Indeed. It's a church function (not strictly a mass) that's held in the run-up to Easter, where there's readings and somber music about fourteen steps in Jesus's murder. First station is "Christ is sentenced to death", fourteenth station is "Christ is laid in his tomb", I think #12 is "Christ dies". In between 1 and 12 are three points at which Christ trips (no lie), I think he gets stripped nekkid, and so on.

There is nothing kids want to hear less than, "we're going to Stations of the Cross".

I still don't get the emphasis on Christ's suffering that is baked into Catholicism. It should be the subsequent resurrection that gets the emphasis, but in Catholic services it seems not to.

The most convincing interpretation I've heard is that it's a medieval/plague thing. Our lives are pretty cozy, so people relate to Jesus from stories about his humility, generosity, capacity for forgiveness and so on. Medieval people's (both peasants and monks) lives were tough. They were dying by the bucketload from plague and hardship and random knights sticking spears in them, so a suffering and tormented Jesus was a much easier sell for the church.

Interesting...

In my view the subsequent resurrection makes all the suffering pointless. This was summed up by this line from the film 25th Hour, "And while you're at it, fuck JC! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin' Otisville, J!"

"There is nothing kids want to hear less than, "we're going to Stations of the Cross"."

No fucking kidding.

Know what's worse than growing up in a Catholic family and having to spend most of the week at church for several hours a day? Having your birthday in April and regularly having it happen during the Easter weekend. No time for a birthday party or special dinner for little Rosebeekee, we had to go to the four hour long mass or stand in line for two hours so the whole church could kiss the feet of the Jesus statue (yay flu!).

One time the priest decided to make the run-up to Easter more engaging: the Palm Sunday readings involved the sounds of a rooster crowing (probably one of the laity with Animal Mimicry skills) and a Very Dramatic Chord when the body was missing from the tomb. Next year they went back to traditional style.

Goddamn, most of us can't even find Easter from year to year, but it seems Easter managed to find you. :-(

Speaking of trying something new for Easter mass, I remember one time our church had some teenagers do some kind of "interpretive dance" type thing with scarves that acted as whatever prop they needed it to be (whip, veil, cross etc) set to ambient music. The church was mostly seniors, so finding young people to do this was probably a pain. Despite how I described it, it was actually really interesting, well done, respectful, and an appropriate length (around 15 minutes).

So naturally they never did anything remotely like this, or anything different, ever again. Probably because some 110 year old complained about the kids bringing rock music into the church or something stupid.

Catholic thing. Most Catholic churches situate little statues/diorama things that tell the story of the Passion. It's basically an expanded meditation around the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, with similar prayers.

Of course, I'm Baptist, so we didn't have these ghastly, morbid Catholic things, and growing up, the Moral Majority had yet to take total control of evangelical churches so we didn't yet have the obsession with abortion or American exceptionalism. There is usually a Passion cantata in the wealthier Baptist churches, and because I was unmolestably ugly I was never suckered into that diddle scam.

"the Moral Majority had yet to take total control of evangelical churches so we didn't yet have the obsession with abortion or American exceptionalism"

You probably did, it just wasn't as explicitly political just yet. The Baptist way of reading the Bible -- reliance on concordances rather than actually reading the thing the way books are generally read -- exists precisely to justify slavery and to excuse injustice and cruelty.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2016/11/26/concordanc e-ism-backfires-for-anti-gay-preacher/

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That illiterate premise is a feature, not a bug. That’s what biblicism is for. That is how and why it was invented, adopted, and ultimately required for white evangelical American Christians.

Because slavery. See, if you read the Bible, the trajectory and its conclusion is unmistakable. But if you instead “look it up” in the Bible — turning to the entry for “slavery” in a concordance — you can compile a list of abstracted clobber-texts that can be weaponized as an “authoritative” defense of the opposite conclusion. It’s quite effective.

That concordance search for “slavery,” after all, won’t ever turn up any of that “loose the bonds of injustice” and “break every yoke” business. Nor will it show you how Jesus made such a passage the mission statement for his ministry. Nor will it remind you of the freaking title of the second book of the Bible.

And whether consciously or unconsciously, it’s quite easy to tailor the terms of your concordance search to ensure that you get only the result you’re looking for while avoiding anything that would challenge, question or contradict your prior conclusions. (Make sure you do your word search for “slavery” rather than for “liberation” or “oppression” or “injustice.”) Biblicism — concordance-ism — thus allows you to seek and find whatever it is you want to say and then to claim you’re not the one saying it, but that God’s Word is saying it, and therefore it is incontrovertible.