What then could hold us back from thinking of the last century as the century during which the Holy Saturday was the experience of many people who believed in Jesus and of many other men whose faith is known and led only by God? In the concentration camps under the Nazi rule, in the gulag and in the Soviet prisons, in many countries where the atheistic communist ideology gave new martyrs to the Church, as on a deep Holy Saturday… A few years ago, I met a bishop in China who belonged to that Church which, officially, is not in communion with Rome and he said to me in Latin: “We live the Holy Saturday, but we are waiting for Easter: it will come! Tell the Holy Father that we love him.” On Holy Saturday God seems to be absent, evil seems to prevail, suffering seems to have no meaning, and where is God? Sometimes it’s Holy Saturday also for those who meet the darkness along the path of their faith, those who see it wavering, those who can feel no more hope. A day of callousness, during which each confidence seems to be inaccessible and too great to be conceived. Then there is the Holy Saturday of many sick people, above all the ones who suffer from Aids, who are bound to Jesus in his shame… But Holy Saturday can also be seen as the time when the blood of the martyrs and of the victims falls as a seed on the earth in order to fecundate it in view of a plentiful fruit, a time during which the decay of our outward being leaves room for the growth of our inner man… Everyone who will speak of his Holy Saturday will be able to say then: “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). There is no Easter dawn without a Holy Saturday.

Translated from: 

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}, Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 85-89.