BY Daniel Harkins | April 15 | 
0 COMMENTS 
print
Papal Way of the Cross mediations on financial crises and social justice
The Holy Father’s Good Friday address, written by an archbishop who campaigns against the mafia, will examine the failures of our economic and justice systems
Pope Francis will reflect on the financial crisis, torture and problems with the justice system on Good Friday in his Way of the Cross meditations.
Thousands will gather at Rome’s Colosseum (above) to hear the Pope read out the text which was written by Archbishop Giancarlo Bregantini of Campobasso-Boiano in southern Italy. The archbishop has been a vocal critic of mafia activity in the country, a cause the Holy Father has championed himself, criticising mafia criminality last month during a meeting with victim’s relatives.
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.’
In a critique of society’s attitudes to criminals, the Holy Father will say that in Jesus we glimpse the bitter experience of those locked in prisons.
“Prisons today continue to be set apart, overlooked, rejected by society; marked by bureaucratic nightmares and justice delayed” the Pope is expected to say. “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 us 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.’
—The full text of Pope Francis’ Way of the Cross meditations can be found at http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/2014/documents/ns_lit_doc_20140418_via-crucis_en.html
RSS Feeds