Why do we visit seven churches on Holy Thursday?
On Holy Thursday, also called Maundy Thursday or the Thursday of the Mysteries, the faithful visit seven churches, meditating on the stages of Jesus’ trial and Passion in the following order:
1 – The Upper Room of the Last Supper
2 – Gethsemane (the Garden of Olives)
3 – Before the Sanhedrin, at the house of Caiaphas
4 – At the Antonia Fortress, before Pilate
5 – Before Herod
6 – Before Pilate again
7 – Golgotha
This custom began in Jerusalem in the earliest days of Christianity. Every year on the night of Holy Thursday the faithful would gather “at the first hour of the night (that is, about seven in the evening) at the Eleona church” on the Mount of Olives, to pray and sing; then around midnight they went up in prayerful procession to the summit, to the Imbomon, and stayed there praying and listening to the Gospel. Before cockcrow they went down to the church built where Jesus “knelt down and prayed” (Luke 22:41), and then to Gethsemane, where Jesus was arrested; there they prayed and heard the Gospel, then made their way to the city gate, and through the city to the Cross… (account of the pilgrim Egeria, Travel Diary, one of the oldest Christian texts of its kind, around 383).
In the sixteenth century this devotion was organized in Rome by Saint Philip Neri. Rome, the city of seven hills, became for Christians the city of the seven great pilgrimage basilicas, built over the tombs of martyrs, which have been places of pilgrimage for centuries.
The custom continues to this day; its purpose is to meditate on the stages of Jesus’ trial and Passion.
The popes encouraged this devotion, which took twenty-four hours, since the faithful had to walk at least twenty miles. Pope Sixtus V issued a bull in which he mentioned the symbolic meaning of the seven churches of the book of Revelation. In 1935 Pope Pius XI gave fresh impetus to this devotion, granted pilgrims a plenary indulgence, and asked Christians living outside Rome to practise it too. And when opening the synod of 1960, Pope Saint John XXIII stressed the importance of this practice.
