Speakers read meditations as the group stopped 14 times to mark each of the “Stations of the Cross” starting with the first when Jesus was condemned to death by Pontius Pilate to the last when he was buried in a tomb. The meditations are written by different groups each year and this time they were penned by prisoners, including a murderer, from a jail in northern Italy. Prison guards, chaplains, and family members of both prisoners and victims were also involved in the composition of the texts.

“I committed an evil immensely greater than any of those that I had received,” stated the reflection written by the murderer. The meditation written by the parents of a murdered girl said: “Our condemnation to suffering will never end.”

Pope Francis has often brought attention to the problems of prisoners, including overcrowding, and more recently he has expressed concern that the coronavirus would spread unchecked in jails.“I became a grandfather in prison. I didn’t experience my daughter’s pregnancy. One day, I will tell my granddaughter the story of only the goodness I have found and not the evil I have done,” read another meditation.

The participants prayed before a wooden crucifix which is normally kept in a church in Rome and brought to the Vatican for the special service. According to tradition, a plague that hit Rome in 1522 began subsiding after the crucifix was taken around the streets of the Italian capital for 16 days in 1522.

Source and image: globalnews.ca