Good Friday is celebrated on the Friday before Easter and commemorates the end of Jesus’ life and the events that immediately preceded it.
This most solemn day is called good, a word that means holy.
Catholics spend this second day of the sacred Paschal Triduum meditating on Jesus’ Passion and Death, venerating the Cross, and praying for the salvation of the world.
The Lord’s Passion is celebrated in the afternoon which includes reading accounts of the events from Sacred Scripture.
Because Jesus died and was placed in the tomb on this day, it is the only day of the year when Mass is not celebrated. Holy Communion is distributed from the Eucharist consecrated the day before.
As a day of penance, abstaining from meat and fasting are required by the Church on Good Friday.
A day of fasting and prayer:
After this, aware that everything was now finished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I thirst.” There was a vessel filled with common wine. So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop and put it up to his mouth. When Jesus had taken the wine, He said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head, He handed over the spirit.
John 19: 28-30
Our own sins are part of the story:
Remembering the God who died for us:
The Church dares to call this day good:
God loved us all along:
Good Friday is the greatest day of hope, come to fruition upon the Cross, as Jesus dies, as He draws his last breath, crying out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”. Entrusting his “given” existence into the Father’s hands, He knows that his death is becoming the source of life, just as the seed in the earth must be destroyed that a new plant may be born: “If a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”. Jesus is the grain of wheat that falls to the earth, is split open, is destroyed and dies, and for this very reason is able to bear fruit. From the day on which Christ was raised upon it, the Cross, which had seemed to be a sign of desolation, of abandonment, and of failure, has become a new beginning: from the profundity of death is raised the promise of eternal life. The victorious splendour of the dawning day of Easter already shines upon the Cross.
Pope Benedict XVI, Via Crucis, 2 April 2010
Recognizing what Jesus did on the Cross:
The Cross is how God wins back souls:
The link between pain and sin:
The redemption won by Christ consists in this, that He came “to give his life as a ransom for many”, that is, He “loved [his own] to the end”, so that they might be “ransomed from the futile ways inherited from [their] fathers”
Catechism of the Catholic Church 622
Where Jesus died and was buried:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
A day in the life of a Capuchin friar:
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