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 WAY

569

WAY

5iocc8e (Challoner says in Cornwall, but earlier au- horities say in Devonshire); hanged, bowelled, and [uartered at Kingston-on-Thames, 23 September, 588. He is frequentl3' confusi'd with the martyred aynian Riehard Flower, alias Lloyd, who suffered at ryburn, 30 September, 1588 (as to whom see Leigh, Iichard), with the priest Wilham Wiggs, alias Way, A. A., a notable prisoner at Wisbech, and with Wil- iam Wyggs, M.A., of New College, Oxford. Our uartyr WiUiam Way received the first tonsure in he Cathedral of Reims from the Cardinal of Guise on ilarch, deacon 5 April, and priest 18 September, 1586, .t Laon, probably b}- Bishop Valentine Douglas, O.S.B. ie set out for England 9 December, 1586, and in une, 1587, had been committed to the Clink. He I'as indicted at Newgate in September, 1588, merely or being a priest. He declined to be tried by a ecular judge, whereupon the Bishop of London was ont for; but the martyr, refusing to acknowledge him ,s a bishop or the queen as head of the Church, vas immediately condemned. He was nmch given o abstinence and austerity. When he was not .mong the first of those to be tried at the Sessions in August, he wept and, fearing he had offended God, rent at once to confession, "but when he himself ras sent for, he had so much joy that he seemed past limself ".
 * 1 March, 1584, and was ordained subdeacon, 22

Calh. Record Soc. Publications. II (London, 1906), 277, 279; V London, 1908), 10, 154, 159, 160, 290, 398; Knox, Douay Diaries London, 1878); Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs (London, 891), 287, 307; Morris, Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers London. 1872-7), II, 234; III, 38; Challoner, Missionary ^riesls, I no. 60; Lemon, Calendar State Papers Domestic, 15S3-i)0 London, 1865), 423.

John B. Wainewbight.

Way of the Cross (Stations of the Cross, Via 'rucis. Via Dolorosa). — These names are used to ignify cither a series of pictures or tableaux repre- enting certain scenes in the Passion of Christ, each •orresponding to a particular incident, or the special orm of devotion connected with such representations, faken in the former sense, the Stations may be of tone, wood, or metal, sculptured or carved, or they nay be merely paintings or engravings. Some Sta- ions are valuable works of art, as those, for instance, n Antwerp cathedral, which have been much copied ■Isewhere. They ai-e usually ranged at intervals Lround the walls of a church, though sometimes they ire to be found in the open air, especially on roads eading to a church or shrine. In monasteries they ire often placed in the cloisters. The erection and ise of the St at ions did not become at all general before he end of the seventeenth century, but they are now o be found in almost every church. Formerly their lumber varied considerably in different places but ourteen are now prescribed by authority. They ire as follows: (1) Christ condemned to death; (2) the ross is laid upon Him; (3) His first fall; (4) He meets iis Blessed Mother; (5) Simon of Cyrene is made to lear the cross; (G) Christ's face is wiped by Veronica; 7) His second fall; (8) He meets the women of erusalem; (9) His third fall; (10) He is stripped of lis garments; (11) His Crucifixion; (12) His death on he cross; (13) His body is taken down from the cross; ,nd (14) laid in the tomb.

The object of the Stations is to help the faithful to nake in spirit, as it were, a pilgrimage to the chief cenes of Christ's sufferings and death, and this has lecome one of the most popular of Catholic devotions, t is carried out by passing from Station to Station, lith certain prayers at each and devout meditation m the various incidents in turn. It is very u.sual, ihen the devotion is performed publicly, to sing a tanza of the "Stabat Mater" while ji.assing from one itation to the next. Inasmuch ;i.s the Way of the 'ross, made in this way, constitutes a miniature pil- primage to the holy places at Jerusalem, the origin of

the devotion may be traced to the Holy Land. The Via Dolorosa at Jerusalem (though not called by that name before the sixteenth century) was reverently marked out from the earhest times and has been the goal of pious pilgrims ever since the days of Constan- tine. 'Tradition asserts that the Blessed Virgin used to visit daily the scenes of Christ's Passion and St. Jerome speaks of the crowds of pilgrims from all countries who used to visit the holy places in his day. There is, however, no direct evidence as to the exist- ence of any set form of the devotion at that early date, and it is noteworthy that St. Sylvia (c. 380) says nothing about it in her "Peregi'inatio ad loca sancta", although she describes minutely every other religious exercise that she saw practised there. A desire to reproduce the holy places in other lands, in order to satisfy the devotion of those who were hin- dered from making the actual pilgrimage, seems to have manifested itself at quite an early date. At the monastery of San Stefano at Bologna a group of connected chapels were constructed as early as the fifth century, by St. Petronius, Bishop of Bologna, which were intended to represent the more important shrines of Jerusalem, and in consequence this monas- tery became familiarly known as "Hierusalem". These may perhaps be regarded as the germ from which the Stations afterwards developed, though it is tolerably certain that nothing that we have before about the fifteenth century can strictly be called a Way of the Cross in the modern sense. Several travellers, it is true, who visited the Holy Land during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, mention a "Via Sacra", i.e. a settled route along which pilgrims were conducted, but there is nothing in their accounts to identify this with the Via Crucis, as we understand it, including special stopping-places with indulgences attached, and such indulgenced Stations must, after all, be considered to be the true origin of the devotion as now practised. It cannot be said with any certainty when such indulgences began to be granted, but most probably they may be due to the Franciscans, to whom in 1342 the guardianship of the holy places was entrusted. Ferraris mentions the following as Stations to which indulgences were attached: the place where Christ met His Blessed Mother, where He spoke to the women of Jerusalem, where He met Simon of Cyrene, where the soldiers cast lots for His garment, where He was nailed to the cross, Pilate's house, and the Holy Sepulchre. Analo- gous to this it may be mentioned that in 1520 Leo X granted an indulgence of a hundred days to each of a set of sculptured Stations, representing the Seven Dolours of Our Lady, in the cemetery of the Francis- can Friary at Antwerp, the devotion connected with them being a very popular one. The earliest consis- tent u.se of the word Stations, as applied to the accus- tomed halting-places in the Via Sacra at Jerusalem, occurs in the narrative of an English pilgrim, William Wcy, who visited the Holy Land in 1458 and again in 1462, and who describes the manner in which it was then usual to follow the footsteps of Christ in His sorrowful journey. It seems that up to that time it had been the general practice to commence at Mount Calvary, and proceeding thence, in the opposite direc- tion to Christ, to work back to Pilate's house. By the early part of the sixteenth century, however, the more reasonable way of traversing the route, by begin- ning at Pilate's house and ending at Mount Calvary, had come to be regarded as more correct, and it became a special exercise of devotion complete in it.self. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries several reproductions of the holy places were set uj) in different parts of Europe. 'The Blessed Alvarez (d. 1420), on his return from the Holy Land, built a series of little chapels at the Dominican friary of Cordova, in which, after the pattern of separate Stations, were painted the principal scenes of the