Eighth-grade students at Iona Preparatory Lower School brought the Stations of the Cross to life on Wednesday, acting out the events of Jesus’ final day and helping their fellow pupils understand their meaning.

The annual performance is a tradition at the New Rochelle all-boys school and has taken place both indoors, as it did this year, and outdoors. Iona Prep’s Upper School, its high school, undertakes a similar performance, usually the day after that of the kindergarten through eighth grade Lower School.

Using backlighting projected on a white screen, students dressed in period costumes acted out scenes depicted at each station. Two narrators alternated describing the station and its events, and the lessons to be learned from instances of Christ’s suffering, meeting the Blessed Mary, and his ultimate crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

All 225 of the school’s students participated in the 45-minute assembly, with eighth graders performing, and the others watching.

The Stations of the Cross trace Jesus’ journey towards His passion, death, and Resurrection. Although praying the stations can be done throughout the year, it is most often offered to the faithful during Lent.

Brother Lucian Knapp, chaplain for the Lower School, described his approach to the staging. “Each year I try to do something different. Last year we did it outside. A few years ago, because of the pandemic, we didn’t do it, but before that, we did some of the traditional Stations of the Cross on the wall. Then I took a group of our students to the high school, and they painted some Stations of the Cross with some high school boys. We try to do something different so it keeps their interest,” he told The Good Newsroom.

He sees the Stations of the Cross as a way of bringing home the meaning of Lent for the students. “It’s the time that we enter into Lent, and we learn about Jesus and His dying on the cross, and it’s visualized for them. They get more out of that when they can visually see what’s going on,” Brother Lucian said.

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