Options for Holy Week plentiful as pandemic shuts down regular Masses

by Joe Bollig
joe.bollig@theleaven.org

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — If you’re wondering what you and your family are going to do about Holy Week and Easter, wonder no longer. Here are a few online resources to use for your domestic church.

Monks to the rescue!

Our very own monks from St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison have taken the traditional retreat they usually offer to Benedictine College students and adapted it for individuals and families to access online. The abbey’s online retreat — “All My Desires Are Known to You” — will be offered from Wednesday night of Holy Week on April 8 through Easter Sunday on April 12.

 Retreat master Father Jay Kythe, OSB, and Brother Angelus Atkinson, OSB, assistant retreat master, will lead participants through an itinerary that includes: the Liturgy of the Hours, live daily conferences on a variety of topics, table readings for mealtimes, Good Friday Way of the Cross material, suggested silent prayer times, live-streamed Mass and a live panel discussion with a Q&A period. There will be information suitable for children, too.

Materials, including a detailed itinerary, will be emailed to those who sign up. To do so, click here. This will take you to the sign-up page. Scroll down and enter your information. There’s no charge, but a freewill offering is certainly welcome.

Holy Week@Home Experience

The Pastoral Center, a ministry based in Alameda, California, is offering free resources that can be used by families, parishes and dioceses. It’s the “Holy Week at Home Experience.” This website offers oodles of links to numerous resources for every day of Holy Week. To participate, go online here. Immediately under the “Holy Week@Home Experience” graphic, explore the resources available for each day.

Holy Week with the help of Liturgical Press

The Liturgical Press at Collegeville, Minnesota, offers three online resources for use at home.

• Holy Week at Home: While not replacing the liturgies we normally celebrate in our churches, this resource offers brief family rituals for every day between Palm Sunday and Easter. Find it online here.

• There you will also find a link to “Celebrating the Eucharist Missalette for Holy Week.” This missalette, like you’d find in church, will help you follow along if you will be watching the Holy Week and Easter liturgies via television or livestream.

• An English/Spanish version of the same is available by clicking the link called “Misal del Pueblo English/Spanish Bilingual Missalette for Holy Week.”

The ‘Arch’ experience

Finally, our own Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann has been livestreaming his daily Mass at 8:30 a.m. and his Sunday Mass at 10 a.m. through Facebook Live. You can access these liturgies — both live and recorded — on his Facebook page here.

Watch both his Facebook page and the homepage of the archdiocesan  website in the coming days for where to find the archbishop’s Holy Week and Easter service livestreams.