Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE The Way of the Cross with the Saints, published by TAN Books, is a guided devotional that walks the reader through the fourteen stations of Christ's Passion using the words and meditations of canonized saints. Where a standard Stations of the Cross booklet offers brief prayers composed for general use, this collection places the reader inside a centuries-long conversation about what it means to follow Christ to Calvary. The intended audience is anyone who prays the Stations regularly and wants something more demanding: not just words to recite but witnesses to imitate. The saints' voices do what no single author can — they demonstrate that the Cross has been met, and met again, by real human beings across radically different historical circumstances, each of whom found in the Passion not only a pattern of suffering but a map of love. For parishes, prayer groups, Lenten retreats, and individual daily prayer, this is a serious companion for one of Catholicism's most ancient forms of embodied devotion. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book affirms the dignity of the body by making physical movement — walking station to station, pausing, kneeling — integral to the prayer. The saints whose voices appear here did not treat the Incarnation as incidental; Christ's physical suffering at each station corresponds to a specific human experience of pain, rejection, or exhaustion. This grounds the devotion in the created unity of body and soul rather than treating prayer as a purely interior event. - **Fallen**: The Passion sequence confronts concupiscence directly: at each station the reader encounters not only Christ's suffering but the human disorder that caused it — cowardice, betrayal, mob cruelty, indifference. The saints' meditations do not soften these moments. They name the specific disorder and invite the reader to recognize it in their own life, making the Way of the Cross an examination of conscience embedded in narrative rather than a checklist. - **Redeemed**: The arc of the fourteen stations is the arc of redemption in miniature. Suffering is not the final word at any station; each pause is an occasion for the reader to receive what Christ is offering — mercy, companionship in suffering, the promise of resurrection. The saintly commentators model how disordered desire can be reordered through voluntary suffering united to Christ's own, a mechanism Aquinas calls the purgative work of charity. - **Justice (sacrifice)**: The saints represented here understood sacrifice not as passive resignation but as an active offering. This distinction matters pastorally: the book trains the reader to make their suffering purposeful rather than merely endured, which is the difference between the purgative and the merely painful. - **Prudence (memory)**: Praying the Stations with saintly commentary is an exercise in what Aquinas identifies as the memory-function of prudence — learning from those who have already navigated the terrain. The reader is not constructing a response to suffering from scratch but inheriting a tested wisdom. SECTION THREE Aumann[^1], in Spiritual Theology, draws a distinction that illuminates this book's deepest purpose: the saints 'did not resign themselves to suffering; rather, they sought it voluntarily,' and those who reached the perfection of virtue experienced what Aumann calls the 'folly of the Cross' as an expression of the gift of fortitude, not stoic endurance — a framework that explains precisely why saintly commentary transforms the Stations from pious exercise into a school of heroic charity. Benedict XVI[^2], in his Wednesday Audiences, observed that the saints 'constitute the most important message of the Gospel, its actualization in daily life,' which is the editorial principle TAN Books has built into this volume's structure. And Francis[^3], in Gaudete et Exultate, reminds the reader that the cloud of witnesses makes it possible to say: 'I do not have to carry alone what, in truth, I could never carry alone' — the exact comfort this book offers to anyone who prays the Stations in grief or exhaustion. ## References 1. Aumann, Jordan (n.d.). *Spiritual Theology*. — 'the saints did not resign themselves to suffering; rather, they sought it voluntarily' 2. Benedict XVI (n.d.). *Wednesday Audiences*. — 'the Saints constitute the most important message of the Gospel, its actualization in daily life' 3. Francis (n.d.). *Gaudete et Exultate*. Page 1. — 'Surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God… I do not have to carry alone what, in truth, I could never carry alone'
✓ Strengths
- ✓Stations the reader within the Passion narrative through saintly voices, showing that contemplating Christ's suffering is not abstract theology but a disciplined act of self-surrender that trains both attention and desire.
- ✓The saints' meditations make the unity of body and soul concrete: physical pain, posture, and movement through the stations correspond to interior movements of contrition, love, and resolve — the body is not incidental to the prayer.
- ✓By gathering witnesses across centuries of Christian life, the book demonstrates that devotion to the Cross is a living tradition transmitted from person to person, not merely a text to be read — a form of docility to the communion of saints.
- ✓The structure of fourteen stations gives the reader an ordered, repeatable practice, which supports habit formation in the Thomistic sense: the will is strengthened not by single acts of resolve but by repeated, ordered acts of worship.
- ✓The saintly commentaries model heroic patience under suffering, giving the reader a lived example of fortitude animated by the gift of the Holy Spirit rather than mere stoic endurance.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠Readers in acute grief or trauma may need pastoral accompaniment alongside this text; the Passion's imagery of abandonment and extreme physical suffering can intensify distress when read without a guide.