Chapter I: The Veneration of the Holy Places

It may be said of many, perhaps most, of our popular devotions that they are not so much spontaneous as imitative. They have been prized at first as the substitute for something better, because they seemed to bring within the reach of the many some practice of piety which had been hitherto regarded as the merit or the privilege of the few. To recite, for instance, the entire Psalter daily was the ambition of the early ascetics, but obviously the repetition of one hundred and fifty psalms was a feat beyond the capacity of men busied with the concerns of everyday life. It was only when the convention was devised of representing each psalm by a Hail Mary that the bulk of the faithful found that they could imitate the long vigils of the monks by reciting the fifteen decades of “Our Lady’s Psalter.” Again, a monastic habit was not a desirable or possible attire for ordinary Christians living in the world, but by an imitation of a portion of that habit, rapidly diminishing in size until hardly a suggestion remained of its former significance, secular persons found that they could wear the livery of the Order of their choice, not merely at the hour of death, as so many aspired to do, but even while going about their daily occupations. Or once more, when the Divine Office, the official prayer of the Church, was found to be too long and too difficult for any but clerics to recite, the Hours of our Lady, which were much shorter and practically invariable, formed a substitute which even the more ignorant of the laity need not despair of mastering.

The devotion commonly known to us as the Stations of the Cross has a very similar origin, and in its singular combination of old and new, of elements dating from the beginning of Christianity, with forms which have only become fixed during the last four centuries, it affords an almost typical example both of the gradual growth of practices of piety and of the working of the imitative tendency just alluded to. As the Rosary, then, was a miniature Psalter, as the scapular was a miniature monastic habit, and as the Hours of our Lady were a miniature Office, so the Stations of the Cross constituted a miniature pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Despite all the courage and fervour of the Christians in the later middle ages, the number of those who were actually able to make their way to Palestine was, relatively speaking, insignificant. It was a boon when men were taught how to join in a make-believe pilgrimage which did not take up an hour of time, and which stimulated their devotion to the bitter sufferings of CHRIST as much as, or even more than, a perilous journey over seas. Such, at any rate, is the very simple idea which has made the Stations dear to the heart of the poor in every part of the world. But in spite of its simplicity there have been many stages in the growth of this devotion, and these, so far as I am able to elucidate them, will form the subject of the pages which follow.

It is commonly said that the _Via Dolorosa_, the route of our SAVIOUR’S painful journey to Calvary, has from the earliest ages been reverently marked, and that already in the time of Constantine it was the goal of pious pilgrims from all parts of the world.[1] However probable this may seem antecedently, it must be confessed that no direct evidence is forthcoming in support of such a statement. If our Blessed Lady really did spend her last days upon earth in traversing again and again the scenes of the Passion of her Divine Son, no trustworthy record of the fact is at present known to survive. Only in the later middle ages do we meet the full details of the story of the Mother’s daily pilgrimage, and indeed it must be admitted both that the records of pilgrims of the first ten centuries are silent as to the existence of any traditional Way of Sorrows, and also that the first indications of it which we encounter are not easily reconcilable with the sites now venerated. On the other hand, antiquity speaks clearly as to the principle of paying honour to the holy places. There is sufficient reason to believe that the memory of the more important spots connected with the life of our Blessed LORD was accurately preserved in the fourth century. The Christians of Jerusalem were already a numerous body. They seem to have had no doubt about the accuracy of their identifications. The instinct of such traditions of locality was strong amongst them. It would appear, then, that only an extreme scepticism will question the fact that the spots where Constantine built his churches, the spots which Christians, like the Bordeaux pilgrim of A.D. 333, came from the ends of the earth to visit, were really the sites they claimed to be. On the one supremely important question of the identification of the holy Sepulchre and Calvary, it may be said fearlessly that, despite the attempts of sundry English and American Protestants to find a Calvary of their own in another quarter, the evidence of archæology and excavation is altogether on the side of the old tradition. The narrative of the Lady Egeria’s Pilgrimage, _c._ 380, discovered within the last few years,[2] has also come to reinforce what we already knew from St Jerome, the Bordeaux pilgrim, Eusebius, and others concerning the intense feelings of veneration which the residents of Jerusalem felt for the holy places (a very limited number) pointed out by local tradition.[3] There is no reason to fear, in the case of such Christians as she describes for us, that their imagination was stimulated to new flights by a keen anticipation of baksheesh.

We have just said that in point of fact the sites which were pointed out in Jerusalem in the time of the Bordeaux pilgrim, of St Jerome or of Egeria, seem to have been few. This may be due to some extent to the fact that the most detailed account of the city, that of Egeria, is imperfect. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that this lady of Galicia was keen to make mention even of spots of minor interest when they were pointed out to her. A short quotation in her own words will probably illustrate better than any verbal description the spirit in which Egeria, and no doubt most of her contemporaries, approached such questions. She had travelled more than a thousand miles to visit the holy places, and landing first in Egypt had skirted the northern shore of the Red Sea taking in Mount Sinai on her way. Now these are the terms in which she speaks of the sites shown her by the monks on Mount Sinai in their own immediate neighbourhood.

“Having satisfied every desire with which we had made haste to ascend, we began now to descend from the summit of the Mount of GOD to another mountain which is joined to it. The place is called Horeb, and we found a church there. This is that Horeb to which the holy Prophet Elijah withdrew when he fled from the face of King Ahab, and where GOD spake to him saying, ‘What dost thou here, Elijah?’ as it is written in the Book of Kings. For the cave where holy Elijah hid is shown to this day before the door of the church which is there; the stone altar is also shown which holy Elijah built that he might offer sacrifice to GOD. All which things the holy men deigned to show us. There we offered an oblation and an earnest prayer, and the passage from the Book of Kings was read; for we always especially desired that when we come to any place the corresponding passage from the book should be read. There having made an oblation, we went on to another place not far off, which the priests and monks pointed out, namely, that place where holy Aaron had stood with the seventy elders when holy Moses received from the LORD the law for the children of Israel. There, although the place is not roofed in, is a huge rock having a circular flat surface, on which it is said these holy persons stood. And in the middle there is a sort of altar made with stones. The passage from the Book of Moses was read, and one psalm said, which was appropriate to the place; and then, having offered a prayer, we descended.”[4]

It need hardly be said that in studying the sites and the ceremonial of Jerusalem the Lady Egeria was not less earnest. She speaks of the Church of the Anastasis over the Holy Sepulchre, of the “Martyrium” close beside it on Calvary or Golgotha, of the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, of Gethsemani and the Grotto of the Agony, of the way across the brook of Cedron, of Mount Sion and the Column of the Flagellation which was erected there, but she says nothing of our _Via Dolorosa_, nor of the site of any episode for which there is not warrant in the Gospels.

Although the narrative of Egeria is the earliest detailed account which we possess of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there are a number of other records in succeeding centuries which allow us to see that the eagerness of the faithful to visit the holy places did not slacken, and which leave a tolerably complete picture of the shrines honoured in Jerusalem at each successive epoch in early Christian history. Almost from the very beginning there went hand in hand with this earnestness in making pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre a desire to reproduce at home in some imperfect way the venerated sites that had been visited. It is to this instinct probably that we owe both the ancient Church of the Anastasis (the Resurrection) at Constantinople, which by some confusion was later on associated with the cultus of the virgin martyr St Anastasia, as well as that of Sta Croce in Rome, together with the Church of Sta Maria Maggiore, or _Ad Præsepe_, which was meant in some sense to serve as the counterpart of Constantine’s basilica at Bethlehem. To develop this subject adequately would lead us too far afield, and it must suffice to say that the design of perpetuating the memory of the holy places may be traced even in the representations of ancient mosaics. One has of late years been found in Palestine itself, which may claim to be regarded as nothing less than a map of the province of Syria, including a plan of Jerusalem in the sixth century,[5] while Father Grisar identifies the background of the great mosaic in the apse of S. Pudenziana, assigned by de Rossi to the year 398, as an attempt to represent pictorially the chief buildings of the same Holy City.[6]

This spirit of imitation seems in some measure to have grown and developed with the lapse of ages. Perhaps one of the most interesting monuments which it has left behind may be recognized in the curious group of churches, communicating with each other and forming one building, originally erected as part of the Monastery of San Stefano in Bologna. With regard to the construction of these venerable churches we know little or nothing that is trustworthy. It seems, however, highly probable that the tradition regarding them is substantially correct. The buildings were intended to reproduce in some way the more important shrines of Jerusalem, and may be regarded as perhaps the most ancient existing example of a set of Stations of the Holy Land, even if they do not in strictness deserve to be called Stations of the Cross. St Petronius, Bishop of Bologna, to whom the construction of S. Stefano is attributed, lived in the fifth century. The chronicle of the monastery preserves a long life of him, which is no doubt a medieval fabrication, and which may or may not incorporate some fragments of genuine tradition. But in any case the manuscript itself seems to be of the twelfth century. Assuming this to be approximately the date of the composition, it bears witness to the existence, at least at that epoch, of an attitude of mind with regard to the holy places which must have had much to do with the development of our devotion to the Stations. The writer tells us that in the very ornamentation of the monastery which Petronius constructed he copied the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that he had with singular foresight measured everything accurately with a measuring-rod during his stay in the Holy Land.[7] It is to be noted that the description of this work given in the life bears a quite extraordinary resemblance to certain prominent features of the mosaic of the sixth century found at Mâdaba, and it is quite conceivable that the compiler may here be incorporating the language of some authentic early document.[8]

The writer further tells us that Petronius also built a monastery upon another more elevated spot which down to the writer’s own day was called Mons Oliveti. This was at the exact distance from Golgotha which the saint had himself measured when he was in the Holy Land. On the top of this “Mount Olivet” the saint planted a second church, reproducing the Church of the Ascension. The valley between was called Josaphat, and there was a pond constructed to represent the _natatoria Siloe_. The seven connected churches at S. Stefano were no doubt meant to recall the many sacred sites which tradition grouped about the Holy Sepulchre, though we cannot attach any particular importance to the vague language of Galesinius, who informs us that in the compass of S. Stefano Petronius reproduced the column at which our LORD was scourged, the cross upon which He died, the chamber in which He suffered, the spot where Peter wept over his fall, and the room in which the angel saluted our Blessed Lady.[9] It seems certain, however, that the monastery was familiarly known as Hierusalem, and it is stated to have been described by this term in the Bulls of several popes.[10]

Whether these ideas belong more properly to the fifth or to the twelfth century we are not here called upon to determine. I may confess that I incline to the former date, but in any case it must be admitted that the devotion of the Stations down to near the close of the middle ages had not reached any further stage of development. Examples of imitative buildings like that of S. Stefano of Bologna were comparatively rare and isolated, though the idea of imitation never died out, and definite instances can be quoted. Thus we hear of a Mount of Olives and a chapel of the Holy Sepulchre erected by the Augustinian John von Schaftolsheim in 1378.[11] Again there is a well-known model of the Holy Sepulchre in Bruges which was set up there by two knightly pilgrims on their return from the Holy Land before the year 1435. So also, to turn to what is of more immediate interest to English readers, it would seem that at Fabriano, in the marches of Ancona, certain memorials of the holy places were erected by the pious care of two brothers, Peter and John Bechetti, or Becket, said to be members of the family of St Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury.[12] They were beatified in the early part of the last century, and in the documents of the process special mention is made of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land and of the chapels which they built on their return.

Whether these two Augustinian friars were in any true sense collateral descendants of the saint seems to me more than doubtful, but John da Fabriano was unquestionably lecturing at Oxford about the year 1388, though he was not himself born in England. In 1393 Peter da Fabriano obtained leave from the Franciscan General and from the pope to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On his return he is said to have encouraged his brother, or cousin, John, to follow his example. After this they both went to reside in their native town, and, as the process of beatification tells us, “They caused a church to be erected which they called the Holy Sepulchre, and in which they placed five altars. One, dedicated to our SAVIOUR crucified—‘al SSmo Crocifisso,’—stood on an elevation which was reached by twelve steps, and they called it Mount Calvary. Another which was dedicated ‘alla Madonna dello Spasimo,’ in memory of our Lady’s anguish when she swooned away on meeting her divine Son, they named, strange to say, ‘la Valle di Giosafat.’[13] The third altar commemorated our Lady’s grief when she received her Son into her arms. There they placed an image of the ‘Pietà,’ and to reach it you had to descend ten steps. The fourth altar was erected in honour of our Lady ‘delle Gratie,’ and at the fifth their bones (so writes Torelli in 1680) are at the present time enshrined. Besides this they built two chapels, one on each side of ‘Mount Calvary,’ in one of which the Holy Sepulchre is reproduced in the same size as at Jerusalem, and in the other chapel is the tomb of the Blessed Virgin, with gilt statues beside it representing the other Marys.”[14]

Again it is related of the Dominican, Blessed Alvaro, who died in 1420, that he made a pilgrimage to Palestine, and “in order that some sort of memorial of these holy places might remain for ever in the friary which he erected, he arranged in it a series of oratories in which the mysteries of our redemption might be set forth in separate stations; the which pious institution of his is said to have been copied in other religious houses.”[15] Similarly the Blessed Eustochium, a Poor Clare of Messina, is recorded, out of devotion to the Passion, “to have set up representations of the holy places as if it were at Jerusalem. And so within the enclosure she had constructed the birthplace of CHRIST and there too the house of His blessed Mother, there the Mount of Olives, there the Garden in which our SAVIOUR was seized, there the Supper Room, there the houses of Annas and Caiphas, there the Prætorium of Pilate, there the Mount of Calvary and the tomb beside it. To these spots she came daily, and just as if she were present at the very scenes themselves she contemplated with tears the meekness of her heavenly Spouse and all the acts which He did, each in its due order.”[16]

Blessed Eustochium died in 1491, and it is plain that neither in this case nor in the others we have quoted is there anything at all closely resembling our modern “Way of the Cross.” None the less we must allow that the idea of the counterfeit devotional pilgrimage is there in principle. Moreover this germ occasionally admitted remarkable developments in the practice of the ascetics of the middle ages, as is touchingly illustrated by the example of Blessed Henry Suso, the famous Dominican mystic. The pious exercise described in the following passage must have been adopted by him as early as the year 1326, for the dialogue form into which he threw his “Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit,” or “Horologium Sapientiæ,” begun in that year, is said to have been suggested to him during one of these nightly devotional pilgrimages.[17]

“He [Blessed Henry] now began every night after matins at his usual place, which was the chapter room, to force himself into a Christlike feeling of sympathy with all that CHRIST, his LORD and GOD, had suffered for him. He stood up and moved from corner to corner, in order that all sluggishness might leave him, and that he might have throughout a lively and keen sensitiveness to our LORD’S sufferings. He commenced this exercise with the Last Supper, and he accompanied CHRIST from place to place, until he brought Him before Pilate. Then he received Him after He had been sentenced at the tribunal and he followed Him along the sorrowful way to Calvary from the court-house to beneath the gallows. The following was the manner in which he made the ‘Way of the Cross’: On coming to the threshold of the chapter house, he kneeled down and kissed the print of the first step which the LORD took, when, on being sentenced, he turned Him round to go forth to death. Then he began the psalm which describes our LORD’S passion, ‘DEUS, DEUS meus, respice in me’ (Ps. xxi), and he went out by the door into the cloister repeating it. Now there were four streets through which he accompanied Him. He went with Him to death along the first street, with the earnest desire and will to go forth from his friends and all perishable goods, and to suffer for CHRIST’S glory misery without consolation and voluntary poverty. In the second street he proposed to himself to cast aside all perishable honour and dignity and voluntarily to despise this present world, considering how the LORD had become a ‘worm and the outcast of the people.’ At the beginning of the third street he kneeled down again, and, kissing the ground, willingly renounced all needless comfort and all tender treatment of his body in honour of the pains of CHRIST’S tender body; and he set before his eyes what is written in the psalm, how that all CHRIST’S strength was dried up, and His natural vigour brought nigh to death as they drove Him onward thus pitiably; and he thought how fitting it is that every eye should weep and every heart sigh on account of it. When he came to the fourth street, he kneeled down in the middle of the road, as if he were kneeling in front of the road through which the LORD must pass out; and then falling on his face before Him he kissed the ground, and crying out to Him prayed Him not to go to death without his servant but to suffer him to go along with Him. Then he pictured to himself as vividly as he could that the LORD was obliged to pass quite close to him, and when he had said the prayer, ‘Ave, rex noster, Fili David!’ (Hail, our King, Son of David) he let Him move onwards. After this he knelt down again, still turned towards the gate, and greeted the cross with the verse, ‘O crux ave, spes unica’ (Hail, O Cross, our only hope!) and then let it go past. This done he kneeled down once more before the tender Mother Mary, Heaven’s Queen, as she was led past him in unfathomable anguish of heart, and he observed how mournfully she bore herself, and noted her burning tears and sighings and sorrowful demeanour; and he addressed her in the words of the ‘Salve Regina’ and kissed her footsteps. Then he stood up and hastened after his LORD until he came up with Him.

“And the picture was sometimes so vividly present to his mind that it seemed to him as if he were in body walking at CHRIST’S side, and the thought would come to him how that, when King David was driven from his kingdom, his bravest captains walked around him and gave him loving succour (2 Kings, xv). At this point he gave up his will to GOD’S will, desiring that GOD would do with him according to His good pleasure. Last of all he called to mind the epistle which is read in Holy Week from the prophecy of Isaias, beginning ‘Quis credidit auditui nostro’ (Is. liii), and which so exactly describes how the LORD was led forth to death, and, meditating upon it, he went in by the door of the choir, and so up the steps into the pulpit until he came beneath the cross in the place where one day the hundred considerations upon the Passion had been made known to him. He kneeled down and looked upon JESUS stripped of His garments at the moment when He was cruelly nailed to the cross. Then, taking a discipline and in a passion of fervour, nailing himself to the cross with his LORD, he prayed that neither life nor death, weal nor woe, might ever separate him from the Crucified.”[18]

A singularly touching legend regarding a spiritual pilgrimage of the same kind may be read in the Cistercian Chronicle of Frey Bernardo de Brito.[19] He tells us that in the ancient Cistercian convent of Lorvão not far from Coimbra there was a certain holy lay-sister who before dedicating herself to GOD as a nun had led a very mortified life in the world. Among her other good undertakings, however, she had made a vow to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and when she entered religion she was continually haunted by the recollection of this promise to GOD which left her a prey to many harassing scruples, as she saw no means of fulfilling her engagement. Still she always hoped that in some way she might yet be enabled to keep her vow, and for this end she prayed very earnestly and practised the most severe mortifications. Now it happened while she was in this state of distress that a solemn jubilee was proclaimed by the pope, and that extraordinary faculties were given to confessors to commute vows of all kinds, even those of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There was of course no real need of any such commutation in the case of our lay-sister, as vows of devotion, according to the common teaching of theologians, are annulled _ipso facto_ by solemn profession in a religious order. However, the sister, tortured by scruples, presented herself to the confessor during the jubilee-tide, and humbly asked him for some commutation which might discharge her conscience. He decided that it would be best for her to make a spiritual pilgrimage for such time as the actual journey to the Holy Land would have lasted had she been able to travel thither, and so for a year together, with the leave of her superior, the good lay-sister spent all her time in passing from altar to altar and from shrine to shrine within the convent enclosure, identifying them with those sacred spots which are venerated by pilgrims in the holy city. Before the day appointed for commencing this exercise she bade a solemn farewell to her sisters in religion, and during all the time which followed she spoke no word to them nor they to her. She took her scanty repasts in the refectory when the others had finished, leaving the larger share of her allotted portion to be given to the poor, and at night she lay down on the ground and slept in the church or in the cloister, wherever she might be when the hour sounded for retiring to rest.[20] For full twelve months this exercise continued, and it happened that on the night when the year of pilgrimage would expire, she was seen praying in the church before the Blessed Sacrament with hands uplifted. There she must have remained in this attitude from midnight until dawn; but when the sacristan who came to open the church approached to warn her that the people were entering for Mass, she found the sister lifeless and cold, but still kneeling as before, while her face was all aglow with supernatural light. This unusual occurrence deeply moved the townspeople, who cut away portions of her habit and preserved them as relics, by which many miracles were afterwards said to have been wrought. But the strangest marvel of all happened only a few days later when a pilgrim newly returned from the Holy Land knocked at the gate and asked for news of Sister Maria Minz, this being the name of the good lay-sister who had so peacefully departed. They bade him tell them how he came to know her and to make such inquiry, whereupon he related that in all his pious visits to the holy places of Jerusalem this sister had been his companion; but that on such a day, naming the day of her death, she had suddenly quitted him as they were journeying homeward, informing him that she was wanted in her convent and bidding him call there to ask for further tidings.

Father Brito adds that he could not ascertain the year in which this event took place, but that the memory of the holy lay-sister was still venerated in the convent of Lorvão. Such historical foundation as the story may have would seem to belong to the pre-Reformation period, while the mention of the jubilee, which was proclaimed for the first time by Boniface VIII, shows that it must in any case be subsequent to the year 1300.

But we may turn back now from the devotional practices of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to see how in Jerusalem itself a definite _Via Dolorosa_ or Way of Sorrows had meanwhile gradually come to be recognized, although perhaps it was not as yet called by any specific name.[21] There can in any case be little doubt that when the two brothers de Fabriano or Alonso the Dominican visited Palestine, they would have had pointed out to them by their guides as an object of special devotion the path followed by our SAVIOUR on His way to Calvary.

Footnote 1:

This is stated even by Thalhofer, in the second edition of the
“Kirchenlexicon,” art. Kreuzweg.

Footnote 2:

This has hitherto been printed and is commonly quoted under the title
of “Peregrinatio Silviæ.” We owe to Dom Férotin, O.S.B., the discovery
that the author’s true name is not Silvia but either Egeria, Etheria
or perhaps Eucheria.

Footnote 3:

“Certe si consortia nostra displicuerint adorasse ubi steterunt pedes
Domini, pars fidei est, et quasi recentia nativitatis, et crucis ac
passionis vidisse vestigia.” (St Jerome to Desiderius, Migne, P. L.
xxii, p. 493).

Footnote 4:

“Pilgrimage of St Silvia,” pp. 15, 16, in the translation of the
Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society.

Footnote 5:

See “La Mosaïque Géographique de Mâdaba,” by the R. P. Lagrange, O.P.,
in the “Revue Biblique,” 1897, pp. 165-185 and 450-458.

Footnote 6:

“Civiltà Cattolica,” p. 722, September, 1895.

Footnote 7:

“Illo plurimo labore typice gessit opus mirifice constructum instar
Dominici sepulchri, secundum ordinem quem viderat et provida cura cum
calamo dimensus fuerat cum esset Hierosolymæ” (“Acta Sanctorum,” Oct.
vol. II, p. 459; Molinier “Itinera Hierosolymitana,” II, p. 145).

Footnote 8:

I refer particularly to the long porticoes with their rows of columns.
“Aliud quoque ædificium idque plurima varietate columnarum a
fundamentis ædificavit cum atrio in circuitu, cum duobus ordinibus
preciosarum columnarum, cum basibus et capitellis suis, signis
multiplicibus decoratis, ita ut super inferiorem ordinem columnarum
alius pretiosior supereminebat, tali modo extendebatur usque ad locum
qui figurate Golgotha, hoc est Calvaria, nuncupatur, ubi crux in qua
CHRISTUS pro salute mundi fixus est posita fuit” (ibid.) The use of
the word Golgotha is suggestive of an early date and a genuine
Palestinian tradition.

Footnote 9:

“Acta Sanctorum,” Oct. vol. II, p. 466.

Footnote 10:

e.g., Celestine III: “Cum itaque in templo gloriosi martyris Stephani,
quod dicitur Hierusalem de Bononia quod servus DEI Petronius, ejusdem
civitatis episcopus, instar sepulchri DOMINI nostri JESU CHRISTI in
Hierusalem erexit et construxit,” etc. (Acta SS., loc. cit. p. 434.)

Footnote 11:

See Sepp, “Jerusalem und das heilige Land,” 2nd edition, vol. I, p.
504.

Footnote 12:

See Father John Morris, S.J., “Life of St Thomas of Canterbury,” 2nd
edition, p. 508.

Footnote 13:

The traditional shrine of the Swoon of our Lady at Jerusalem was
certainly not located in the Valley of Josaphat, but, as every pilgrim
of the fourteenth and fifteenth century tells us, it stood near the
Ecce Homo arch.

Footnote 14:

I have translated this from a printed copy of the “Approbatio Cultus”
in the process of beatification, pp. 13-14. The copy is in the library
of the Bollandist Fathers at Brussels.

Footnote 15:

Barbier de Montault, “Œuvres,” vol. VIII, p. 152, from the Dominican
Breviary.

Footnote 16:

Wadding, “Annales Minorum,” ad annum 1491.

Footnote 17:

From the Preface to the French edition of Suso by Verard (1493), of
which there is a beautiful copy on vellum in the British Museum
library (IB, 41151), we learn that attention was early directed to his
“Way of the Cross.” “Assavoir est que ceste maniere de parler entre
sapience et le disciple fut trouvee et commencee par l’occasion qui
ensuit. Advint une fois que le disciple dont ce livre fait memoire
faisoit apres matines une procession autour le cloistre ou par
l’eglise de son convent [sic] en lonneur et souvenance de cette tres
piteuse procession que nostre sauveur jhu crist fist quant on le mena
de jerusalem en calvaire. Et avoit acoustume le dit disciple a faire
chascune nuyt apres matines une telle procession” (Prologue, sig. a,
iv recto).

Footnote 18:

I have copied Father Knox’s excellent translation of Suso, pp. 50-54,
but I have modified a phrase here and there, where the original seemed
to require it. It may be noted that the phrase “Way of the Cross” is
equally used by Suso of a journey which he took in imagination to
accompany our Lady home after the entombment.

Footnote 19:

“Primeira Parte da Chronica de Cister,” Lisbon, 1602, book VI, c.
xxxiv, fol. 463.

Footnote 20:

Father Quaresmius, who borrows the story from Brito, omits these
details. He evidently thought that such a flagrant neglect of all
means of healthful relaxation was not calculated to edify.

Footnote 21:

Tobler, “Topographie von Jerusalem,” considers that the name _Via
Dolorosa_ did not come into common use before the end of the sixteenth
century. This however must be a mistake, for the Spanish poet Juan de
la Enzina, in his “Viage de Jerusalem” (1519), speaks of the street
(_calle_) along which our LORD dragged His cross, “which nowadays is
called the street of anguish” (_qu’ oy dia se dize la Cal de
Amargura_). At this period it was also sometimes called the _Via
Sancta_—Holy Way.