He lifted it at the first station and didn’t set it down until the fourteenth. Inside the torch-lit Colosseum, flanked by two torchbearers, Pope Leo XIV carried a wooden cross through the full Way of the Cross on Good Friday — something no pontiff has done in decades.

John Paul II managed the complete procession from 1979 until hip surgery in 1995 forced him to stop. Benedict XVI, then 78, carried the cross only to the first station before following the rest of the route unburdened. Francis never carried it at all. Illness eventually kept him from even attending. He died last Easter Monday.

Leo, 70, is built differently. An avid tennis player and swimmer who, before his election, kept to a gym regimen his former trainer described as more fitting for a man in his early fifties, according to the Associated Press. On Friday evening, he made the physical statement unmistakable: up steep stairs from the Colosseum floor, through roughly 30,000 faithful packed onto surrounding cobblestone streets, all the way to the Palatine Hill for the final blessing.

The Colosseum — a pagan monument built for spectacle and death — provided its own backdrop of empire and suffering. The meditations this year, written by Rev. Francesco Patton, the former custodian of the Holy Land, were pointed: “…the power to start or end a war; the power to instill violence or peace,” read the first station’s text, a reminder that those in authority will answer to God.

Prayers also turned to war orphans, refugees, trafficking victims, and children “deported by policies devoid of compassion” — words that landed without naming names but carried unmistakable weight from the first American pope, who has publicly questioned whether hardline immigration policies align with Catholic teaching, according to Reuters.

One hour. Fourteen stations. A cross carried the whole way.

Sources