CNA Staff, 27 March, 2024 / 12:40 pm (ACI Africa).
The Visitation to Seven Churches is a Holy Thursday devotion primarily practiced in Latin America, Italy, Poland, and the Philippines — though it is also practiced in many other places.
The devotion involves traveling to seven local churches after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on the evening of Holy Thursday. These visits recall the final seven places Jesus went from his arrest on Holy Thursday to his death on Good Friday.
In each church, the pilgrim kneels before the altar of repose, meditates on the appropriate Scripture, and offers prayers and adoration. In this way, pilgrims seek to spiritually accompany Christ as he enters his passion.
The first church recalls Jesus going from the Cenacle, where he celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he earnestly prayed and sweat blood in his agony over what was about to take place (see Luke 22:39-46).
In the second church, the pilgrim meditates on Jesus being taken from the Garden of Gethsemane by the armed crowd to the house of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas the high priest, where he was interrogated and slapped in the face (see John 18:19-22).
