The Way of the Cross — fourteen stations retracing Christ's path to Calvary. Grown from the pilgrimage to the holy places at Jerusalem into a devotion of the whole Latin Church, its stations fixed at fourteen and its indulgences extended to every church by the eighteenth century.
The fourteen Stations: I. Christ is condemned to death. II. The cross is laid upon him. III. His first fall. IV. He meets His Blessed Mother. V. Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross. VI. Christ's face is wiped by Veronica. VII. His second fall. VIII. He meets the women of Jerusalem. IX. His third fall. X. He is stripped of His garments. XI. His crucifixion. XII. His death on the cross. XIII. His body is taken down from the cross. XIV. And laid in the tomb.
The dated sources the library holds, oldest first — in their own words.
The devotion is rooted in the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where the faithful reverently retraced the path Christ walked to Calvary — the way later called the Via Dolorosa (a name not used before the sixteenth century).
Custody of the holy places at Jerusalem is entrusted to the Franciscans, who become the great promoters of the devotion and to whom its later indulgences are chiefly traced.
An English pilgrim, William Wey, visits the Holy Land in 1458 (and again in 1462) and leaves one of the earliest descriptions of following the footsteps of Christ from station to station.
After Benedict XIII extended the indulgences to all the faithful in 1726, Clement XII in 1731 permitted the indulgenced Stations to be erected in all churches — by then the number was settled at fourteen.
“It cannot be said with any certainty when such indulgences began to be granted, but most probably they may be due to the Franciscans, to whom in 1342 the guardianship of the holy places was entrusted.”