope reflected on the phrase Jesus uttered on the cross in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and which echoed through the square when sung in the responsorial psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Pope Francis gives his homily at Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican April 2, 2023. (CNS photo/Chris Warde-Jones)

“Christ, in his abandonment, stirs us to seek him and to love him and those who are themselves abandoned, for in them we see not only people in need, but Jesus himself,” he said.

According to the Vatican gendarmes, some 60,000 people were present in St. Peter’s Square for the Mass.

Fighting off coughs as he began his homily but otherwise speaking without difficulty, Pope Francis said that in his Passion, Jesus experienced the distance of God so he could be “completely and definitively one” with humanity.

The pope was released from the hospital April 1 after a four-day stay for treatment of bronchitis. He processed into St. Peter’s Square on the popemobile wearing his winter coat on an early spring day in Rome.

In his homily, Pope Francis highlighted the many “abandoned Christs” that exist in society: “the poor who live on our streets and that we don’t have the courage to look at, migrants who are no longer faces but numbers.”

He also recalled those who are “discarded with white gloves: unborn children, the elderly left alone, who could be your mom or dad,” as well as the “sick whom no one visits, the disabled who are ignored, and the young burdened by great interior emptiness with no one prepared to listen to their cry of pain and who don’t find another path but suicide.”

Putting his prepared text aside, Pope Francis remembered Burkhard Scheffler, a German homeless man who died in November “alone and abandoned” under the colonnade that surrounds St. Peter’s Square.

“He is Jesus to each one of us,” said the pope.

“So many are in need of our watch, so many are abandoned,” he said. “I also need Jesus to caress me, to come close to me, and that’s why I go to find him in the abandoned, in those who are alone.”

At the beginning of the celebration, Pope Francis stood at the obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square to bless the palms carried there by some 400 people. He then proceeded to the altar by car.

The pope delivered the homily after listening to the account of Jesus’ Passion from St. Matthew’s Gospel, but Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, vice dean of the College of Cardinals, was the main celebrant at the altar.

After Mass, the pope prayed the Angelus with the faithful in St. Peter’s Square and thanked them for their prayers that “have intensified in the past days.”

“Thank you, truly,” he said.