Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday, the Thursday of Holy Week, commemorates the Last Supper, at which, in Christian belief, Christ instituted the eucharist, and the washing of the disciples' feet. Its English name comes from the Latin mandatum, "commandment", from Christ's words at the foot-washing, "a new commandment I give you, that you love one another"; the evening liturgy re-enacts the washing of feet, in which a bishop, priest, or, increasingly, any leader washes the feet of members of the congregation in a gesture of servant love.

The day carries several distinct actions. In the West the evening Mass of the Lord's Supper opens the Triduum; afterwards the sacrament is carried to an altar of repose, the main altar is stripped bare, and a watch is kept, recalling Gethsemane. A separate morning Chrism Mass in each Catholic diocese blesses the holy oils for the coming year and the clergy renew their vows. In the East it is Holy Thursday, keeping the mystical supper. Across traditions the day binds together three things the church takes as inseparable: the eucharist, the priesthood, and the commandment of love expressed in humble service.

The foot-washing rite had traditionally been performed only on men, reflecting the twelve male apostles Christ washed at the Last Supper, but Pope Francis broke with that custom from the first year of his papacy in 2013, washing the feet of women, non-Christians and prisoners at services held in a youth detention centre and later at refugee centres and prisons, a deliberate widening of who is included in the rite that some traditionalist Catholics criticised as a departure from the text's literal historical basis, while supporters welcomed it as recovering the rite's underlying meaning of humble service to whoever is present rather than a re-enactment restricted to a literal apostolic cast.

Francis formally revised the church's liturgical rules in 2016 to make the inclusion of women in the foot-washing rite the general norm rather than an exception requiring special permission, a change that individual bishops and parishes worldwide have adopted at different speeds, so that the specific group of people whose feet are washed on Maundy Thursday now varies by parish in a way it did not before 2013, depending on how far a given diocese has implemented the wider practice the pope himself set out to establish.