A strange and wonderful thing happened at Easter – and I find I am still thinking about it, thinking towards the future as well as casting back to the events – so I am going to write about it. In my parish we celebrated the first two liturgies of the Triduum without a priest.

The alternative would have been to close the church and involve the committed-enough parishioners in round trips of up to 150 miles each time, which is what we did for the Vigil on Saturday night, filling the church at Whithorn and failing, because of the dire weather, to carry the lighted Paschal Candle through the Holy Door of Mercy.

We are blessed in having a home-grown deacon, which obviously makes things easier. We simply left out those bits that require a priest, and remarkably few they turned out to be. And it was a lovely thing we did. Afterwards, everyone spoke of being conscious of a particular and powerful atmosphere of love – and of peaceful but sturdy attentiveness.

Now this seems very odd because the prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Robert Sarah, and others, say that “the purpose for which the Lord instituted this feast” was (a) the institution of the priesthood and (b) the institution of the Mass. By these criteria, our liturgy ought to have been a total disaster because these were precisely the “missing” elements. There was no priest and no consecration; we received consecrated hosts from the tabernacle.