Biography
Born Paolo Girolamo Casanova at Porto Maurizio in 1676, Leonard became a Franciscan friar of the Riformella branch and one of eighteenth-century Italy’s most influential popular missionaries. His preaching called people to conversion through confession, the Eucharist, devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, and sustained meditation on the Passion.
Leonard’s defining apostolate was the Way of the Cross. He erected hundreds of sets of Stations so that ordinary Christians could make a spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem close to home. His method joined accessible preaching to a physical path of prayer, making the Passion something walked slowly rather than merely discussed.
For the Jubilee of 1750, Pope Benedict XIV asked Leonard to establish fourteen Stations within the Colosseum. The ceremony on December 27 placed the ancient amphitheater within Rome’s public devotional memory of the martyrs and gave the Via Crucis a setting that later popes would revive for Good Friday. Leonard died in 1751 and was canonized in 1867.
How to read this pilgrimage
At the Colosseum, remember Leonard’s 1750 stations without claiming that particular named martyrs are historically proven to have died in the arena. The surviving cross and modern papal Via Crucis carry forward the devotional history even though the original station shrines were removed in the nineteenth century.
St. Leonard of Port Maurice, teach us to walk the Cross with perseverance and hope.