Good Friday 2014 Way Of The Cross Live Stream: Watch Pope Francis Lead The Prayer At The Colosseum In Rome, Full Text In English Here
Watch a live stream of Pope Francis preside over the via crucis - the Way of the Cross - this Good Friday evening at the Colosseum in Rome. The event is scheduled to begin at 9:00 PM and to conclude at 10:45 PM, Rome Time.
Watch a live stream of Good Friday 2014 Way of the Cross prayer here:
The "Way of the Cross" is an annual event hosted by the Vatican since 1970 as part of the church's celebration of Holy Week, leading to the Easter Masses Saturday night and Sunday morning at St. Peter's Basilica and Square, according to the National Catholic Reporter. It follows the Stations of the Cross represented in Catholic churches around the world, symbolizing Jesus' journey to his crucifixion.
Pope Francis and thousands of pilgrims pray in the candlelit Colosseum and pause during each of the traditional 14 stations of the Cross.
The Pope will read out the text which was written by Archbishop Giancarlo Bregantini of Campobasso-Boiano in southern Italy, Scottish Catholic Observer reports.
During the Good Friday address, the Pope will speak about the "burden of all those wrongs which created the economic crisis and its grave social consequences: job insecurity, unemployment, dismissals, an economy that rules rather than serves, financial speculation, suicide among business owners, corruption and usury, the loss of local industry."
"Prisons today continue to be set apart, overlooked, rejected by society; marked by bureaucratic nightmares and justice delayed" the Pope is expected to say, the Scottish Catholic Observer reports. "Punishment is doubled by overcrowding: an aggravated penalty, an unjust affliction, one which consumes flesh and bone. Some-too many!-do not survive... And when one of our brothers and sisters is released, we still see them as 'ex-convicts,' and we bar before them the doors of social and economic redemption.
"More serious is the practice of torture, which tragically is still practiced in different ways throughout our world. As it was in the case of Jesus, beaten, reviled by the soldiers, tortured with a crown of thorns, cruelly flogged."
The meditations will ask Catholics to "weep for those men who vent on women all their pent-up violence" and will say that "to love to the very end is the supreme teaching which Jesus and Mary have left us."
