Stations of the Cross – Via Crucis

According to tradition, this devotion may be traced back to the earliest period of the Church, when the Blessed Virgin Mary was the first to pray while physically walking the way of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, an 18th century German nun and mystic who had many visions of Jesus and Mary, states the following of Our Lady while she lived in Ephesus:

When [the Blessed Virgin] was living in Jerusalem, she had never failed, ever since Our Lord’s death, to follow His path to Calvary with tears of compassion. She had paced out and measured all the distances between the Stations of that Via Crucis, and her love for her Son made her unable to live without this constant contemplation of His sufferings. … Soon after her arrival at her new home [in Ephesus], in the neighborhood of her dwelling, the Blessed Virgin had herself erected the Stations of the Holy Way of the Cross. I saw her at first going alone and measuring off all the special points of the bitter Passion according to the number of steps which, after the death of her Son, she had so often counted. At the end of each definite number, she raised a memorial stone in remembrance of the special suffering there endured by her Divine Son. …

After all the Stations were definitively marked, the Blessed Virgin made the Holy Way with her maid in silent meditation. When they reached a Station, they sat down, meditated upon the mystery and its signification, and prayed. … The Faithful, when performing this devotion, carried a cross about a foot in length with a support which they placed in the little hollow on the upper surface of the stone while they were meditating, either kneeling or prostrate on their face. … There were twelve such stones. … Whenever I saw Mary making the Holy Way of the Cross, she wore an overgarment that fell in folds down the back as far as the feet. … It appeared to be a festal robe, for in accordance with ancient Jewish customs, a similar one had been worn also by Anne. … She had worn it at the Crucifixion under the mantle of prayer, or mourning, which entirely enveloped her, and she wore it now only when performing this devotion.

Later, St. Jerome (342-420), who lived in Bethlehem towards the end of his life, wrote of the crowds of pilgrims who visited those holy places and followed the Way of the Cross. By the 5th century, several churches began to create outdoor holy “stations” locally for those faithful who could not travel to the Holy Land but wanted to still venerate Jesus’ path to Calvary in a devotional manner. When the Moslem Turks blocked access to the Holy Land in the 16th century, the Franciscans began to build a series of outdoor shrines in Europe to duplicate their counterparts in the Holy Land. The number of stations varied between seven and thirty, where seven was the most common, and the type of stations varied, where some places included the city gate through which Christ passed on Palm Sunday, and the houses of Herod and Simon the Pharisee.

In 1686, Pope Innocent XI granted to the Franciscans the right to erect stations within their churches and in 1731, Pope Clement XII extended to all churches the right to have the stations erected by a Franciscan priest. He also set the number and types of stations to the fourteen ones that we venerate today. Thirty years later, in 1761, St. Alphonsus Liguori wrote his famous meditations on these fourteen stations, which is still used today. In 1862, bishops throughout the Church were allowed to erect the indoor stations by themselves, without the intervention of a Franciscan priest.