Nun’s Stations of the Cross reflections at Colosseum

In a series of spiritual meditations in front of Pope Francis and the City of Rome, an Italian nun on Good Friday 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, writes Christopher Lamb. 

Sr 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. 

Peppering her meditations with stories of women struggling on the streets, Sr Eugenia lambasted governments for their indifference to refugees. “Lord, we ask you to have mercy and compassion on this sick world,” Sr Eugenia prayed. 

The 14 Stations of the Cross are a spiritual exercise following 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 14th station, where Jesus is laid in the tomb. “While governments debate, closed off in their palaces of power, the Sahara is filled with the bones of men and women who could not survive exhaustion, hunger and thirst.” She reflected on the 26 Nigerian women who had drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2017, asking if anyone bothered to remember them, noting that only five 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 amphitheatre where Christians in the early Church were tortured and killed. “It is easy to wear a crucifix on a chain around our neck,” 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.”