Cardinal Ratzinger’s meditations for the Stations of the Cross this year are excellent and very thought provoking. He is just one example:
The tradition that Jesus fell three times beneath the weight of the Cross evokes the fall of Adam – the state of fallen humanity – and the mystery of Jesus’ own sharing in our fall. Throughout history the fall of man constantly takes on new forms. In his First Letter, Saint John speaks of a threefold fall: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes and the pride of life. He thus interprets the fall of man and humanity against the backdrop of the vices of his own time, with all its excesses and perversions. But we can also think, in more recent times, of how a Christianity which has grown weary of faith has abandoned the Lord: the great ideologies, and the banal existence of those who, no longer believing in anything, simply drift through life, have built a new and worse paganism, which in its attempt to do away with God once and for all, have ended up doing away with man. And so man lies fallen in the dust. The Lord bears this burden and falls, over and over again, in order to meet us. He gazes on us, he touches our hearts; he falls in order to raise us up.
A "new and worse paganism" nails much of modern society.
4 comments
Thanks, these do look wonderful and very thought provoking in light of the last week’s events. I’m going to have to print these out.
well, we bloggers three went to stations in our geographical parish last night, here in Edinburgh, only to find it was
The New Scripture Stations
we were not impressed. The actual devotion thing itself was okay, no sense fo style and naff words but fine, but it was rather cheeky to advertise it as the Stations of the Cross and not mention that it was somebody’s idea of stations.
Dear Curt Jester:
I would like to thank you for posting this, and particularly, for making the web connection to His Eminence, Cardinal Ratzinger’s Stations of the Cross and Meditations.
I have always found his Eminence’s writings to be illuminated in and with the light of Christ, and have found his thought to express that highest encomium of the late R. A. Rafferty: a complex genius and a simple saint. While I think it would be unlikely to happen, alas, I think he would be a worthy successor to His Holiness, John Paul the Great.
Here is another look at the stations of the cross.
http://www.spiritandlifeministries.com/bookstore.html