The Way of the Cross

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The Way of the Cross is a Catholic devotion in which the faithful pass in sequence by a series of images representing the suffering and death of Christ, halting at each to pray and reflect. The set of scenes — the stations — has been fixed by long custom at fourteen, beginning with the condemnation before Pilate and ending with the body laid in the tomb. Most run along the walls of a church, marked by a cross and often a carved or painted relief, so that the devotion is a walk: the worshipper moves from one to the next as the meditation moves through the events of a single afternoon.

A station marker on the Via Dolorosa, the route through Jerusalem traditionally walked as the road of Christ’s passion — Berthold Werner, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That walking is the whole point. The fourteen are arrayed in order around the nave, usually seven down one wall and seven down the other, and the worshipper travels their length on foot, pausing bodily before each in turn. A station is not only a picture but a place — a spot reached, stood before, and left behind for the next. Where the rosary holds its scenes in the mind and the hand moves only over beads, here the body itself crosses the floor of the church, and the change of posture from one halt to the next carries the meditation forward. The devotion is built so that the passion is not read or recalled at a distance but, in a deliberately literal sense, re-walked: the participant retraces the road Jesus is held to have walked, scaled down to the dimensions of a parish floor.

The pull of Jerusalem

The road comes first, and the road is in Jerusalem. The thread runs back to the streets of the city itself, to the route that wound from the place of condemnation to Calvary — later named, in the sixteenth century, the Via Dolorosa, the sorrowful way. The instinct to walk where Christ walked is very old. Already at the end of the fourth century the pilgrim Egeria, in her account of the Jerusalem liturgy, describes the faithful moving in procession on Holy Thursday and Good Friday from the Mount of Olives down toward the place of the crucifixion, station by station through the night and into the day — a communal walk through the sites of the passion, anchored at its end in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which held under one roof both Calvary and the tomb. The Friday procession down the Via Dolorosa, led to this day by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land and ending inside the Sepulchre, is the living root of which the parish walk is the transplanted shoot.

A Good Friday procession retraces the way of the cross through the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem — via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

To make the pilgrimage was the privilege of few. The journey to Jerusalem was long, costly, and after the fall of the crusader kingdoms increasingly perilous, and the great mass of the faithful would never see the Via Dolorosa with their own feet. The Way of the Cross took its characteristic shape as a substitute for that journey — a way of making the pilgrimage at home. Returning travelers, having walked the actual route, set up reproductions of its halting-places where they lived, so that those who stayed behind might walk a likeness of the road and gain something of what the pilgrim gained. The whole subsequent history of the devotion is the history of that translation: an unrepeatable journey to a distant city rendered into a portable, repeatable circuit that any church could contain.

The Franciscan custody and the spread

The translation had a custodian. The Friars Minor, the order of Francis of Assisi, were granted formal custody of the holy places — the Custody of the Holy Land was established under Clement VI in 1342 — and from that post they became both the guardians of the Jerusalem route and the chief propagators of its image abroad. Franciscan piety was already steeped in the passion: the affective meditation on the wounds of Christ that runs through the order, from Francis’s own stigmata to the schematized Lignum vitae of Bonaventure, made the friars the natural sponsors of a devotion organized entirely around the road to Calvary. They guided pilgrims through the stations in Jerusalem; in Europe they erected stations in their own churches and secured from Rome the right to do so and to attach to them the spiritual privileges of the Holy Land.

Other erected likenesses preceded and accompanied the Franciscan sets. The Dominican Álvaro of Cordova, early in the fifteenth century, is said to have laid out in the grounds of his friary near Cordova a series of small chapels with images of the scenes of the passion, an early garden of the holy places. Late in the same century the Franciscan Bernardino Caimi began the Sacro Monte of Varallo in the Italian Alps — a built replica of Jerusalem, its chapels staged with life-size figures, so that a pilgrim might climb a hillside in Piedmont and pass through a Holy Land in miniature. Behind all of these stood the same logic: the sacred geography of Jerusalem reproduced elsewhere, walked elsewhere, its grace held to travel with its form.

Chapels of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, the late-fifteenth-century built replica of Jerusalem begun by the Franciscan Bernardino Caimi — via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The earliest surviving use of the very word stations for these halting-places comes from an English pilgrim, William Wey, who went to the Holy Land in 1458 and again in 1462 and wrote of following the steps of Christ from station to station — though his sequence, counted in part backward from the Sepulchre, is not the order later settled upon. The terminology, like the devotion, was still forming.

From many forms to fourteen

For a long time there was no fixed devotion to speak of, only a family of related ones. The number and choice of scenes varied widely from place to place and book to book. Some schemes counted as few as five or seven; others ran to eleven, twelve, nineteen, or beyond thirty, depending on which moments of the journey a given town or devotional manual chose to mark. The scenes themselves drifted: some sets began at the house of Pilate, others at the Garden of Gethsemane or the Last Supper; some ended at the deposition, others carried on to the burial or the resurrection. The standardization, when it came, owed as much to the printed devotional books of northern Europe — which Herbert Thurston, the devotion’s most careful historian, traced as the real channel of the fourteen-scene form — as to anything brought back directly from Jerusalem. The modern stations are less a faithful copy of the Jerusalem route than a European literary composition that the Jerusalem guides themselves eventually adopted.

Rome’s confirmations followed the practice rather than founding it, and they came in a sequence of papal acts spanning the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Innocent XI, in 1686, granted the Franciscans the right to erect stations in all their churches and ruled that the indulgences once gained by visiting the holy places in Jerusalem could be gained by making the Way of the Cross before such a set; Innocent XII confirmed the privilege in 1694. Benedict XIII, in 1726, extended those indulgences to all the faithful, not the friars alone. Clement XII, in 1731, fixed the number at fourteen and opened to all churches — under conditions, the erection reserved to a Franciscan or to one with delegated faculties — the right to set them up. Benedict XIV, in 1742, urged every priest to enrich his church with the stations. By the middle of the eighteenth century the loose family of passion-walks had become a single authorized form, with a fixed count, a recognized order, and a defined spiritual reward.

What rests on Scripture and what on tradition

Christ before Pilate (1881) by Mihaly Munkacsy, the condemnation that opens the sequence — one of the stations drawn from the Gospel accounts — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Of the fourteen, only some stand on the Gospel narratives. The condemnation before Pilate, the carrying of the cross, the compulsion of Simon of Cyrene to bear it, the words to the daughters of Jerusalem, the stripping, the crucifixion, the death, the deposition, and the burial are all Gospel scenes. Others — the three falls, the wiping of Christ’s face by Veronica, and in many sets the meeting with his mother along the way — rest on pious tradition and not on the canonical passion accounts. They entered the sequence through the long medieval elaboration of the passion, the same affective imagination that produced the Stabat Mater and the meditations on the sorrows of Mary, and they are held within the devotion as devout amplification rather than reportage. The point has never been concealed; the devotion has always known which of its scenes the evangelists wrote and which the centuries added. Veronica herself — the name read as vera icon, the true image, and attached to the legend of the cloth that took the imprint of the face — is a figure of tradition, and the station that bears her name is a meditation on the human impulse to wipe a suffering face, not a historical claim.

A discipline of attention

A station relief on the wall of St. Raphael’s Cathedral, Dubuque, marking the twelfth station — the death of Christ — before which worshippers pause in turn — via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA)

What the devotion asks is not historical reconstruction but a particular kind of attention. The slow movement from station to station is a way of being present to the passion — of dwelling on each moment of it in turn, in penitence and gratitude, rather than reading it past at speed. This is the discipline of meditation given a floor plan and a pace: the eye rests on the relief, the body rests in place, the mind holds one scene before moving to the next, and the sequence of bodily halts paces the interior work so that no scene is hurried. It is a discipline of the eyes and the feet as much as of the will. Where the affective cult of the wounded heart of Christ centers a single image of love — the matter of the Sacred Heart devotion — and the bead-told mysteries of the rosary carry the mind through joyful and glorious scenes as well as sorrowful, the Way of the Cross holds to the road of the passion alone, walked from condemnation to grave.

Indulgences — the remissions long attached to the exercise as an act of worship offered to God, the latria due to him alone — bound it tightly to the Church’s wider economy of penance and of almsgiving and pilgrimage, the whole apparatus by which the medieval and early-modern Church reckoned the satisfaction owed for sin. To make the stations devoutly, before a properly erected set, was to gain what the pilgrim to Jerusalem gained, and the privilege moved with the form. The devotion became especially associated with Lent and above all with Good Friday, the day on which the liturgy of the Paschal Triduum offers no Mass and the church stands stripped: on that afternoon the stations are made publicly, often with the whole congregation walking together, a single body moving through the single afternoon of the passion in the hours the Church keeps as the very hours of the crucifixion.

Durability and the open sequence

The form has proved unusually durable and unusually open. Protestant churches, which once set the devotion aside as a medieval accretion, have in places taken it up again — it is now found in Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist churches as well as Catholic ones — and the impulse to ground the scenes more firmly in Scripture has reshaped the sequence itself. Modern versions have added a fifteenth station for the resurrection, refusing to leave the worshipper at the sealed tomb; others have substituted a wholly scriptural set drawn only from the Gospels. John Paul II inaugurated such a Scriptural Way of the Cross on Good Friday 1991, replacing the non-Gospel stations with scenes the evangelists record — the agony in Gethsemane, the betrayal, Peter’s denial, the promise to the good thief — and celebrated it repeatedly at the Colosseum in Rome; Benedict XVI approved that set for public use in 2007. The sequence, fixed for two centuries at fourteen, turns out to breathe.

Underneath the variation the structure holds: a fixed sequence of marked places, walked in order, each a pause. It is among the plainest instances of a wider religious instinct — that to dwell on a story step by step, in the body and not only in the mind, is to enter it differently than reading allows.

Sources and scholarship

The standard historical study remains Herbert Thurston’s The Stations of the Cross: An Account of Their History and Devotional Purpose (London: Burns & Oates, 1906), which dismantled the assumption that the modern fourteen descended unbroken from the Jerusalem route and located the decisive shaping of the form in the printed devotional literature of the Low Countries and the Rhineland; the full text is available through the Internet Archive. Thurston’s account of the eighteenth-century papal confirmations and of the variable medieval numbering underlies most later treatments, including the article on the Way of the Cross in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). A concise modern overview of the devotion’s structure, history, and present practice is given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the development of the substitute-pilgrimage idea in built form — the Sacri Monti of north-western Italy that staged Jerusalem on Alpine hillsides — is documented by the regional heritage authority at sacrimonti.org. Together they distinguish three layers that the devotion folds into one walk: the fourth-century communal procession through the actual Jerusalem of the passion; the late-medieval European reproduction of that route for those who could not travel; and the eighteenth-century Roman fixing of the reproduction into a single fourteen-station form.

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