Eleventh Station
Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross
V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.
R. Because by Thy holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.
For Thee, my Lord, impiety chose the worst of final torments. The worst, yes, because it is that which causes one to die slowly, that which produces the greatest sufferings, and that which, being reserved for the most abject criminals, was the most infamous. Everything was prepared by hell to make Thee suffer in body and soul. Does this immense hatred not have some lesson for me? Woe betide me—who never will understand it sufficiently—if I do not become holy.
Between Thee and the devil, between good and evil, between truth and error, there is a profound, irreconcilable, eternal hatred. Darkness hates the light, the children of darkness hate the children of light; the fight between the two sides will endure until the consummation of the ages, and there will never be peace between the race of the Woman and the race of the Serpent.
In order to understand the immeasurable extension and immensity of this hatred, it is necessary to contemplate all that it dared to do. There is the Son of God, transformed, in the words of Scripture, into a leper in whom nothing is sound; a being who writhes like a worm under the effect of the pain; detested, abandoned, nailed to a cross between two common thieves. The Son of God: what grandeur—infinite, unimaginable, absolute—is contained in those words! Behold, in spite of all, what hatred has dared to do against the Son of God!
The whole history of the world, the whole history of the Church is nothing but this inexorable struggle between those who are of God and those who are of the devil, between those who are of the Virgin and those who are of the Serpent. It is a struggle in which there are not merely mistakes of the intellect nor only weakness in the angelic and human hosts that follow Satan, but also malice—deliberate, culpable, sinful malice.
Behold that which needs to be said, commented on, remembered, emphasized, proclaimed, and once more remembered at the foot of the Cross. For we are such, and liberalism has disfigured us to such a point that we are always inclined to forget this truth absolutely inseparable from the contemplation of the Passion.
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Well did the Virgin of Virgins, the Mother of Sorrows, know this, she who participated in the Passion along with her Son. Well did the Virgin Apostle know this, he who at the foot of the Cross received Mary as his Mother, thus receiving the greatest legacy ever given a man to receive because there are certain truths which God has reserved for the pure and which He denies to the impure.
My Mother, in the moment in which even the good thief merited forgiveness, I ask that Jesus forgive me for all the blindness with which I have considered all the works of darkness being plotted around me.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory Be.
V. Have mercy on us, Lord.
R. Have mercy on us.
V. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
R. Amen.