Vatican City - At 9.15 pm this evening, Friday 3 April, Pope Leo XIV will preside over the Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum. Through all fourteen stations, he himself will carry the cross, in a gesture that gives the rite an altogether distinctive spiritual and symbolic weight.
“I think,” Leo XIV said at Castel Gandolfo, “that it will be an important sign because of what the Pope represents: a spiritual leader in the world today, a voice that says that Christ still suffers. And I carry all these sufferings too in my prayers.” The meditations and prayers were written by Father Francesco Patton, a Friar Minor and former Custos of the Holy Land. The reflections touch on deeply concrete and dramatic themes. In the First Station, the theme of power emerges, unmasked by Christ before Pilate: every authority, Patton writes, will be judged by the use it makes of force, justice, the economy and even war. Later, the cross becomes the place where Jesus takes human frailty upon himself; the falls speak of humiliation, suffering, depression, addiction and every form of crushing burden that marks contemporary existence.
There is also ample space given to mothers, orphans, migrants, refugees, prisoners, women who are victims of trafficking, and children whose childhood has been stolen. Father Patton reads the disfigured face of Christ in the wounded bodies of our time and asks for real tears against indifference. In this perspective, the Way of the Crossbecomes a school of compassion, responsibility and pity. And yet the meditation will not end in sorrow. The final image is that of the garden of the tomb, where death is passed through and overcome. Christian hope, in these meditations, does not make the cross lighter: it passes through it, takes it upon itself and transfigures it. This is the heart of the rite that Leo XIV will carry out this evening at the Colosseum, personally bearing the cross from beginning to end of this distinctive rite.
f.S.V.
Silere non possum