Classic texts for the Way of the Cross

Stations of the Cross: Community Prayer Edition offers parishes and other communities a unique and contemporary way to pray the Stations. It includes new prayers composed by Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, along with excerpts from his full-length meditations and the remarkable images that accompanied them in the original edition of Stations of the Cross. This profound and beautiful resource will guide the faithful to enter more deeply into communion with the crucified Jesus. It is ideal for parishes, parish-based organizations, prayer groups, youth groups, school and campus ministry programs, families, and individual faithful to experience.

One of today’s most popular and respected Catholic writers presents the first guide to the new Stations of the Cross, reflecting the revisions made by Pope John Paul II. A traditional devotion for Catholics for more than four hundred years, the Stations of the Cross commemorates the route Jesus traveled from being sentenced to death, crucified, and then buried in a borrowed tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In the past, the devotion included a number of stations based on popular stories of piety and devotion, but not mentioned in the Gospels. Over the past eight years, however, Pope John Paul II has made substantial changes to the devotion in his Good Friday celebrations of the stations, removing those not found in the Bible and replacing them with stations that more accurately follow scriptural accounts of Christ’s passion. The revised Stations of the Cross focuses on the condemned Jesus and on the community walking the way with him to the cross. Unrelieved by stories like Veronica’s wiping blood off the face of Jesus and his meeting with his mother; this is a story of an execution. The new stations deal directly with the pain, suffering, betrayal, and injustice to which Jesus was subjected. In explaining his reasons for revising the stations, the Pope has said that the alterations are intended to serve as a model for other devotions and to encourage the return to the Scriptures as the source of and inspiration for contemporary worship. In this helpful, authoritative guide, Megan McKenna presents the fourteen new stations with the scriptural passages that Pope John Paul II uses on Good Friday. She also provides a basic introduction to the practices and reflections on the importance of the devotion for present-day Catholics and Episcopalians.

The Stations of the Cross is a traditional way of exploring the Easter story, telling of the last walk that Jesus took to the cross and the people whom he encountered on the way. The walk is re-enacted each Friday in Jerusalem, and in churches worldwide, especially on Good Friday.

The Stations of the Cross in Atonement for Abuse and for the Healing of All invites a wounded church to contemplate the passion and death of Jesus through the experience of clerical abuse survivors. This one-of-a-kind resource is written and illustrated by priests to foster healing amidst the destruction committed by their brothers. Award-winning author and acclaimed liturgist Paul Turner pairs each of the fourteen Scripture-based stations with powerful quotes from survivors of clerical sexual abuse and responds to each with profound confessional prayer. Thought-provoking paintings by author and liturgist Ronald Patrick Raab, CSC, accompany each station. This resource will be cherished by parishes, faith-based organizations, retreat centers, prayer groups, youth groups, school and campus ministry programs, families, and individuals who yearn to honor survivors suffering with Christ and who yearn to bring this too often ignored reality to lived prayer experiences.

“My Lord and my God, under the loving eyes of our Mother, we are making ready to accompany you along this path of sorrow, which was the price for our redemption.” Praying the Stations of the Cross with St. Josemaria Escriva is an invitation and guide to praying and contemplating the traditional fourteen stations following the way of Jesus Christ’s passion and death. Like the original, this adaptation of St. Josemaria’s beloved devotion, The Way of Cross, seeks to help people to pray and, with God’s grace, to grow in a spirit of reparation and of gratitude to Our Lord, who has rescued us at the cost of his blood. St. Josemaria’s scriptural commentaries, fruit of his personal prayer, help us to enter into and become one more in each scene, so that as we strive to accompany Jesus more intimately and lovingly, we come to understand the redemptive meaning of his suffering and our own. *Includes Audio

This perennially popular meditation booklet combines imaginative, full-page photos with a dialogue between Christ and the reader, urging us to carry on Christ's unfinished business and unite our human will with the divine will. Each mediation is an authentic application of Jesus' suffering to our personal lives. Ideal for either private devotion of public Stations of the Cross, for adult parish Lenten programs, and high school use.

In 1991, Pope John Paul II introduced a new Bible-based interpretation of the Stations of the Cross. This devotional guide to invite readers to prayerfully walk in solidarity with Jesus on his agonizing way of the cross-- from his last torturous moments in the Garden of Gethsemane to his death and burial. Now with full-color station images from previously unpublished paintings by Michael OBrien, this booklet creates an ideal resource for individual or group devotional use, particularly during the Lenten season.

Walking the Stations of the Cross, the Christian faithful re-create the Passion, following the sorrowful path of Jesus Christ from condemnation to crucifixion. While this devotion, now so popular in the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, first emerged in Jerusalem and began spreading through Western Europe in the fourteenth century, it did not assume its current form, and earn the Church's formal recognition, until almost three centuries later. It was at this time, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, that a Franciscan friar in colonial Mexico translated a devotional guide to the Stations of the Cross into the native Nahuatl. This little handbook, Fray Agustin de Vetancurt's Via crucis en mexicano, proved immensely popular, going through two editions, but survives today only in a copy made by a native scribe from Central Mexico. Reproduced here in Nahuatl and English, Vetancurt's handbook offers unique insight into the history, the practice, and the meaning of the Stations of the Cross in the New World and the Old. With the Via crucis en mexicano as a starting point, John F. Schwaller explores the history of the development and spread of the Stations of the Cross, placing the devotion in the context of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, the two trends that exalted this type of religious expression. He describes how the devotion, exported to New Spain in the sixteenth century, was embraced by Spanish and natives alike. For the native Americans, Schwaller suggests, the Via crucis resonated because of its performative aspects, reminiscent of rituals and observances from before the arrival of the Spanish. And for missionaries, the devotion offered a means of deepening the faith of the newly converted. In Schwaller's deft analysis--which extends from the origins of the devotion, to the processions and public rituals of the Mexica (Aztecs), to the text and illustrations of the Vetancurt manuscript--the Via crucis en mexicano opens a window on the practice and significance of the Stations of the Cross--and of private devotions generally--in Mexico, Hispanic America, and around the world.