In a series of hard-hitting spiritual meditations in front of Pope Francis and the City of Rome, an Italian nun said that Christ continues to be crucified in the migrants left to drown at sea, women sold into sexual slavery and children who are abused.
Sister Eugenia Bonetti, 80, who works with trafficked women and those seeking to leave Italy’s prostitution industry, was commissioned by the Pope to deliver this year’s Stations of the Cross reflections at the Colosseum.
She did not disappoint. Peppering her meditations with stories of women struggling on the streets, Sister Eugenia lambasted governments for their indifference to refugees, and accused Christian men of using young girls for sex.
"Lord, we ask you to have mercy and compassion on this sick world," Sr Eugenia prayed.
The fourteen stations of the cross are a spiritual exercise which follow each step of Christ’s journey towards his crucifixion. Each year the Pope takes part in the meditation at Rome’s Colosseum, with families, religious sisters and priests from across the world carrying the cross from station to station around the ancient Roman site.
“The desert and the seas have become the new cemeteries of our world,” Sr Eugenia wrote at the fourteenth station, where Jesus is laid in the tomb. “While governments, closed off in their palaces of power, debate, the Sahara is filled with the bones of men and women who could not survive exhaustion, hunger and thirst. How much pain is involved in these new exoduses!”
She reflected on the 26 Nigerian women who had drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2017, asking if anyone still bothered to remember them, and that only five of them were identified. She talked about a nine-month old baby from Nigeria, Favour, whose parents had left their home country for a better future but ended up relying on “unscrupulous traffickers” and drowning.
“Only Favour survived; like Moses, she was saved from the waters. May her life become a light of hope on the path towards a more fraternal humanity.”
The Pope sat on a raised platform overlooking the ancient amphitheatre which was used in ancient Rome as a place to entertain the crowds with gladiatorial contests. It was also the place where a number of Christians in the early church were tortured and killed.
“It is easy to wear a crucifix on a chain around our neck or to use it to decorate the walls of our beautiful cathedrals or homes,” Sr Eugenia wrote for the second station when Jesus takes up his cross.
“It is less easy to encounter and acknowledge today’s newly crucified: the homeless; the young deprived of hope, without work and without prospects; the immigrants relegated to slums at the fringe of our societies after having endured untold suffering.
Sister Eugenia said that “the poor, the foreigner, the other, must not be seen as an enemy to be rejected and resisted” but instead as brothers and sisters to be welcomed.
“They are not a problem, but a precious resource for our fortified citadels, where prosperity and consumption fail to alleviate our growing weariness and fatigue,” her meditations for the eighth station explained.
“Money, comfort, power,” Sister Eugenio wrote, were the idols of our age, meaning that everything and everyone can be bought and sold. This included children who are then “stripped of their dignity and hope for the future.”
She pointed to all those children who are “exploited in mines, fields and fisheries, bought and sold by human traffickers for organ harvesting and are used and abused on our streets by many” including “Christians, who have lost the sense of their own and others’ sacredness.”
At the Sixth station, where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, Sr Eugenia recalled “a young girl with a slim body we met one evening in Rome while men in luxury cars lined up to exploit her.” She added that the girl “might been the age of their own children.”
Sister Eugenia criticised the hypocrisy of a society which proclaims “equal rights and dignity for all human beings” yet in practise is happy to allow some women, men and children to be sold into slavery.
“Men, women and children are bought and sold like slaves by the new traders in human lives,” she wrote as the crowd reflected on Jesus being nailed to the cross.
“How many people are growing rich by devouring the flesh and blood of the poor?”
At the end of the meditations the Pope offered his own prayer where he identified the various ways there was suffering in the contemporary world.
“The cross of lonely people abandoned even by their own children and relatives
The cross of people thirsting for justice and peace
The cross of people who do not have the comfort of faith;
The cross of the elderly…under the weight of years and loneliness
The cross of the little ones, wounded in their innocence and in their purity
The cross of the migrants who find the doors closed due to fear and hearts locked in by politicians’ calculations
The cross of humanity that wanders in the darkness of uncertainty and in the darkness of a fleeting culture
The cross of families broken by treachery, by the seductions of the evil one or by murderous lightness and selfishness.
The cross of the consecrated who tirelessly seek to bring Your light into the world and feel rejected, mocked and humiliated.
The cross of the consecrated who, along the way, have forgotten their first love.
The cross of your children who, believing in you and trying to live according to your word, find themselves marginalised and even discarded by their relatives and their peers.
The cross of our weaknesses, of our hypocrisies, of our betrayals, of our sins and of our numerous broken promises.
The cross of your Church that, faithful to your Gospel, struggles to bring Your love even among the baptised.
The cross of the Church, your bride, who feels herself continually attacked from inside and outside.
The cross of our common home that seriously withers under our eyes selfish and blinded by greed and power.
Lord Jesus, revive in us the hope of the resurrection and your definitive victory against every evil and every death.”
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