GruntGod 2.10.3: Stations of the Cross
(Re)introducing An Exilic Invention
This is drawn from the revision of the Francis chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
Pilgrims have marked significant points along Jerusalem's Via Dolorosa, the "road of suffering" Joshua+ walked to his crucifixion, since at least the fourth century. But the station count was never fixed. Across seven centuries of practice it ranged from as few as seven stops to as many as thirty, depending on local custom, and several of the most popular stations aren't in the Bible at all: three falls, Veronica wiping Jesus' face, Mary receiving his body. Only three stations survive in every version across every century: Christ taking up his cross (John 19:17), being nailed to it (John 20:25), and dying on it (Matt. 27:50; Mark 15:37; Luke 23:46; John 19:30). In 1991, Pope John Paul II tried to correct centuries of drift by introducing a "Scriptural Way of the Cross" restricted to Gospel-attested moments. It's telling that it took nearly two thousand years for anyone to try.
The Franciscans didn't invent the standardized stations out of confidence. They invented them out of exile. The order had been entrusted with custody of the Holy Land's Christian sites because of Francis's own friendly (if unsuccessful) audience with the Sultan at Damietta. That custody held until the 1290s, when hostile forces pushed them out for roughly fifty years. They couldn't put sandals on the ground in Jerusalem. So they adapted to overcome; reconstructing the pilgrimage inside their own churches using paintings and statuary, marking the same significant points without the geography to back it up. The Stations, as we know them, are what a displaced religious order built when the actual pilgrimage became physically impossible.
The Franciscans returned to Jerusalem in 1347, but the in-church version they'd improvised during exile didn't disappear, it spread. In 1686, Pope Innocent IX approved a Franciscan request to install stations in churches worldwide, with a letter specifying that praying the stations carried the same spiritual benefit as physically visiting the sites. By 1731, the Vatican extended that benefit to every Catholic church, not just Franciscan ones. Something built as an emergency substitute during a fifty-year exile became, within four centuries, the standard form of Christian pilgrimage practice everywhere. Most Catholics who pray the stations today have no idea the ritual exists because a religious order got kicked out of the place it was supposed to be.
I don't think that's a coincidence worth glossing over, and it's part of why I think this material belongs somewhere even if it didn't survive the GruntGod chapter cut. Constraint produced the innovation. The friars didn't have the option of the "real" pilgrimage anymore, so they built a version that worked without it — and that version turned out to be more durable and more portable than the original. There's something there worth sitting with if you've ever had to build a version of faithfulness that worked without the deployment, the unit, the mission you didn't get to finish. Exile built the stations. It might build something in you too.
