Pentecost 50 days after Easter

In the Jewish calendar, Shavuot lasts for seven full weeks or fifty days until the day after the seventh Shabbat, after the Passover holiday. Hence its name of Feast of Weeks (Shavuot, in Hebrew) and that of Pentecost (fiftieth, in Greek ancient) in Hellenistic Judaism. Fifty days constitute seven weeks, according to the biblical way of counting, and the number 7 is symbolic.

Its origins lie in a festival celebrating the harvest which gradually became the celebration of the Sinaitic Covenant between God and Moses and the establishment of the Mosaic Law.

The Acts of the Apostles explicitly place during the Jewish feast the moment when the first disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, who were gathered together in number of one hundred and twenty, received the Holy Spirit and divine inspiration in the Upper Room of Jerusalem: tongues of fire rested on each of them, formalizing the coming of the Spirit in an episode of inspired communication which allowed the disciples to express themselves in languages other than Galilean (Judeo-Aramaic Galilean) and to be understood by foreigners.

The celebration of this episode, however, does not appear before the 2nd century, linked to the fixing of the celebration of the Christian feast of Easter, fixed on a Sunday in spring which then extended by around fifty days of celebrations that the Carthaginian priest Tertullian called, around 200, spatium Pentecostes.

By the time of Charlemagne, Pentecost had become a compulsory holiday, mentioned as such at the regional council of Mainz, during which the Catholic Church addressed the newly baptized and confirmed.

The feast of Pentecost is a specific occasion to celebrate the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Through Pentecost, the Church commemorates the anniversary of its own foundation.

On this occasion, the prayers call upon God to send the Holy Spirit upon the Church and the Churches of our time and, on a more individual level, that the Spirit be granted to them in a personal way.

The three biblical symbols that the liturgy takes up are the dove, mentioned during the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth2 as well as the breath of wind and the tongues of fire spread during the coming of the Spirit.