Palm Sunday services draw hundreds, begin Holy Week
‘Some people ... deny what is true because it gets in the way of their unfettered freedom to do only what we want.’ CARDINAL SEÁN P. O’MALLEY
The smell of incense hung in the slightly hazy air inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross late Sunday morning, as hundreds filled the sanctuary to observe Palm Sunday, marking the start of the Christian Holy Week.
Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley stood in the middle of the cathedral around 11:30 a.m., joined by nearly a dozen clergy and cathedral staff, and blessed baskets of palms from within a thin cloud of smoke. As he led the procession back to the pulpit, O’Malley’s metal crozier clinked against the stone floor with each step as the choir sang “Hosanna filio David.”
O’Malley welcomed the congregation to “the most important week in human history.”
Palm Sunday begins Holy Week. It commemorates Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, where he was welcomed by crowds cheering and waving palms. The service often includes a recitation of the Passion of Jesus, the story of the final moments before Jesus’s crucifixion.
O’Malley, taking the role of Jesus in a reading, recited the Passion alongside parishioners Bill Martin, who narrated, and Sandra Harris, who provided additional voices. The congregation read on behalf of the crowd, at times shouting “crucify him” during the dramatization.
In his homily, O’Malley warned that Christians should embrace the truth no matter how difficult doing so may be. He argued that Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who oversaw Jesus’s trial, deliberately ignored Jesus’s innocence “because the truth would demand another course of action, a risky one.”
“The truth scares us at times,” O’Malley told the congregation. “Some people embrace a relativism and deny what is true because it gets in the way of their unfettered freedom to do only what we want and not what truly we require.”
The Mass closed with communion and a concluding prayer. As parishioners filtered out, cathedral staff handed out stacks of palm leaves. Children waved palms from strollers, and some adults tied theirs into crosses.
Antonio Dias, senior altar coordinator at the cathedral, estimated that around 1,700 visitors attended the Sunday Mass. He said that service followed a series of “full Masses” earlier in the morning, which almost completely depleted the church’s supply of palms.
“We had to run to [get] more palms,” while the 11:30 a.m. Mass was already underway, Dias said. “It’s a lot of people today.”
After most of the crowd had cleared, Puerto Rican medical students Yael Quiles, 24, and Angel Aguayo, 25, stood outside the cathedral and took photos of their palms, which another churchgoer had folded into crosses.
The pair were in Boston while Quiles visited Harvard Medical School, he said, and they did not want to miss Sunday morning Mass in town before flying back to the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus later that afternoon. They had never been to the cathedral before, but it was a short walk from their hotel.
“We were looking for which church to go, and then we found this one,” Aguayo said, drawn in by the architecture and history. “We said, ‘This one’s got to be the one.’”
Some other parishioners said they and their families have been coming to the South End cathedral for decades.
Maria Anidi, who lives in Hyde Park, helped distribute communion during the service. The 68-year-old said she was married in the cathedral in 1981, and four of her five children were baptized there.
Anidi said other churches “cannot compare” to Holy Cross, gesturing to its lofty ceilings and dozens of stained glass windows. The building, first dedicated in 1875, was restored around 5 years ago.
“Look at the saints,” she said, pointing to a wall of stained glass portraits. “They are praying with you.”