I don’t know if the Catholic tradition of visiting seven churches on Holy Thursday is still alive today or if perhaps it has vanished onto the dusty shelf of cultural history. This Lenten season Holy Thursday falls on April 18.
In the 1ate 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican-American population in Laredo —which was about 95 % of the total population — took this tradition very seriously. I vividly remember in the 1960s when I was attending St. Augustine High School and later, Laredo Jr. College, that Mamá would ask me if I could please drive her in Papá’s 1956 brown Plymouth and her two dear friends, Sra. Valdivia, Doña Pepa, and Lita Castañeda, to visit seven Catholic churches on the night of Holy Thursday.
I don’t remember if we ever did all seven churches, but I know that I drove them on that cool and cloudy evening to as many as they could visit before getting tired.
Even when I was at St. Mary’s University and I would come home to visit my parents for Easter, Mamá would ask me for this special favor.
Holy Thursday is the feast that marks the end of Lent and the beginning of the Holy Triduum, which includes Good Friday, Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday.
The Mass on Holy Thursday is an observance of the last supper.
After the Mass is over, it is customary to spend time in quiet prayer. The Seven Churches visitation grew out of this time of prayer and adoration and has continued throughout the world, and especially in Mexico. The traditional pilgrimage is believed to have started in Rome when the people visited the seven Roman basilicas — St. John Lateran, St. Peter’s, St. Mary Major, St. Paul-outside-the walls, St. Sebastian, Santa Croce-in-Jerusalem, and St. Lawrence-outside-the walls.
For Catholic who live outside of Rome, the tradition corresponds to the seven stops or stations of the cross (via crucis) that Jesus made on his way to Calvary. They are:
1. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
2. Jesus is bound and taken from Annas.
3. Jesus is taken before Caiaphas, the High Priest.
4. Jesus is taken before Pontius Pilate.
5. Jesus is taken before Herod.
6. Jesus is taken before Pontius Pilate for a second time.
7. Jesus is given the crown of thorns and is led to his crucifixion.
Our first stop on Holy Thursday was at St. Augustine Church, which was about two blocks from our house at 801 Zaragoza Street. There was no specific time for us to make the visits and usually it was after supper.
The official start of the visitation began at the end of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which commemorated Jesus’s institution of the Holy Eucharist. The four of us would kneel before the Holy Eucharist, make the sign of the cross, and pray silently for about twenty minutes. And, then on to the next church.
At that time, there were eight Catholic churches to visit — Blessed Sacrament, Cristo Rey, Guadalupe Church, Holy Redeemer, Mother Cabrini, St. Joseph’s, St. Peter’s, and San Luis Rey. Before we started, Mamá would say to me to take them to as many as we could possibly visit before it got too late and they got tired. The pilgrimage took a little over two hours.
Living in Laredo during this time was ideal for practicing this Catholic tradition because it was a small town with no major highways crisscrossing it, and the traffic was minimal.
I tend to believe, and I could be wrong, that this tradition has gone by the wayside, or the practice is not as widespread among the Mexican American community as it used to be decades ago.
(The author can be reached at jgilbertoquezada@yahoo.com)
