On the most sacred night of each year—the Easter Vigil—our freshly illuminated Church interiors resound with the celebrant’s chanting of the Easter Preface which begins the Eucharistic apex of the Vigil’s celebration:

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
at all times to acclaim you, O Lord,
but on this night above all
to laud you yet more gloriously,
when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.
For he is the true lamb
who has taken away the sins of the world;
by dying he has destroyed our death,
and by rising, restored our life.¹

For at least the last 1,300 years, the Church in her Latin Tradition has prayed this same preface annually at each Easter Vigil. It is present in the Gregorian Sacramentary of the eighth century, the Missale Romanum of the Council of Trent, and it remains the same in today’s Missale Romanum. As an ancient prayer of the Church, the only novel characteristic of the preface from our recent reforms is the title given to it: “The Paschal Mystery.” Providentially, we can observe the history of the first Preface of Easter as a “microcosm” of the Church’s rediscovery of the Paschal Mystery in her sacramental-liturgical theology.

The theology of the Paschal Mystery, made emblematic in the last 100 years by liturgical reform, has ancient scriptural and patristic roots.

Just as this prayer is ancient in its use and content but has carried a new title and familiarity in recent decades, so, too, the theology of the Paschal Mystery, made emblematic in the last 100 years by liturgical reform, has ancient scriptural and patristic roots—but it never bore either this title or such a familiarity as it does today. In particular, it was the labors of the Liturgical Movement which set the foundation for the Church’s magisterial proclamation of the theology of the Paschal Mystery.

In order to more fruitfully understand and participate in the coming feasts within Holy Week, those rites that most vividly celebrate the Paschal Mystery, this article will reflect on two questions. First, what is the Church’s understanding of the term “Paschal Mystery”? Second, in what way is it a new concept in the last century, and how did the Paschal Mystery come to hold such a central place in the Church’s theology and catechesis today?

Paschal Theology

The theology of the Paschal Mystery has a twofold substance: it describes, on the one hand, the united “event” of Christ’s particularly salvific actions, and, on the other, how this saving event has been made accessible to the faithful through the liturgy.

When we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, it seems strange to ask which actions in his ministry can be considered “salvific.” Could any of Jesus’ actions not be salvific? On the contrary, all of Christ’s life and actions are involved in the saving missio of the Only-begotten Son by the Father. Yet, there is a unique quality to the events surrounding his final Hour. This is evidenced during Lent, when we set our hearts towards the celebration of Holy Week, just as Jesus shifted his focus towards his coming Passion in Luke’s Gospel, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:5).

Sacrosanctum Concilium names the particular actions of Jesus which comprise the Paschal Mystery: “His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and the glorious ascension.”² In fact, within the liturgical tradition of the Church, the Roman Canon has, from ancient times, identified these actions with the Eucharistic memorial. After the consecration, the Unde et memores identifies the saving events memorialized on the altar: “[W]e celebrate the memorial of the blessed Passion, the Resurrection from the dead, and the glorious Ascension into heaven of Christ, your Son, our Lord….”³

Sacrosanctum Concilium names the particular actions of Jesus which comprise the Paschal Mystery: “His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and the glorious ascension.”

Yet, how does the Paschal Mystery reach us today? The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The Paschal mystery of Christ…cannot remain only in the past… [it] participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all time while being made present in them all.”⁴ The saving work of Jesus cannot be contained by the single historical moments of his earthly life and death. Further, access to this event was founded by Christ in his Church through Christian ritual: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:18-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-25). The normative means by which the Paschal Mystery reaches souls is through the liturgy of the Church.⁵ After his Resurrection, Jesus sent his Apostles to proclaim his Paschal Mystery to all nations and, in addition, our Lord sent them “that they might accomplish the work of salvation which they had proclaimed, by means of sacrifice and sacraments, around which the entire liturgical life revolves.”⁶ In other words, the Paschal Mystery is accomplished in you and me when we participate in the liturgy of the Church.

This is the heart of the Easter Preface. It reveals both aspects of the Paschal Mystery, the saving event as well as the effective memorial. Quoting St. Paul, the preface identifies Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament blood offerings: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Then, holding his death and resurrection together, the prayer applies them to us: “by dying he has destroyed our death, and by rising, restored our life.” The preface draws us towards the historical mystery of Christ which is accessible at every Mass.

“Newness” and Centrality

Though the term “Paschal Mystery” was not widely known 100 years ago, the content of this term is not altogether novel to the history of the Church. Rather, by magisterially adopting aspects of the theology from the Liturgical Movement, the Church has recovered an ancient understanding of what is today named the Paschal Mystery.

The earliest known use of the phrase Mysterium Paschale goes back to a bishop of the second century, Melito of Sardis, who, like many of the Fathers, examined the life and death of Christ in light of the Old Testament types. Melito recognized in the life and death of Jesus the final and eternal fulfillment of the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover lamb.⁷ However, though such typology was common throughout the Patristic age, Mysterium Paschale had yet to become a standard term for this concept.

When we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, it seems strange to ask which actions in his ministry can be considered “salvific.” Could any of Jesus’ actions not be salvific?

Yet, the core of this theology is rooted in St. Paul. In several instances, Paul’s letters show the faithful how the mystery of Jesus’ saving actions is ritually present in their own lives:

• “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4 ).
• “by grace [we] have been saved—and raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5-6).
• “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1).
• “If we have died with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11).

This language of those events are echoed by Church Fathers as St. Cyril who in his Mystagogical Catecheses compares the baptism and anointing of Christ with our own reception of the sacraments: “And as Christ was in reality crucified, and buried, and raised, and you are in Baptism accounted worthy of being crucified with (συσταυρωθῆναι), buried with (συνταφῆναι), and raised together with (συναναστῆναι) Him in a likeness.”⁸ This is the mystery of the liturgy: we can encounter the reality of Christ’s actions by participation in their likeness.

Recovering the Mystery

It wasn’t until the Liturgical Movement recognized the liturgy as “mystery” once again that the term “Paschal Mystery” was established within ecclesial vocabulary. Due to the complex history involved and the brief nature of this article, only broad sweeps can be made concerning this intricate (and controversial) theological development.

The Liturgical Movement sought to rediscover the ancient sources of the Church’s belief and praxis through studying the Scriptures, the Fathers, and liturgical texts. They noticed a difference between the ancient vision of the liturgy from that of the post-Enlightenment setting in recent centuries. Responding to the hyper-rationalist approach to nature, man, and liturgy in his day, Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), a Benedictine priest of Maria Laach, developed his Mysterientheologie (“Mystery Theology”). In an age where “[l]ove, religion, friendship, ideals—all have been exploded as mere nervous twitchings,”⁹ and where “[m]odern man thinks that he has thus finally driven out the darkness of the Mystery, and that he stands at last in the clear light of sober reason,”¹⁰ Casel’s hope was to restore a vision of the liturgy as “mystery” to aid the faithful’s participation in the reality residing there. “For Casel a ‘mystery’ was not primarily a mysterious truth beyond our reason but a reality—a divine reality, hidden yet communicated.”¹¹ Casel’s invitation was to draw all the faithful personally closer into that mysterious reality: “For man it is an acting-with, a suffering-with, a rising-with, that is, an acting and suffering that follows an objectively existing, more powerful acting and suffering. This acting-suffering is the work of Christ himself, which we reach, however, through the sacramental image.”¹²

Thus, the sacraments put Christ’s saving work within reach of the faithful so that Christ acts, suffers, and rises within those participating in the liturgy. Casel explains, “[T]he content of the res [reality] of the sacrament is not something new, such as a new sacrifice of the Lord, but it is that sacrifice which happened once for all and which brought about salvation. Thus, in the mystery we have, truly and really present, the work of salvation which has occurred in history.”¹³ This work illuminates the true work of the Liturgical Movement, not focusing primarily on external reforms and ministries, but, rather, on the invitation to actively, or ‘actually,’ participate (participatio actuosa) in this reality.

For Casel a ‘mystery’ was not primarily a mysterious truth beyond our reason but a reality—a divine reality, hidden yet communicated.

This shift from viewing the liturgy from a rationalist perspective to one of an encounter with the mystery of Christ was recognized by Joseph Ratzinger as one of the greatest concepts of our age: “Perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century, the mystery theology of Odo Casel, belongs to the field of sacramental theology, and one can probably say without exaggeration that not since the end of the patristic era has the theology of the sacraments experienced such a flowering as was granted to it in this century in connection with Casel’s ideas, which in turn can be understood only against the background of the Liturgical Movement and its rediscovery of ancient Christian liturgy.”¹⁴ Such claims from Ratzinger hint at the motivations for the Church’s gradual development of the theology of the Paschal Mystery. However, the Church did not embrace all of Casel’s work as such, but, rather, certain essentials of his insight as they were “not so much contradicted but reorganized,”¹⁵ especially through the work of Louis Bouyer.

Bouyer (1913-2004), an Oratorian priest of Paris, played a crucial role in the early Liturgical Movement of France. His initial work, Le Mystère Pascal, is a “meditation on the liturgy of the last three days of Holy Week,”¹⁶ which endeavors to bring us into a greater understanding of and contact with the mystery celebrated in Holy Week. Ironically, Bouyer did not approve of the title chosen by a Dominican colleague, the theologican and liturgist Aimon-Marie Roguet: “Father Roguet…suggested the title: Le Mystère pascal, which everyone today imagines to have been a common expression in the patristic and Middle Ages, while, as I pointed out in vain, Christian Latin was very familiar with Paschale sacramentum, but not mysterium paschale….”¹⁷ In time, as the Church began to rediscover the content of the Paschal Mystery, the term itself was firmly established.

The liturgies of Holy Week display the Paschal Mystery in word and gesture most explicitly.

Bouyer built upon Casel’s foundations, but in a manner that kept more strictly to the Scriptural and Patristic tradition. Where Casel understood mystery, in part, through the pagan mystery cults, Bouyer demonstrated the essence of mystery theology within our own biblical theology. He argued that it is not necessary to look to the pagan cults for the context and foundation of our Pauline and particularly Christian mystery. Rather, Bouyer argues that such a historical move was to “obscure our appreciation of the creative originality, and therefore, everlasting validity, of that great vision of Christianity.”¹⁸

Soon after Vatican II, Bouyer emphasized the magisterial adoption of Paschal Mystery theology in two ways. First, he recognized the gradual adoption of the Liturgical Movement’s theology from Pius XII’s Mediator Dei to the more elaborate, explicit, and “most solemn expression of the whole teaching of the Church” in Sacrosanctum Concilium.¹⁹ Yet, secondly, in the Church’s proclamation of the Paschal Mystery in that Constitution, Bouyer soberly notes how the Church engaged the work of Casel and the school of Maria Laach concerning their Mysterientheologie: [T]he supreme authority in the Church has now distinguished, in the thinking of these pioneers, the nucleus of undisputable truth from hypotheses or mere personal opinions.²⁰

Bouyer is referring to the formulation of the Paschal Mystery as given in Sacrosanctum Concilium²¹ and, later, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as described at the start of this article. Yet, how do we understand the Church’s magisterial adoption of this novel term with its ancient content? Bouyer explains, “It is, as the Council makes so clear, the view of the Church forever, precisely because it springs forth from the whole of Scripture.”²² It is how the Church has always prayed, continues to pray now, and it is how she will pray this and every Holy Week in our own parishes.

Our Active Participation

Though the reality of the Paschal Mystery is present and accessible in all of the liturgies of the Church, it is during the celebrations of the Sacred Triduum in which the lines seem to fade away between our own personal histories and Christ’s saving event, fulfilled in history. The liturgies of Holy Week display the Paschal Mystery in word and gesture most explicitly. From Genesis to Jesus, the scriptural narrative invites us to walk (and even fall down) with Christ. Holy Thursday marks the free handing over of the Son as he institutes the saving Eucharist and Priesthood for sacrifice and service. Good Friday sets our own suffering on the redemptive way of the Cross, to witness the central act of self-gift of the God-Man in his Passion and death. Then, at the Vigil, with the Paschal Candle aflame and darkness in flight, the announcement of our glorious salvation in Jesus’ victory rings out: “This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

These liturgies invite us, with St. Paul, the Church Fathers, and every century of the Church’s celebration, to actively participate in the reality of the Paschal Mystery made present and tangible within the Holy Mass. During this Holy Week, as Christ’s Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension seem to burst forth from the hymns, prayers, and rituals of Mother Church, you and I come into mysterious contact with the reality of the event of salvation. Through the liturgy, we are not left alone in our own histories. In these and all the Church’s liturgies, the Paschal Mystery is accomplished in us who worthily participate in the sacrifice: we suffer with, rise with, and even experience the ascent into glory with Jesus the Christ, Savior and Head of his Body, the Church. To him be glory forever.

1. The Roman Missal, Third Typical Edition, “Preface I of Easter: The Paschal Mystery,” 2011.
2. Sacrosanctum Concilium [SC], 5.
3. Unde et memores sumus domine nos tui servi, sed et plebs tua sancta christi filii tui domini dei nostri, tam beatae passionis, necnon et ab inferis resurrectionis, sed et in caelis gloriosae ascensionis… This memorial prayer continues unchanged from the Gregorian Sacramentary (eighth century), to the Missale Romanum of the Council of Trent (16th century), and the current Missale Romanum.
4. CCC 1085
5. Cf. SC 7
6. SC 6
7. Cf. Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, (trans.) Alistair Stewart-Sykes, in Popular Patristics Series, Number 20, (ed.) John Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 31-34 and 37ff.
8. Cyril of Jerusalem, “Mystagogical Catecheses,” Edwin Hamilton Gifford (trans.), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 7, (eds.) Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894), III.2.
9. Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship: and Other Writings, (ed.) Burkhard Neunheuser (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962), 2.
10. Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, 3.
11. Burkhard Neunheuser, “Preface,” in Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, ix.
12. Odo Casel, “Glaube, Gnosis und Mysterium,” Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft 15 (1941) 155-305, 251 (my translation). For better understanding of Casel’s theology of the sacramental “image” cf. Juan Rego, “O. Casel y el sacramento como imagen simbólica,” Annales Theologici 25 (2011), 289-304.
13. Odo Casel, “Glaube, Gnosis und Mysterium,” 251 (my translation).
14. Joseph Ratzinger, “I. The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” in Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy, Volume II (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014; original German 2008), 153.
15. Louis Bouyer, The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, (trans.) Illtyd Trethowan (Petersham, MA: Saint Bede’s Publications, 1990), 2.
16. Louis Bouyer, The Paschal Mystery: Meditations on the Last Three Days of Holy Week, (trans.) Mary Benoit (Providence, RI: Cluny, 2022), xiii.
17. Louis Bouyer, Memoirs (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 186. This parallels the dogmatic work of Hans Urs von Balthasar who wrote Theologie der drei Tage [“Theology of the Three Days”] (1969), in which he argues that the Passion, Death, Descent, Resurrection, and Ascension (what we now call the Paschal Mystery) reveal not only something about the Trinity as witnessed in their “economic” action, but, also, that they reveal something of the very nature of the immanent Trinity itself. This work, when translated into English, years later, was given the title Mysterium Paschale (Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, (trans.) Aiden Nichols (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000)).
18. Louis Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived: A Doctrinal Commentary of the Conciliar Constitution on the Liturgy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 15.
19. Most especially numbers 5–7 which define and elaborate on the Paschal Mystery as it is celebrated in the liturgy. For more on this gradual development of doctrine, cf. Dominic M. Langevin, From Passion to Paschal Mystery: A Recent Magisterial Development Concerning the Christological Foundation of the Sacraments (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2015).
20. L. Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived, 11.
21. Cf. SC 5-7.
22. L. Bouyer, The Liturgy Revived, 15.