Special Stations of the Cross to take place in Milford this Lent

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Stations of the Cross can be found in most Catholic churches; this one depicting the eighth station is at St. Peter Catholic Church in American Fork.

MILFORD — This Lent, the Catholic communities of southwestern Utah will be able to celebrate the Stations of the Cross in a special way.

Father Marco Tulio Lopez, pastor of St. Bridget Parish in Milford and its associated missions, Holy Family in Fillmore, Our Lady of the Light in Beaver and St. John Bosco in Delta, this year decided to write special prayers for the Lenten devotion.

“These Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis in Spanish) for my four communities is because I hope that during Lent we can go deeper into the mysteries of the Passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from a theological and pastoral perspective,” said Fr. Lopez, adding that he expects that this will generate a better response to the social and ecclesiastic realities of the Church.

He based the narration for each Station in Scripture, Church tradition and the teachings of the Church, he said, and also included a brief theological reflection.

This Lent, Fr. Lopez is asking his parishioners to attend the Stations of the Cross with more devotion, “but not disengaging from their daily lives; I mean contemplating the mysteries of our salvation so we can find the light of hope that guides us in our reality.”

For that, Fr. Lopez recalled a passage from Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation  Evangelii Gaudium: “Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others.” (n. 89)

Today’s world is unstable, as it has been since the beginning, Fr. Lopez said, but “we as Christians need to analyze ‘In this way, the personal God of the Bible appeared to him: a God who is able to speak to us, to come down to dwell in our midst and to accompany our journey through history, making himself known in the time of hearing and response’” (Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei n. 33)

As children of God, every man and woman of faith “has, in the midst of all the adversities of today’s world, to keep their eyes on Jesus, acknowledging him as the image of an invisible God, because as Pope Benedict XVI said in the inaugural session of the fifth general conference of the Bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean, ‘Hence the unique and irreplaceable importance of Christ for us, for humanity. If we do not know God in and with Christ, all of reality is transformed into an indecipherable enigma; there is no way, and without a way, there is neither life nor truth,’” Fr. Lopez said.

It is his hope that all the parishioners who wish to follow his Stations of the Cross will do so, and that it “helps them in their meditation of the mysteries of our salvation,” Fr. Lopez said.

The Stations of Cross the will take place every Friday during Lent; contact Fr. Lopez at St. Bridget Parish for information, 435-387-2732.