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.

Its roots lie in the pull of Jerusalem. Early pilgrims retraced the route Christ was held to have walked to Calvary, the Via Dolorosa, and those who could not make the journey were offered a substitute at home. The Franciscans, who held custody of the holy places from the fourteenth century, did much to spread the practice through Europe, erecting stations in their churches and securing the right to do so. The number and choice of scenes varied for centuries — some schemes had seven, some thirty — before the fourteen-station form settled into place and was confirmed by Rome in the eighteenth century. Several of the traditional stations, among them the three falls and the wiping of Christ’s face by Veronica, rest on pious tradition rather than on the Gospel narratives, a point the practice itself has never concealed.

What the devotion asks is not historical reconstruction but a particular kind of attention. Practitioners understood the slow movement from station to station as a way of being present to the passion — of meditating on each moment of it in turn, in penitence and gratitude, rather than reading it past at speed. Indulgences were long attached to the exercise, which bound it tightly to the Church’s wider economy of penance. It became especially associated with Lent and above all with Good Friday, when the stations are made publicly, often with the whole congregation walking together.

The form has proved unusually durable and unusually open. Protestant churches, which once set the devotion aside as medieval accretion, have in places taken it up again; modern versions have added a fifteenth station for the resurrection, or substituted a “scriptural” set drawn only from the Gospels. 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.

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