7. The chanting of the Litany of the Saints during the humi prostratio.
8. The mass of Holy Saturday without introit, and with the threefold Alleluia, i.e., instead of Vespers.
9. In many places Easter festivities take place on the evening of Holy Saturday, but these are not liturgical.
10. On Easter morning, the lifting up of the Crucifix from the sepulchre; procession, opening of the doors, and entry into the church. The gospel being St Mark xvi. 1-7.
In the Middle Ages other special ceremonies and forms of rejoicing took place.
That Easter was the special season for the baptism of those catechumens whose preparation had extended over the whole of the preceding year, is made prominent only at a comparatively later date, in special laws, when the catechumenate was already dying out, as, for example, in the seventh canon of the Roman Synod of 402, the fourth Canon of Gerunda, the eighteenth Canon of Auxerre, where it is expressly laid down that outside the Easter season, baptism must be given to none save the sick. By the time of the Second Synod of Maçon (585), the custom of baptising all the year round on any day had already become very common. This Synod, however, endeavoured to reinstate the ancient custom and also prescribed rest from work for the whole Easter week.[121] However, as late as the seventh and eighth centuries, Easter continued to be the regular season for baptism, at least in Rome, as the so-called scrutinies[122] show, and even the Synod of Neuching (772), in its eighteenth canon, wished to restrict baptism to only two dates in the year.[123]
At an early date, Holy Week had already received a special name, septimana major, which appears already in the fourth century,[124] and which it still retains in liturgical books. The German name (Karwoche) comes from the old German chara or kara, sadness or lamentation, and served to mark the character of the time, always and everywhere regarded in the Church as a time of sadness.
The description of the liturgical ceremonies of Holy Week is best introduced by the account of a pilgrim from Gaul in the fourth century. To the account of her travels, written between 383 and 394, at the end of a pilgrimage extending over three years, she added a description of all that took place during Holy Week in Jerusalem at that period. There, the Holy places themselves suggested devotional practices which were imitated throughout the Church, and have partially survived to the present day, as, for example, the procession of palms and the adoratio crucis. Liturgical scholars, being ignorant of this source of information, formerly sought the origin of these practices in a wrong quarter: it is now beyond doubt that they originated in Jerusalem.
To begin with, students of the liturgy used to be divided over the question when and where the palm procession originated, and various conjectures were put forth. Binterim thought Bishop Peter introduced the blessing of palms at Edessa in 397, while Martène, attributed its origin to the eighth or ninth century. As a matter of fact, not a trace of the blessing of palms is found in the Gregorian sacramentary.[125] We shall certainly not be mistaken if we look for the origin of the palm procession in Jerusalem, for the Gallic pilgrim gives us the following account: On the Sunday, at the beginning of Holy Week, the usual Sunday morning services were held in the larger church on Golgotha, then called the Martyrium, but at the seventh hour of the day (about one P.M.) all the people assembled on the Mount of Olives, where was the cave in which the Lord used to teach. There for two hours, hymns and antiphons were sung and lections from the Scriptures were read. At the ninth hour, they ascended to the summit, whence the Lord ascended to heaven. Here again, hymns were sung, lections suitable to the place and day were read, and prayers were offered up. At the seventh hour, when the gospel account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem had been read, all rose up, and with branches of palm or olive in their hands, and, singing Benedictus qui venit, proceeded from the hill down into the city, and continued their procession until they reached the Church of the Anastasis where vespers were sung, and an oratio ad crucem offered up.[126]