In Luke 9:23 our Lord tells us, “If any man would come
after me, let him deny himself and take up his Cross daily
and follow me.” One of our most beloved devotions allows
us to do this in an almost literal way; namely the Stations of
the Cross. Especially popular during the Lenten Season,
the Stations enable us to intimately enter into the Passion,
making a spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land at the very
moment of our Lord’s sacrifice.
The Stations of the Cross, also known as The Way of the
Cross have deep roots in Tradition. It is said that Mary
herself would revisit daily the places of our Lord’s Passion.
St. Jerome, in the fifth century, also speaks of crowds as
visiting the places of the Passion. However it is not until
the fifteenth century that an English pilgrim to the Holy
Land, William Wey, makes use of the word “Stations” in this
context. And it was not until the sixteenth century that the
actual route taken by Christ at the Passion was named the
Via Dolorosa. By this time it was not uncommon for
Churches to have representations of the steps made by our
Lord on His way to the Cross. The number sometimes
varied with a similar devotion known as The Seven Dolours
of The Blessed Virgin Mary. The city of Vienne in southern
France used Stations that numbered but eleven in the
seventeenth century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century a Franciscan
priest would lead the 14 Stations we now know every Good
Friday at the Colliseum in Rome. In more recent times
these have been led by the Holy Father. The setting of the
Colliseum, the site of many martyrdoms of the early
Church, is quite appropriate.
Although we generally celebrate 14 Stations, the
fourteenth and final Station being that of laying Jesus in the
Tomb, Pope John XXIII added a fifteenth to be prayed at
the foot of the Altar, the Resurrection. Part of the reason
that the fifteenth Station has not caught on in the popular
imagination is that the Stations are viewed as a Lenten
devotion and ending with the entombment of Christ, they
are especially appropriate for Good Friday. The Stations
are viewed primarily as a penitential devotion and including
the Resurrection changes the overall nature of the
devotion.
The booklets that we use for the Stations are based on
the devotional by St. Alphonsus Liguori. There are others
that have been written as well, or one might simply
meditate on each Station while saying an Our Father, Hail
Mary, and Glory Be. However one prays the Stations it is a
most worthwhile devotion and one that can be spiritually
satisfying to the depths of our souls.