worship at the cathedral 5 - laetare sunday

This Sunday is Laetare Sunday.  So many things had been said about the color and the antiphon of this Sunday and so many still will be said about them today, and so I would like to be excused.  Instead I would like to write something that I just discovered about this Sunday and I hope it would add another level of meaning to what we already knew so well.

Unknown to many and to me, this Sunday is also called "Dominica de Rosa" or Rose Sunday.  It is not referring primarily to the color of the vestments which is old rose (Not pink, ok! [which is the reason why some priests may not be so at home with the color or wearing it, they elicit some smiles from the faithful] By the way, my professor in liturgy once told us in one of his classes that universally, pink is the male color and blue is feminine [in the Philippines, it's the other way around], which explains the Virgin Mother's color.  Is this true?). 

Going back, Rose Sunday does not primarily refer to the color of the vestments but to a tradition still being practiced today of the pope giving a golden rose to royalty, military figures, governments, shrines and churches as a token of his reverence and affection.  And traditionally the pope blesses this rose and gives it to the recipient on the fourth Sunday of Lent. In 2016 for example Pope Francis gave the golden rose to the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa and in 2013 it was given to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The rose is made of gold, intricately made by artisans, and like all roses then (before genetics came into the picture) its stem has thorns and symbolically they are gold tinted in red.  Why a gift of rose in the middle of Lent?  Pope Leo XIII in his sermon on the conferral of the golden rose explained the symbolism saying, the rose "shows the sweet odor of Christ which should be widely diffused by His faithful followers and the thorns and red tint of the petals refer to His bloody Passion."

Its significance is further explained by Pope Innocent III who said:  "As Lætare Sunday, the day set apart for the function, represents love after hate, joy after sorrow, and fullness after hunger, so does the rose designate by its color, odor, and taste, love, joy and satiety respectively. The rose is the flower spoken of by Isaiah (11:1), "there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root."

Today the severity of Lent (that is if we have been seriously observing the sacrifices of lent) is interrupted in the middle (the middle of the 40 days of penitence is actually last Thursday) so that we will be reminded what this is all about.  We are not fasting just for the sake of fasting (although some need fasting to slim down), we are not abstaining for the sake of abstaining like a bunch of masochistic persons who like to torture ourselves.  We are not doing penance in self-hatred or just for the love of it.  We are made to look beyond our penance as we are made to look beyond the passion and death of Jesus to his resurrection when he has conquered sin and death. and brought new life to the world.  He is after all the golden rose whose thorns are tinted in red.  In the middle of lent we are reminded to look up and not to be bowed down, to look forward and not to be simply self-absorbed, for beyond this penances is the resurrection, beyond this dying is life - "the love after the hate, the joy after sorrow, the fullness after hunger."