With Holy Week and Easter Sunday behind us, we wonder if, after Lent, we can continue some of our spiritual practices that we found so helpful. Yes!
Added prayers are always appropriate; fasting, including abstinence from meat and eating less, is especially pertinent to Fridays and other penitential days; almsgiving never becomes irrelevant and unnecessary. But the particular focus as we engage in these spiritual exercises changes: during Lent, the suffering Lord; Easter, the resurrected and glorified Jesus; Advent, the Son of God who came to us; Christmas, the newborn king surrounded by his mother and foster father.
There is a tried-and-true offering to God that is at home during Lent but is always beneficial. The Stations of the Cross. Many saints found the devotion to be a sure friend all year round.
St. Leonard of Port Maurice (1676-1751) personally loved the stations and exhorted his listeners to take up this practice. He is called the “Apostle of the Stations of the Cross,” having preached about the stations for more than 40 years and erected nearly 600 sets of stations throughout Italy, including in the Colosseum in Rome. He also had fervent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, which he believed should be defined as a dogma of the Catholic faith, which occurred in 1854.
When the stations were erected in the Colosseum, St. Leonard preached a sermon that stated in part: “This saving remembrance of the Passion of our Divine Redeemer is precisely the heavenly pearl with which I hope to enrich your souls by the erection of the Stations of the Cross, which is to take place in this wonderful amphitheater. When paganism was still dominant, this ground was the arena whence hundreds and thousands of Christians won the palm of martyrdom, and whence, glorious and triumphant, they took their flight towards Heaven. Admire, then, dear brethren, the touching object here offered to your piety — namely, the adorable Blood of Jesus Christ, shed so abundantly on the road to Calvary, and mystically mingled here with that blood of the martyrs which has consecrated this famous Coliseum.”
The Stations of the Cross provide us with a reliable form of meditation on the Passion of Christ. We learn how to love Jesus more ardently and serve him in any way he desires.
Another devotee of the stations was St. Alphonsus Mary Liguori (1696-1787), a member of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists), bishop and eventually a doctor of the church. His famous reflections on the Stations of the Cross are still used in numerous parishes. The meditation for each station concludes in a similar vein: “I love Thee, my beloved Jesus; I repent with my whole heart for having offended Thee. Never permit me to separate myself from Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt.”
His meditation on the Fourth Station, Jesus Meets His Afflicted Mother, is especially poignant: “Consider the meeting of the Son and the Mother, which took place on this journey. Jesus and Mary looked at each other, and Their looks became as so many arrows to wound those Hearts which loved each other so tenderly. My most loving Jesus, by the sorrow Thou didst experience in this meeting, grant me the grace of a truly devoted love for Thy most holy Mother. And thou, my Queen, who wast overwhelmed with sorrow, obtain for me by thy intercession a continual and tender remembrance of the Passion of thy Son.”
The Stations of the Cross may be prayed at any time of the year. They are a reliable means to assist us as we progress in the spiritual life, which is nothing more than conformity to Jesus Christ.
Msgr. Mangan, former faculty member at Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., is parochial vicar of several parishes in the Diocese of Sioux Falls, S.D.
Corpus Christi