Upheaval in Tibet, and a Chinese Cardinal wrote the Good Friday Stations this year

The Holy Father sent a letter to Catholics in China last year.

There is now civil strife in Tibet, spreading to neighboring provinces.

Joseph Card. Zen Ze-kiun, Bishop of Hong Kong, is the author of this years Stations of the Cross for the Pope’s Good Friday celebration in Rome.

Interesting. 

Today SIR has a little article about Card. Zen and the Stations.  Here it is in my translation:

From SIR:

Way of the Cross: Card. Zen ze-kiun, The Pope’s "attention" to Asai and especially China

"When His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, through the Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, asked me to prepare the meditations for the Way of the Cross for Good Friday this year at the Colosseum, I did not have the slightest hesitation to accept such a task.  I understood that the Holy Father, with this gesture, wanted to show his attention for the great Asian continent and to involve, especially, in the solemn exercise of Christian piety the faithful of China, for whom the Way of the Cross is a deeply felt devotion.  The Pope wanted that I should bring to the Colosseum the voice of those sisters and brothers far away."

This is how the Salesian Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-Kiun, bishop of Hong Kong, present the meditations and prayers composed by Him for the Pope’s Way of the Cross at the Colosseum (21 March 9:15 pm).  "Certainly", the Cardinal writes in his forward, "the protagonist of this sorrowful Way is Our Lord Jesus Christ, as presented in the Gospels and the tradition of the Church.  But behind Him there is the mass of people of the past and of the present, who are we."

"Let’s leave aside", Card. Zen Ze-kiun wrote, "that tonight many of our distant brothers also in time are present spiritually in our midst.  They, probably more than us today, have lived in their bodies the Passion of Jesus.  In their flesh Jesus has been arrested anew, calumniated, tortured, derided, driven, crushed under the weight of the Cross and nailed to that wood like a criminal.  Obviously this evening at the Colosseum, we are not alone here.

"Present to the heart of the Holy Father, and all our hearts, are all the ‘living martyrs’ of the 21st century".  For the bishop of Hong-King, "thinking of the persecution, let us think also about the persecutors.  In composing these meditations, I realized with great fear that I am not much of a Christian.  I had to make a huge effort to purify myself of feelings of little charity toward those who caused Jesus to suffer and those who are causing our brothers to suffer in the world today.  Only when I stood myself before my own sins and my infidelities, did I manage to see myself among the persecutors and I was able to melt from remorse and gratitude for the forgiveness of the merciful Lord"

The whole text of the meditations is available at www.vatican.va.

The Holy Father spoke about Tibet at the General Audience today.

[flv]08_03_19_B16_tibet.flv[/flv]