On the evening of April 3, 2026, a 70-year-old man from Chicago walked the full length of the Via Crucis at Rome’s Colosseum carrying a wooden cross through all fourteen stations. That the man was Pope Leo XIV, the first American ever elected to the papacy, made the act remarkable. That no pope had done it this way since 1994 — since the final years of John Paul II — made it historic. That he chose to do it in the midst of an active war in the Middle East, with tens of thousands of faithful watching from within the ancient arena and hundreds of millions more across television and social media, made it something else again: a deliberate statement about what the papacy is for in a world currently governed by military logic.
Breaking a Thirty-Two-Year Precedent
The tradition of the papal Way of the Cross at the Colosseum stretches back centuries, but its modern form has a specific origin. Pope Benedict XIV consecrated the amphitheatre to the memory of Christ’s Passion and the early Christian martyrs in 1756. Pope John XXIII revived the Good Friday procession in 1959. Pope Paul VI led the Via Crucis before Eurovision cameras in 1964, transforming a local Roman tradition into one of the world’s most-watched Easter rituals.
But it was Pope John Paul II who set the standard that Leo XIV revived on Good Friday 2026. From 1980 until 1994, John Paul II personally carried the cross through all fourteen stations — a physically demanding act of devotion that he eventually relinquished as Parkinson’s disease diminished his strength. His successors Benedict XVI and Francis led or attended the ceremony in various capacities but did not carry the cross for all fourteen stations in the same way.
Leo XIV’s decision to restore the full ritual — carrying the cross himself at every station — was announced in advance and drew extraordinary attention, partly because of who he is. Robert Francis Prevost, the Augustinian friar from Chicago elected on the fourth ballot of the May 2025 conclave, has spent most of his ministry in Peru and Rome, cultivating a reputation as a methodical administrator and a political moderate. The Colosseum gesture signalled something different: a willingness to use the visible power of papal symbolism at a moment when the world is watching the Church’s role in active conflict.
The Meditations: Francis of Assisi and the Middle East
Because 2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi — the patron saint of peace and the inspiration for the first pope to take the name Francis — Leo XIV asked Franciscan Father Francesco Patton to write this year’s Via Crucis meditations. Father Patton served as Custos of the Holy Land from 2016 to 2025, giving him direct knowledge of the situation in the region currently torn by the US-Iran war and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
The meditations he wrote drew explicitly on the suffering of people in active conflict zones, without naming specific sides or governments. According to Vatican News, Leo XIV’s reflections at the conclusion of the ceremony called on the faithful to ‘live our lives as a journey’ and urged the Church to ‘follow in the footprints of Christ’ rather than the footprints of power. The National Catholic Reporter described the remarks as ‘more than a homily — a position statement from the first American pope on what American power must not become.’
Roughly 30,000 people were present inside and around the Colosseum. Millions more watched via RAI, EWTN, and Vatican Media streams. The ceremony was held by candlelight, beginning at 9:15 PM Rome time, and lasted approximately two hours as Leo XIV moved between each of the fourteen stations with the cross on his shoulder.
Leo XIV at Ten Months: The Papacy Taking Shape
Leo XIV’s papacy, which began in earnest in January 2026 following his election the previous May, has been characterised by quiet institutional competence combined with occasional moments of conspicuous symbolic intervention. He has maintained the broad pastoral priorities of his predecessor Francis — dialogue, accompaniment of the poor, concern for the environment — while signalling continuity with the administrative reforms of both Francis and Benedict XVI. His choice of the name Leo was widely read as a reference to Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the foundational document of Catholic social teaching, and as a signal that his papacy would engage seriously with economic justice in what he has described as ‘the age of artificial intelligence.’
The Colosseum walk represents something different from administrative continuity: a willingness to put his body into the symbolic argument his papacy is making. At 70, carrying a wooden cross for the full fourteen stations of the Via Crucis is not a trivial physical undertaking. John Paul II had begun doing it at 60, in peak health, and continued for fourteen years as his condition declined. The decision to restore the full ritual in his first Good Friday as pope carries a weight that Vatican observers noted widely in the hours after the ceremony.
What This Actually Means
The Good Friday walk at the Colosseum matters beyond its liturgical significance because it is one of the few moments in the modern world where a religious leader commands the undivided attention of hundreds of millions of people simultaneously — and chooses what to do with that attention. Leo XIV used it to perform an act of profound humility in one of the world’s most loaded spaces, a venue built by an empire to stage spectacle and death, repurposed by centuries of Christian memory into a site of martyrdom and witness.
In the context of a world currently watching the United States conduct a war in the Middle East, and with the first American pope now in office, the symbolism was not subtle. It did not need to be. The Colosseum ceremony was the most-watched single papal event of 2026, and the image of Leo XIV — a Chicagoan, an Augustinian, a man who spent decades working in Peru — carrying a wooden cross through the ruins of Roman imperial ambition will carry meaning well beyond Easter week.
Sources
Vatican News | Euronews | National Catholic Reporter | Washington Post | Britannica | National Catholic Register