Gerry O’Connor CSsR and ACP Leadership – Holy Thursday Homily

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1. A poem generated by AI — plausible but unsettling. Someone played me a poem supposedly in the style of the late Yeats generated by AI and it was horrible. Will AI write our sermons for us? It would be less challenging than poems… but there is a draining away of soul, of real warm human voices. Here in Rome I followed the Holy Thursday: liturgy, with washing of the feet, at Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri, the sublime church designed by MIchelangelo in 1562 using the central aula of the Baths of Diocletian, followed later by a thoroughly vibrant performance of Mozart’s Requiem by a choir and orchestra from the region of Molise. For Good Friday, the Via Crucis at the Colosseum was very gentle. Visibility was poor, I mostly gazed at the Arch of Constantine, which I first saw 53 years ago; it’s a book in stone, every detail of which has been pored over by scholars for centuries, and it’s very much in line with the celebration of Nicaea this year (the Council had geopolitical significance as one of Constantine’s great achievements in uniting the Empire after the decades of civil war that he had lived through). The prayers, read chiefly by women, were in the mode of encourage ment, and were clued in to the characteristic pressures of today, very much in the style of Pope Francis. An American seminarian was disappointed — he wanted to hear more about sin, pain, death, and so on, and fewer feel good messages. But the messages made the crowd feel that they were united as brothers and sisters, rather than consigning each to the gloom of private conscience. Each Station ended with the Pater Noster and a sung stanza of the Stabat Mater. For the Easter Vigil Santa Maria Maggiore is recommended. I feel a bit like Cardinal Des Connell, who said one day when here in the Irish College: “You know, I don’t want to go back…”

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