Stations in the Village

Yesterday was Good Friday.  I spent the day at St. Patrick's Cathedral at a three-hour long reflection on the seven last words of Christ with Father Robert Barron followed by a Good Friday Liturgy with Cardinal Dolan (I love living in New York!).

The coolest part of the day was still to come, though.  The Vocations department for Archdiocese organized a Stations of the Cross through the southern part of Manhattan.  On a Friday night that is nothing special to someone who isn't Christian, it must have been strange to outsiders to see a large group of people led by a guy in a purple cape and a crucifix, singing hymns of praise in Latin, while walking through the streets of one of the most liberal areas of one of the most liberal cities in the world.

But that's exactly what we did.  We made our way from church to church or landmark to landmark, stopping at each to pray and reflect on a different moment in Christ's passion or pray a decade of the rosary.  It took four hours, concluding finally at 1am, and we must have walked about 6-8 miles, but it was awesome.

On a street corner in Greenwich Village, by NYU

Washington Square Park

Some people supported what we were doing, some people didn't, but most just stared for a second and then ignored us.

The hardest moment for me what at the very beginning - our first stop.  When the organizers originally planned the route a few years ago, they made this the first stop, not knowing it was directly in front of Planned Parenthood.  In the past, people have thrown eggs at the group from their windows above, but this year that didn't happen.  Instead, as we were singing, a woman started screaming at us our her window- not profanities, but rather something much sadder, and very true.  "Jesus. forgave. everyone!" she pleaded.  Everyone.  She screamed it over and over and over and over again.  She is so right.  And it pained me so much to hear her anger and sadness geared toward us, and to know how wrong her impression of us was, but not be able to make it right.

Jesus died to forgive everyone.  We were standing there last night to condemn, but rather to ask that He do just that.  That He have mercy on those who have had abortions and to heal them.

My heart broke a little at that moment.  How much misconception there is out there about the Church and what She stands for.  I hope I can do my part now and always to make it right, at least a little.

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen