The Paschal Mystery: Meditations on the Last Three Days of Holy Week

By Louis Bouyer | Introduction by Michael Heintz The Sacred Triduum is both source and zenith of the Catholic liturgical year. In this illuminating volume, Louis Bouyer explains the liturgies of the last three days of Holy Week, their storied history, rich symbolism, and profound spiritual power—underscoring the ultimate reality of the Paschal Mystery as the Mystical Body of Christ’s participation in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Describing his study as both eminently practical and basically biblical, Bouyer draws forth an understanding of the liturgy as “the life reflected in the pages of the Bible, concretized in a devotional action,” and the rites and ceremonies of the Triduum as the celebration par excellence of the living mystery of salvation. Together with its changeless Head, the Mystical Body, ever renewed, partakes of the Last Supper, is stretched upon the cross, and descends into the tomb to rise again on the third day. This is the paschal mystery. (Louis Bo