Pastor’s Letter: March 23, 2025

Pastor’s Letter: March 23, 2025

21 Mar 2025 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear St. Philomena Family,

How is Lent going? It has been another full week here—I continue to be amazed at how many good people and how many good activities we have going on here. Our Chess and Speech Teams just wrapped up great seasons…by the time you are reading this we’ll be into our Musical weekend…it is really joyful and inspiring to see our young people learning and growing in so many different areas!

This past week, someone stopped me and asked why we pray the Stations of the Cross during Lent? Great question! According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Stations of the Cross could also be called Via Crucis or Via Dolorosa. “These names are used to signify either a series of pictures or tableaux representing certain scenes in the Passion of Christ, each corresponding to a particular incident, or the special form of devotion connected with such representations… The erection and use of the Stations did not become at all general before the end of the seventeenth century, but they are now to be found in almost every church” (newadvent.org/cathen/15569a.htm).

The Catholic Encyclopedia teaches that the number of stations was different in different places (as many as 37 in some places, including marking of seven different falls of Jesus in some versions), but the Church has settled on the fourteen most of us are familiar with:

1. Christ condemned to death
2. The cross is laid upon him
3. His first fall
4. He meets His Blessed Mother
5. Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross
6. Christ’s face is wiped by Veronica
7. His second fall
8. He meets the women of Jerusalem
9. His third fall
10. He is stripped of His garments
11. His crucifixion
12. His death on the cross
13. His body is taken down from the cross
14. His body is laid in the tomb

“The object of the Stations is to help the faithful to make in spirit, as it were, a pilgrimage to the chief scenes of Christ’s sufferings and death, and this has become one of the most popular of Catholic devotions. It is carried out by passing from Station to Station, with certain prayers at each and devout meditation on the various incidents in turn. It is very usual, when the devotion is performed publicly, to sing a stanza of the ‘Stabat Mater’ while passing from one Station to the next.”

As the general idea is to walk the steps of Christ along the way of the Passion (either physically or spiritually), it makes sense that the origins of the Stations go back to the Holy Land. “The Via Dolorosa at Jerusalem (though not called by that name before the sixteenth century) was reverently marked out from the earliest times and has been the goal of pious pilgrims ever since the days of Constantine…Tradition asserts that the Blessed Virgin used to visit daily the scenes of Christ’s Passion and St. Jerome speaks of the crowds of pilgrims from all countries who used to visit the holy places in his day.”

Without a doubt, the Stations of the Cross can be a great way to connect with the saving sacrifice of Jesus…whether during Lent or any day throughout the year. Since the Stations work well as an individual prayer or for a group praying together, there is a great variety in how the meditations can be made. Would you believe there is even an exercise routine called the “Stations of the Cross Workout”?  It is put together by the organization “SportsLeader” and combines exercises and prayers that correspond with each of the stations. If you want to check out more on this, Fr Chase did a Youtube video of the workout a few years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkqKxNgSGh8

So, if you are wanting to connect more deeply with the love Jesus has for us…if you want to answer our Lord’s challenge to “take up our cross and follow” (Matthew 10:38; Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; Luke 14:27)…if you are looking for an interesting way to combine prayer and exercise…whether in Lent or any time throughout the year…the Stations of the Cross has it all!

Know of my prayers and blessing for this week!

In Christ,

Father Luke