A 5 minute daily podcast to help you in your Lenten discipline.
We hear about St. Mary Major on the Esquiline Hill, the Roman Station. Fr. Troadec why we read all the accounts of the Passion. Card. Schuster presents the Prayer over the People, used at the end of the hours of the Office in the Triduum.
Yesterday’s podcast – HERE
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Coat of Arms by D Burkart
A Daily Prayer for Priests
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since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
Someone raised the question of what Wednesday of Holy Week is called and I thought immediately of ‘Spy’ – but realized I had no exact sense of how old a use that was or what exactly its history. Wikipedia did not get me further (though its German article has a fascinating assortment of names, again without historical detail). The original version of the Oxford English Dictionary – the New English Dictionary (as it was still called when Tolkien worked for it), as handily scanned in the Internet Archive – says “Spy Wednesday, in Irish use, the Wednesday before Easter (in allusion, it is said, to Judas)” – but only gives one example – from Samuel Lover’s Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life (1842).
A slight update: one of the other 27 Wikipedia articles had a footnote to the 1893 revised edition of Our Calendar by “Rev. George Nichols Packer” of “Corning, N.Y.” Of “Holy Week” he notes (p. 112) “The days specially solemnized are Palm Sunday, Spy Wednesday, Holy, or Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday.” And adds “Spy Wednesday, so called in allusion to the betrayal of Christ by Judas, or the day on which he made the bargain to deliver him into the hands of his enemies for thirty pieces of silver.” I have not managed to discover in what sense he was “Rev.”, but the friend “at whose suggestion this little volume has been written, and by whose assistance it is now published” (as he writes in his dedication to him), Henry W. Williams was, according to his Wikipedia article, “a representative of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in the General Presbyterian Council in Edinburgh” in 1877 – all of which would suggest a widespread American use and familiarity by the 1890s, though it gets us no further as to its origin. I suspect it might have something specifically to do with the verb “quaerebat”, which is used not only in St. Luke’s Passion as chanted in the Mass of that day, but in the corresponding passages in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark. But the 1910 hand missal I checked translated it (precisely enough) as “sought” and not, say, ‘spied out’.