at NRO

But The Passion does not wallow in violence. Instead, it hearkens back to another tradition of engaging the Gospels, one that attempts to provide a sense of what it was like to be with Christ on the way of the cross (via dolorosa). The tradition of meditation on Christ’s passion and death crystallizes in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s 16th-century manual, The Spiritual Exercises. Founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius counsels use of the imagination to place oneself in the setting of the Gospel stories, to see and hear the events and voices, and to be moved in appropriate ways. “In the Passion,” he writes, “the proper thing to ask for is grief with Christ suffering, a broken heart with Christ heartbroken, tears and deep suffering because of the great suffering that Christ endured for me.”