“Who’s Veronica in the Stations of the Cross?” That’s what I found myself Googling the other day, as if Veronica was an actor in a series I was watching but I just couldn’t put my finger on where I knew her from. Despite 18 years of Catholic education and family life from birth to Leaving Cert, I was drawing a blank on who this woman was in the Sixth Station: Veronica wipes Jesus’s face.
Turns out she was just a bystander who became distraught at the plight of this man carrying a huge wooden cross to his death, and stepped forward to wipe the sweat from his face.
Veronica’s distress makes sense to me, as every Easter through childhood in school and in church, this live action horror film was played out in amateur dramatics and song as the story of Jesus’s trek to his doom was broken down into 14 bite-sized terrors: Jesus is condemned to death, Jesus falls for the first time, the women of Jerusalem weep over Jesus etc. By the time he’d fallen for the third time with his horrified mother watching, I was already predicting that evening’s nightmares.
Every Sunday I would spend at least part of Mass gazing up at whatever station was depicted on the wall above my head and wonder for the millionth time why we were putting ourselves through this hour of misery each week. Even to this day, whenever I enter a church – really only for funerals, and weddings at a push – I instantly look for that building’s representations of the 14 stations. Paintings, carvings, tapestries, etchings, I’ve seen them all.
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I mentioned my childhood terror of the stations to a friend recently. “Wasn’t that the point?” came her deadpan reply. Of course, I was supposed to be shaken by Jesus’s suffering and feel grateful for it. I was supposed to be afraid of hell and damnation and reminded that Jesus was a very special man with the ability to rise from the dead. That wasn’t going to happen to little old me, and I better not get any ideas otherwise. The blow that I wasn’t going to resurrect myself was softened somewhat with the promise of an Easter egg to mark the day Jesus rose again. If memory serves we had to wait until after Mass to break into the box, which was almost the same as being crucified if you think about it.
The yearly rewatch of a 14-part miniseries where a man is whipped and abused in front of his family and friends seems an obvious place to point to hypocrisy
There was great excitement in my teen years when a local composer wrote an entire passion musical – a dramatic retelling of the trial, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus – for our village. I was leaning heavily into the musical aspect of being a Catholic at that stage in an effort to glean some enjoyment out of it. I was thrilled to be part of the passion play chorus, mostly because there was a “big ride” from the village’s fancy estate playing Jesus and people flocked to see him hauling the cross.
The main street was shut down and there were stations along the way with “Jesus falls for a second time” at the bus stop and “Veronica wipes Jesus’s face” at the mainly decorative water pump. It was the first time religion had ever been exciting or sexy, but alas it wasn’t enough to keep me. As soon as I sighed the final “Thanks be to God” on the last school Mass I was gone from the Church, bitter about what felt like wasted time and energy, learning and living something that never stuck.
Now, in a time where drag artists are deemed inappropriate for the eyes and ears of children, the yearly rewatch of a 14-part miniseries where a man is whipped and abused in front of his family and friends seems an obvious place to point to hypocrisy. The man is crucified with nails driven through his extremities and suffers an agonising death before coming back to life days later and showing superhuman strength to escape his tomb. Is this really suitable content for children? Now, a drag show about the stations of the cross, I would watch. Veronica would be serving in a fabulous outfit and Simon of Cyrene would make a literal song and dance out of having to carry the cross for a while. After all, that’s something drag queens and the Catholic Church have in common: living for the drama.