‘The True Cross of Every Day’: Archbishop Golka Walks Good Friday Way of the Cross Through Downtown Denver
- Guest Contributor
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Organized by Communion and Liberation, a Catholic movement started in Italy by Servant of God Luigi Giussani, the annual Stations of the Cross witnessed to Gospel hope in the heart of Denver.
By Matt Walker
The Denver City and County building bells tolled each quarter hour. Sirens came and went. Drivers laid on their horns.
The sights and sounds of the city were as they are on any weekday. Jerusalem two thousand years ago would have been described with different particulars, but with a very similar reality of marked hopelessness.
Even still, on this Good Friday in Denver, the sight of a crowd following a man carrying a large wooden cross was certainly out of the ordinary. Numbering more than 150, these families and single lay people, with priests and nuns in their midst, were also notable for their silence.
Denver's Way of the Cross, now in its fifteenth year, is organized, as it is in many other cities around the world, by the Communion and Liberation lay movement.
“The Way of the Cross happens in the heart of a city where millions of people carry their daily cross, most of the time dreadfully alone,” read the event booklet that participants carried. “This is the true cross of every day, the cross of a person abandoned only to himself in his innermost need for never-ending love, truth, beauty, and justice.”
Just a week after his installation, Denver’s new Archbishop James Golka joined the group for the Way of the Cross, walking alongside them not as a leader per se but as one experiencing it. In the shadow of the state Capitol, his brief remarks at the walk’s outset encouraged all participating to see this event as Servant of God Luigi Giussani did when the movement began their version of The Way of the Cross.
“What we are here to do is not first and foremost to follow a pattern of thought, but rather to enter into an event,” Giussani said at the time. “It is a form of memory, and like every form of memory, it gains all its importance from the seriousness with which the heart fixes its attention on the content of that memory itself.”
(Photos by Matt Walker/Denver Catholic)
The group walked to five different stations along the 1.25-mile path. A bracing wind cut into participants, especially as they stopped at each station to pray, sing and hear Gospel accounts and powerful reflections of Christ’s Passion.
“The route — between the secular power of the Capitol building and the City Hall, and the Gospels and the trial of Jesus — it's evocative," said Lorenzo Patelli, the movement’s local leader after the event. “We walk behind the cross, and we look at what Christ is doing today to us, to maybe get out a little bit about ourselves. It'd be so nice to listen to the choir, not with the wind. But it didn't happen that way, right? It was in the midst of the city, and it was chaos, and people were not understanding what was going on.”
The witness of the group was sometimes ignored, just as so many ignored Christ, unaware of the universe-shaking reality occurring in their midst. Other city dwellers stopped and quietly watched. Some even joined. One man in particular, standing on the steps without a clear purpose for the day, immediately entered the group as it passed in front of him. He asked for a copy of the handout with the text and responses, and prayerfully continued to the very end.
That end came at the statue of Pope St. John Paul II on the grounds of the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. The late pope was a strong supporter of the Communion and Liberation movement, who celebrated Mass and stayed at the Cathedral during World Youth Day 1993.
Culminating the walk there moved the faithful towards the hope of Christ’s Resurrection. The Archbishop read in the closing prayer: “His presence is our joy. His joy is our strength. It is the joy of a love that at the end will win.”
“It was a joy to walk with you today. I love seeing the kids here, you did great,” Archbishop Golka said before blessing the participants. He asked if the children would take a picture with him, truly closing the event with hope for both the proximate and distant future.
