The traditional Via Crucis of Good Friday at the Colosseum, presided over by Pope Leo XIV on the evening of April 3, will be accompanied by meditations prepared by Br. Francesco Patton, OFM, former Custos of the Holy Land (2016-2025).
In several interviews given to the Vatican media and the Custody of the Holy Land, Br. Francesco says he received the request through the Secretary of State. The assignment, he explains, was also entrusted in conjunction with the eighth centenary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi.
The editorial work was born from listening to the Word and from the Franciscan tradition: as a basis, the evangelical texts, with a particular attention to the Gospel according to John, and some passages from the writings of St. Francis, selected to offer a spiritual reading of the stations.
The meditations, in the form of prayer, are intended to help believers walk in the footsteps of Jesus and, at the same time, to open a space of question and of hope even for those afar from the faith.
The look, however, does not remain abstract. The reflections are challenged by today’s reality and by concrete individuals marked by suffering: mothers who mourn their children, women injured by violence, victims of war and those who carry, often in silence, the burden of injustice. In this perspective, the Via Crucis also becomes an invitation to conversion, to the recognition of the dignity of every person and to the rejection of all violence carried out in the name of God.
Br. Francesco also recalls the experience of the Via Crucis that, every Friday, the friars of the Custody of the Holy Land guide along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem: a prayer lived in the midst of daily life, among the crowd and its contradictions, where you learn to follow Christ into a world that often does not understand. It is this concreteness, rooted in the Gospel, that the meditations also wish to deliver to the Church that gathers at the Colosseum.