Quasimodo Sunday reminds us of our frailties

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

Since 2001, we have marked the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday. This year, it fell on March 30.

However, over the years, this Sunday - the end of the octave (eight days) of Easter - has been known by many names. It has been called:

• Dominica in Albis (Depositis), because it was the Sunday to set aside the white garments traditionally worn by the newly baptized during the octave of Easter;
  
  
• White Sunday, because of those same white robes - which are also the proper vestment for all the baptized;
  
  
• Thomas Sunday, for the Gospel reading of the day where Jesus shows his wounds to the doubting apostle;
  
  
• Low Sunday (until the reforms of 1970). There is some confusion about why it was called "Low Sunday." The Catholic Encyclopedia said that "it is apparently intended to indicate the contrast between it and the great Easter festival immediately preceding, and also, perhaps, to signify that, being the Octave Day of Easter, it was considered part of that feast, though in a lower degree." Others believe that "low" is a corruption of the word "laudes" from the prayer sequence of the day: "laudes Salvatori voce" or "Let us sing the Savior's praises."

From the Latin

But the Second Sunday of Easter has also been called "Quasimodo Sunday." The name came - as many of the traditional names for our Sundays do - from what used to be one of the Scripture readings used for the day. In this case, it is the entrance prayer: Quasi modo geniti infantes ..." This translates roughly into "as newly formed (born) infants long for their mothers' breasts ... so you have tasted that the Lord is sweet." It derives from the First Letter of Peter (IPt 2:2), and refers to the newly baptized longing for the teachings of the church.

For most of us, "Quasimodo" is the famous hunchback of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel. The orphaned hunchback - named for the feast day on which he was found abandoned in Notre Dame - grew up in the Paris cathedral, becoming its bell-ringer. Ringing bells made him deaf, and he was already nearly blind in one eye from a huge wart. To the characters in the novel, Quasimodo is "not quite human" or "almost like a human" an object to be avoided or used for their own purposes. He falls in love with a beautiful gypsy, saves her life but does not win her love, and follows her to her criminal's grave, where he dies - one can assume from the novel, of a broken heart.

Where's the joy?

That sad story doesn't seem to fit with the joyous season of Easter. And yet the story of the hunchback carries echoes of the last of the four Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah: "He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, one of those from whom people hide their faces..." (Is 53:3).

Christians interpret that reading as a foretelling part of the Passion of Christ. As we have learned through Lent and Easter, followers of Christ share in both his passion and his resurrection.

How many of us have suffered the scorn of others as did both Christ and Quasimodo? How many of us have suffered?

All of us face death. And, without Christ, we would end up like Quasimodo, deformed and dead in a graveyard for criminals.

Realizing destiny

Yet that is precisely where the resurrection story happens - at the grave of an executed criminal. The man treated as a Quasimodo - abandoned on a cross - brings new life to the true Quasimodos; We sinners who would "not quite" ever realize our destiny "to be like God forever" (CCC, n, 1023), can now do so because of Christ's sacrifice.

"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rm 5:7-8).

Quasimodo, the "almost like, but not quite" human, longed for love and was rejected. We sinners also long for love. But God does not reject us. Christ became like us to show that we are loved - and to help us reach our full potential in him. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that, by baptism into Christ, we become "'a new creature, an adopted son of God, who has become a 'partaker of the divine nature,' member of Christ and co-heir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit" (CCC, n. 1265).

No "almost like about it."

Baptism made us members of Christ. Maybe that is one reason why Quasimodo Sunday follows Easter - to remind us, who have been sinners, that we now share the destiny of the Glorified One.

(Sources: Catechism of the Catholic Church; the Catholic Encyclopedia; The Maryknoll Catholic Dictionary; the New American Bible; en.wikipedia.com; and www.fisheaters.com)