The Via Crucis on Good Friday presided over by Pope Francis tonight on the Churchyard of St Peter’s Basilica and for the first time not in the Colosseum, broadcast worldwide, will be completely unpublished and what is learned will also present some news. The Pope, tonight from 9 pm, will preside over an unpublished Via Crucis due to the pandemic and will read the prayers at the end of each of the fourteen stations.
It will be the Chaplain of the prison in Padua, Don Marco Pozza, curator of the meditations, who will carry the cross in a deserted St Peter’s Square for the Coronavirus emergency and will pass it on to the various representatives who will take turns in the 14 stations. Particularly touching will be the long silence on the deserted square, lit by torches, when, at the twelfth station at the end of the reading: ‘And having said this, he expired‘ (Luke 23:46), the cross will light up and the Pope will kneel at his feet. At the foot of the fan, the crucifix of San Marcello, the crucifix of the miracle revered by the Roman faithful for the liberation from the plague.
The meditations this year were entrusted to the prison of Padua “Due Palazzì” with the supervision of the Chaplain Don Marco Pozza and the voluntary Tatiana Mario. Pope Francis, in a message to the prison house, thanked the detainees because their voice will not remain anonymous but it will be a little bit that of those in the world who are in that condition. In the meditations there is the testimony of the life imprisonment who found the ransom in prison, that of the parents of a daughter victim of femicide killed together with her friend of the heart by a man without mercy, but also the ten-year ‘via Crucis’ of a priest accused unjustly and finally acquitted. Fourteen people accepted Pope Francis’ invitation and meditated on the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
