Purple Shrouds

Purple Shrouds

By

Margarita Velez

A couple of years ago I entered Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and my gaze fell on the purple shrouds covering the crucifix, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Devine Mercy. Beside the altar the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph were also covered. In the alcove, the Sacred Heart was covered with purple and across the aisle, Saint Jude, St. Therese, and St. Anthony were also shrouded. This year a      purple cloth is draped behind the Crucifix at the altar and behind the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. All the others remain uncovered.

As a young girl, those purple shrouds that appeared on Ash Wednesday made me sad. I didn’t understand the reason for them and the nuns didn’t explain why the statues were suddenly covered with purple cloths. Even the reclining Jesus whose hands, feet and side were bloody was hidden by a purple curtain across the glass. 

The absence of holy water made me aware of the solemnity of the Lent when we entered the church and crossed ourselves without dipping our fingertips into the font. According to Catholic Answers: “The practice of the Church has been to empty the Holy water fonts on the days of the Sacred Triduum in preparation of the blessing of the water at the Easter Vigil, and it corresponds to those days on which the Eucharist is not celebrated, i.e. Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.”

The EWTN site said that after the Second Vatican Council a movement sought to put an end to veiling statues. Yet in some places it’s customary to shroud statues until after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. In “Celebrations of the Liturgical Year,” Monsignor Peter Elliot says, “The custom of veiling crosses and images has much to commend it in terms of religious psychology, because it helps us to concentrate on the great essentials of Christ’s work of redemption.

According to Mons. Elliot, the historical origin of the practice is probably derived from a ninth century German custom of extending a large cloth called “Hungertuch”(Hunger towel) to hide the altar entirely from the faithful from the beginning of Lent. The cloth was not removed until Holy Wednesday during the reading of the Passion when the words “the veil of the temple was rent in two.” Some opine that a practical reason was that often the illiterate faithful needed a way to know it was Lent while others believe it was a remnant of the practice of public penance in which penitents were ritually expelled from the church at the beginning of Lent. Veiling during all of Lent may have been a common practice in the Middle Ages, but it has been restricted to Passiontide for several centuries. The altar or processional cross is not veiled and, indeed, its use is implied in the rubrics for the solemn Masses of Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday. The crosses are unveiled after the Good Friday ceremonies while other images are unveiled, with no ceremony whatsoever, before the Easter Vigil — not at the celebration itself.

On Palm Sunday, Father John Paul read the Gospel at the church entrance, then led a procession up to the altar as parishioners waved blessed palms like people did to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem.  In the book Glory in the Cross: Holy Week in the Third Edition of the Roman Missal, Paul turner writes that the procession for many centuries was not part of the Palm Sunday experience and that when it was added to the liturgy in 1955, “the procession rubric appeared not in the first paragraphs, but in the seventeenth, after the blessing of palms.” 

The shrouds no longer make me sad but are reminders that God sent his only son to die to save us from our sins. Praying the Stations of the Cross keeps Jesus’ journey to Calvary and his crucifixion in my mind.

Easter Sunday, when white and gold cloths and lilies adorn the altar announcing that Jesus has risen, we sing Hallelujah!  He died and rose three days later that we may have salvation.  Glory to God in the highest!