In St. Peter's Square the rite of the Via Crucis presided over, on the occasion of Good Friday, by Pope Francis on the churchyard of the Vatican Basilica and without the participation of the faithful, broadcast worldwide. The Via Crucis does not take place, like other years, at the Colosseum, due to the anti-Coronavirus containment provisions.
The texts of the meditations and prayers proposed this year for the stations of the Via Crucis were entrusted by Pope to the Chaplaincy of the "Due Palazzi" prison in Padua. The meditations were written by five people detained, by a family victim of a murder crime, by the daughter of a man sentenced to life imprisonment, by a prison educator, by a supervising magistrate, by a person's mother detained, by a catechist, by a voluntary friar, by an officer of the Penitentiary Police and by a priest accused and then definitively acquitted of justice, after eight years of ordinary trial.
In the 14 stations of the Via Crucis, Michele, an ex-prisoner of the "Due Palazzi" today "new man" and small entrepreneur, will be carried by the director of the Padua district house Claudio Mazzeo, the deputy commissioner of the Penitentiary Police Maria Grazia Grassi, an agent of the same police, the voluntary Tatiana Mario and the chaplain don Marco Pozza. After them, some doctors and nurses of the Vatican Health Care Fund, who in Italy are at the forefront of service to the patients affected by the virus: among them, Esmeralda Capristo, internist doctor of the Gemelli Polyclinic and researcher of Internal Medicine at the Catholic University , and Paolo Maurizio Soave, anesthetist resuscitator of the Policlinico Gemelli and contract professor of the Catholic University, Rome office. Both assist patients infected with Covid-19, admitted to Gemelli and Columbus Covid 2 Hospital. The route begins near the obelisk, goes around it for eight stations and then proceeds towards the "fan" for four stations. Under the "fan" there is the Crucifix of San Marcello, facing the Pope. Here is the twelfth station. The thirteenth station is in the middle of the "fan", while the last one is above the platform. The whole itinerary is marked by torches on the ground.