The Vatican announced on Tuesday that Pope Leo XIV will carry a cross for the entirety of the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, procession celebrated on Good Friday.
This Holy Week is Pope Leo’s first as the Archbishop of Rome, as he was elected pope shortly after last year’s Lenten and Easter season in May. Easter marks the holiest holiday for most of the world’s Christians, including Catholics, and Good Friday is typically observed as a solemn day of reflection and prayer marking the day that Jesus was crucified. Throughout the world, Catholics participate in the Via Crucis procession in which believers pray and reflect on 14 points marking the path that Jesus took while carrying his cross through Jerusalem to Golgotha where he was executed.
In Rome, the Good Friday Via Crucis has traditionally been led by the pope and takes place at the Colosseum. Due to his advanced age and poor health, the late Pope Francis had not led the procession during his final years, instead writing the meditations for each station that participants use to reflect and pray. Prior to Pope Francis, Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II carried the cross for some Good Friday processions, but typically at the beginning and ending of the Via Crucis, not for the entire ceremony.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, the pope referred to the carrying of the cross as a symbolic gesture of the responsibility of the leadership of the Church.
“I think it will be an important sign because of what the pope represents: a spiritual leader in today’s world, a voice to say that Christ still suffers. And I carry all these sufferings in my prayers as well,” he explained. The pope urged “all people of goodwill, to people of faith, to walk together, to walk with Christ who suffered for us, to give us salvation, and to seek to be bearers of peace ourselves.”
“Easter should be the holiest, most sacred time of the year. It is a time of peace, a time for much reflection, but as we all know, once again in the world, in so many places, we are seeing so much suffering, so many deaths, even innocent children,” he asserted.
While this year will be the first that Pope Leo leads the Church through Holy Week, he has already had several opportunities to carry a cross during Catholic ceremonies. In August, the pontiff carried the Jubilee Cross at the Jubilee of Youth.
Two months prior to that, Pope Leo carried the pilgrim’s cross during the Jubilee of the Holy See, leading a procession into St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Vatican also announced on Tuesday that Franciscan Father Francesco Patton, who served as Custos of the Holy Land until last year, will have the responsibility of writing the meditations for the Via Crucis this year. The offer to Father Patton to write the meditations appears to be a gesture towards elevating the suffering of Christians and others in the Middle East after years of conflict that escalated dramatically after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023.
“Being Christians in the Holy Land — but in all parts of the world where Christians are few and/or persecuted — is a vocation and a mission,” Father Patton told Vatican News. “We are called to show the merciful face of God who welcomes every person without distinction of gender, nationality, or religion; and we are called — even in this way — to reveal the filial dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God that every person has, even those belonging to another people, even those who have erred, even those who have harmed me.”
Father Patton also stated that the reflections he will offer “do not want to trigger judgment on individual persons, but invite reflection, asking questions and — if necessary — even to change.”
Pope Leo has focused much of the Church’s attention on the persecuted Christians and war-torn populations of the Middle East in his first year at the helm of the Catholic Church. He made his first official international tour since becoming pontiff to Turkey and Lebanon, the first a stop to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and the second a visit to lead prayer services and meet with the victims, many of them Christian, of the ongoing war between Hezbollah and Israel. As part of his visit to Lebanon, the pope presided over an historic Mass at the site of the 2020 Beirut explosion, attended by 150,000 people. More recently, Pope Leo welcomed the highest-ranking Catholic authority in Iran, Archbishop of Tehran-Isfahan Cardinal Dominique Mathieu, to the Vatican in the midst of the ongoing conflict between that country and America and Israel.
“Precisely as the Church contemplates the mystery of the Lord’s Passion, we cannot forget those who today truly share in His suffering,” the pope advised during his Palm Sunday Mass this week. “At the beginning of Holy Week, we are closer than ever in prayer to the Christians of the Middle East, who suffer the consequences of a terrible conflict and in many cases cannot fully live the rites of these holy days.”
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