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These are some passages from the texts written this year for Way of the Cross from the Pope by prisoners and volunteers from the “Due Palazzi” prison in Padua. After the prayer for the end of the pandemic two weeks ago, St. Peter’s Square is still deserted in the presence of Francisco. For the first time since 1964, the function does not take place in the Colosseum. The restrictions brought about by the coronavirus imply that the rites take place without popular competition.
In reproduction ….
The Way of the Cross is led by two groups of five people each: one from the Venetian prison and another from the Vatican’s Health and Hygiene Directorate. Even the Holy See has its little hospital: “I think of the crucified Lord and the many stories of the crucifixes of this pandemic, doctors, nurses, nurses, nuns and priests who died on the front lines as soldiers,” says Francesco not by chance. afternoon. surprisingly calling the special for Good Friday “A sua Immagine” by Rai Uno directed by Lorena Bianchetti. “I will be close to the pain of the world looking towards hope – the Pope continued -. Hope does not take away pain, but it does not disappoint.”
The way of the Via Crucis begins near the obelisk, the deserted square, the silence of a star-filled sky, many torches on the ground to indicate the way. Francesco watches from the cemetery, at the top of the staircase called “fan”. Once again he is alone, just below the crucifix of San Marcello looking towards him. The twelfth station is in the Crucifix. The thirteenth is in the middle of the fan, while the last one is on the platform, where the Pope waits.
Francis reads the prayers between one station and another: “Lord, do not leave us in the darkness and shadow of death, protect us with the shield of his power.” And again: “God, defender of the poor and afflicted, help us to bring the yoke every day.”
The person commenting at station I is a lifer. Crucifying him “is a cry I also heard about me,” he writes. His crucifixion began when he was a child, an outcast child, now he is said to be more like Barabbas than Christ. His past is something he feels creepy about. “After twenty-nine years in prison, he says, I still haven’t lost the ability to cry, to be ashamed of the wrong thing, but I’ve always looked for something other than life.” Today “I feel in my heart that that innocent man, condemned like me, came looking for me in prison to educate me about life.”
In station II I am writing two parents who killed a daughter. “Ours has been a life of sacrifice, based on work and family. We often ask ourselves: why exactly this evil that has overwhelmed us? We find no peace “Surviving the death of a child is unbearable, but” when despair seems to take over, the Lord, in different ways, comes to meet us, giving us the grace to love each other as spouses, supporting each other. another with difficulty. “They continue to do good to others, and find in this a form of salvation, they do not want to surrender to evil. They experience that” the love of God is capable of regenerating life. “
In station III a person in prison he says his first fall was his end. After a difficult life in which he had not realized that evil was growing within him, he took a person’s life. “One afternoon, in an instant, like an avalanche, he writes, the memories of all the injustices suffered in life untied me. Anger killed kindness, I committed an immensely greater evil than all I had received.” In prison he approaches suicide, but then finds the light again, through meeting with people who give him back the “lost confidence”, showing him that goodness also exists in the world.
It remains a convicted to comment on the fifth station. The cross to carry is heavy, he says, but “everyone knows him inside the Cyrene prisons: it is the middle name of the volunteers, of those who go up to this test to help carry a cross.” Another Simone di Cirene is also her cellmate, capable of unexpected generosity. He concludes: “I am growing old in prison: I dream of trusting the man again someday. Becoming a Cyrenean of joy for someone.”
“How catechist I wipe away many tears, letting them flow: you cannot contain your broken heart. “These are the words of a catechist who reflects on the sixth station. How to calm the anguish of men” who cannot find a way out. converted yielding to evil “? The only way is to stay there, next to them, without feeling fear,” respecting their silences, listening to pain, trying to look beyond prejudice. “How does Jesus do with our weaknesses. And he writes : “Everyone, including prisoners, is offered the possibility of becoming new people every day thanks to that gaze that does not judge, but gives life and hope.”
At station VII a convictedGuilty of drug trafficking, who dragged his entire family with him in prison, he feels infinitely ashamed of himself. He writes: “Only today I can admit it: in those years I did not know what I was doing. Now that I know, with the help of God, I am trying to rebuild my life.” The idea that evil continues to dominate his life is unbearable, and this has become his way of the cross. Prayer to the Lord is “for all those who have not yet been able to escape the power of Satan, all the charm of his works and his thousand forms of seduction”.
“For twenty-eight years I have been serving the penalty of growing up without a father”, is the experience of a daughter lifer to comment on the VIII station. Everything in her family has been destroyed, she travels to Italy to follow her father from time to time in a different prison and taking the sums out of her life, she continues: “there are parents who, out of love, learn to wait for children They mature. For love, I await Dad’s return. For those like us, hope is an obligation. “
Falling and rising again is the testimony of a prisoner that is seen in what is contemplated in station IX. “Like Pietro, I have searched and found a thousand excuses for my mistakes: the strange fact is that a fragment of good has always remained burning within me,” he writes. And he concludes: “It is true that I went to a thousand pieces, but the good thing is that those pieces can still be put together again. It is not easy: however, it is the only thing that still has to mean here.”
As in the tenth station, “Jesus stripped of his garments” is remembered educator He sees many inside the prison also stripped of dignity and respect for himself and for others. They are men and women “exasperated in their fragility, often deprived of what is necessary to understand the wrong done. However, they sometimes resemble newborn children who can still be molded.” But it is not easy to carry out this commitment. “In this delicate service, he writes, we need not to feel abandoned, to be able to bear the many existences that are entrusted to us and that run the risk of sinking every day.”
In the eleventh station of the Via Crucis, meditation is a priest accused and then acquitted. His personal way of the cross lasted 10 years, “full of folders, suspicions, accusations, insults.” As the test mounted, he says, he encountered many Cyrenens who bore the weight of the cross with him. Together they prayed for the boy who accused him. “The day I was acquitted with the full formula, he writes, I discovered that I was happier than ten years ago: I touched God’s action in my life with my hand. Hanging from the cross, my priesthood was illuminated.”
It is from a surveillance magistrate, the text that comments on the XII station. “True justice, he says, is possible only through mercy that does not nail man to the cross forever.” It is necessary to help him get up again, discovering that good that in spite of everything “never goes out completely in his heart”. But it can only be done by learning “to recognize the person hidden behind the guilt committed”, so that he can “glimpse a horizon that can instill hope in condemned people.” The prayer to the Lord is for “the magistrates, the judges and the lawyers, so that they remain just in the exercise of their service” in favor of all the poorest.
In station 13 the meditation is for a friar who for sixty years has been a volunteer in prisons. “Christians, he says, often fall into the flattery of feeling better than others … As I move from one cell to another I see the death that lives within it.” Your task is to stop in silence before the many “faces devastated by evil and listen to them with mercy.” To welcome the person is to move the mistake he has made from his eyes. “Only then can you trust and regain the strength to surrender to the Good, imagining yourself different from what you see now.”
This is the mission of the Church. “Jesus is buried” is the last station, the XIV: the words of a prison police officer, a permanent deacon, concludes the Way of the Cross. In his job, he touches suffering every day and knows that in prison “a good man can become a sadistic man. An evil man could improve.” It also depends on him. And giving another chance to those who favored evil has become their daily commitment that translates into “gestures, attentions and words capable of making a difference.” Able to restore hope to people who are resigned and scared at the idea of receiving, after serving their sentence, a new rejection of society. “In prison, he concludes, I remind you that, with God, no sin will have the last word.”
