Holy Week, the Annunciation and St. Dismas

National Catholic Register, 25 March 2024

The Good Thief is our companion this Holy Week, giving hope to every sinner who worries that it might be too late.

Happy feast of the Good Thief! (More or less.)

There are no feast days observed during Holy Week. When March 25 falls during Holy Week, as it does this year, the great feast of the Annunciation is delayed to the Monday after Divine Mercy Sunday. Holy Week and the Easter Octave take precedence over all.

Yet there is a lesson to be learned when March 25 falls during Holy Week, because in the long Christian tradition, March 25 is more about Holy Week than the Annunciation. Indeed, March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation because the first Good Friday was on March 25. The Good Thief, we might say, had his feast day “stolen” from him.

How do we know the original date of Good Friday, at least liturgically speaking?

March 25 is recorded as the Good Thief’s feast day in the Roman Martyrology — the liturgical book in which the saints and blessed are enrolled according to their feast days. On Good Friday he was promised that “today” he would with Jesus in paradise (Luke 23:43). Christian tradition holds that it was March 25, so his feast day is that date.

That is reflected in Christian literature, too. March 25 in Italy is observed as Dante Day, in honor of the author of the Divine Comedy. Dante travels through hell, The Inferno, on Good Friday. Therefore, the traditional date of the original Good Friday, March 25, is chosen as Dante Day.

All that requires some background. Let Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, explain the importance of March 25:

“Jewish tradition gave the date of March 25th to Abraham’s sacrifice. … This day was also regarded as the day of creation, the day when God’s word decreed: ‘Let there be light.’ It was also considered, very early on, as the day of Christ’s death and eventually as the day of his conception. This is most illuminating. It seems clear to me that we have to recapture this cosmic vision if we want once again to understand and live Christianity in its full breadth.”

Following Jewish tradition, which gave March 25 as the date of creation and of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the early Christians reasoned that the same crucial date would be fitting for the redemption — Good Friday. And if for the redemption, then the Incarnation too.

In the ancient world there was a widespread belief that the lives of great persons would be brought to a close in the perfect fulfillment of their years; they would die upon the same date as they had once been conceived. So the Church Fathers argued backwards. Jesus was crucified on March 25, thus he was conceived on that date, too. Christmas would follow nine months later.

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