Quasimodo Sunday / Divine Mercy Sunday/ First Sunday after Easter

Yesterday I took a trip down to Ventura for the weekly Tridentine Latin Mass indult at the beautiful San Buenaventura mission, where I heard the words that brought back a flood of memories. Yesterday. the first Sunday after Easter, is traditionally known, primarily in France and other parts of Europe, as "Quasimodo Sunday" because of the beginning words of the Introit which come from 1 Peter 2:2,3: Quasi modo geniti infantes, rationabile, sine dolo lac concupiscite ut in eo crescatis in salutem si gustastis quoniam dulcis Dominus, which in English is: As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation: If so be you have tasted that the Lord is sweet. It is used in the context of this particular Sunday to refer to the newly baptized at Easter as well as applying generally to all of us. But I learned about Quasimodo Sunday about four years before I became a Catholic, and about a year before I ever desired to study the Catholic Church! Though, at the time I did not fully understand the Easter connection as I do now.

Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre- Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in stone, had been gazing at on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take them did so. In front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms. The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed."
-4th Book, Chapter 1.

I first read Hunchback in the 10th grade, and it has always been one of my favorite books, and now that I understand the Easter connection better, I can understand the figure of the Hunchback, named after the Sunday on which he was found, much better than I did then. Victor Hugo's story is a tale of redemption in the face of corruption, the sublime versus the grotesque. While the world prided itself on being beautiful on the outside, yet was bitter and ugly on the inside, only Quasimodo, the disfigured hunchback in Hugo's story, understood the value, and the pain, of being inwardly transformed in the innocent loving of others.