Father Francesco Patton, O.F.M., said in an interview that he was “intimidated” but honored by Pope Leo’s request that he write the meditations for the Via Crucis at the Colosseum on Good Friday.
“I took inspiration from the Gospel texts, favoring the Evangelist St. John, who has a penetrating view of the mystery of the Lord’s Passion; and then from the writings of Saint Francis, which are a treasure trove of Christian spirituality,” said Father Patton, who led the Franciscan province in the Holy Land from 2016 to 2025 and is now a friar at Mount Nebo.
Commenting on the current situation in the Middle East, Father Patton said:
We could say that the “zealots,” who at Jesus’ time justified violence in God’s name, have come back into fashion.
Today, “zealots” are everywhere: we find them in the Muslim world through a galaxy of armed fundamentalist movements; we find them in the Jewish world, well represented by settlers and those who politically support them locally and internationally; we also find them among Christians, who unfortunately invoke strange blessings going in the opposite direction to that indicated last Sunday by Pope Leo XIV and 2,000 years ago by Jesus in Gethsemane; we even find them in secular form in state laicisms that censor religious expressions in a discriminatory and persecutory way.