By Mary Pearson
During Lent, many parishes gather on Fridays to pray the Stations of the Cross together.
Just as we remember Christ’s Resurrection each Sunday, making a point to set Sunday aside as a special day to rest from work and give praise to God, Christians have also traditionally held Friday as a day set apart from the rest of the week. It is the day our Lord suffered and died. In Lent, this is in special focus. One practical way many parishes set Fridays apart in Lent is by praying the Stations of the Cross.
“The stations are a profound meditation on the passion of Christ, with visual images that help us to walk the way of Christ,” said Father Leonard DePasquale, I.M.C., of St. Partick parish, Moreno Valley.
“[They] invite us to experience the profound love of God, poured out to us in Jesus.”
St. Patrick offers bilingual Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent. The stations are a familiar practice to most Catholics. As we recount the Via Crucis–or “Way of the Cross,”-- we prayerfully meditate on and pray through 14 specific events of the Passion of Jesus on Good Friday. We walk with Jesus as He meets the weeping women of Jerusalem, we meet Simon of Cyrene, who is ordered to help Jesus carry His Cross; we recall the nails being driven into Jesus’ hands, His death on the Cross, and end with His body being laid in the tomb.
“I am particularly moved by Mary in the stations,” said Fr. DePasquale. “She walks with Jesus, she stood at the Cross. She held His body in her arms when He was taken down from the cross. How can we not be moved by the profound love of a mother?”
At St. Catherine of Alexandria in Temecula, the Divine Mercy group leads the Stations of the Cross outdoors each Friday of Lent. Last year, the parish installed 14 life-sized statues of the stations throughout the parish campus, so parishioners can physically walk as they pray and participate in the Way of the Cross.
On March 14th, Kim Nguyen led a beautiful sung version of the Stations in Vietnamese at St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta Parish in Winchester. “I’m happy to help the Vietnamese community, so I volunteered to lead the stations,” she said.
Kim Luu was present at the stations with her nephew, Nathan. “Every station makes me emotional,” Luu said. At St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, each Friday the stations are led by a different group from the parish.
The devotional practice of prayerfully retracing the steps of Christ’s Passion dates back through the centuries. Beginning in the earliest days of the Church, Christians naturally made pilgrimages to Jerusalem to visit the historical sites of what later would become known as the Via Dolorosa, or the “sorrowful way” of Jesus on Good Friday.
Eventually, visiting the Holy Land became more difficult, and even impossible at times, for Christian pilgrims. In 1217, St. Francis of Assisi sent missionaries to Egypt and the Franciscans were able to encounter firsthand the devotion of visiting the Holy sites in Jerusalem. St. Francis wanted more Christians throughout the world to experience the transformative and deeply sensory experience of walking the Way of Cross, even though it was, at that time, impossible for pilgrims to physically visit Jerusalem.
As a result, the Franciscans began to erect stations in their churches, and the practice began to spread throughout Europe. In 1686, Pope Innocent XI extended the indulgence attached to visiting the Holy places in Jerusalem to any faithful who visited any Franciscan Church and prayed through the Stations there. In 1731, Pope Clement XII declared that any church could erect stations, provided they were blessed by a Franciscan. It was also at this time that the number of stations was officially fixed at 14.
Because the Stations of the Cross is a devotional practice and not a liturgy, there are not strict rubrics governing how the stations must be prayed. There are multiple approved versions of the Stations on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) website. Each are comprised of 14 stations meditating on the events of Christ’s Passion, but they might be written with a particular cause or emphasis in focus. For example, there are “Stations of the Cross for Vocations,” or “Stations of the Cross for Life,” and even the “Scriptural Stations of the Cross” famously first prayed by Pope John Paul II on Good Friday in 1991.
Mary Pearson is a freelance writer and parishioner of St. Martha, Murrieta.