With the early spring showers clearing up just in time for this past weekend, close to 200 local Catholics began their Easter weekend by watching as Centralia’s St. Mary’s and Chehalis’ St. Joseph’s Catholic parishes performed their first Stations of the Cross enactment since before the COVID pandemic, performed by students of St. Mary’s Catholic School.
“It’s been a while, 2018, 2019, before the pandemic, and then we didn’t have the chance to do it again,” Centralia Parish member Adrianna Garibay said. “The students are taking classes to receive their sacraments, which is confession, Eucharist and confirmation.”
Garibay added members from other Lewis and Thurston County parishes, including Rochester, Morton, Onalaska and Winlock, were also in attendance.
Nearly 30 students dressed up to take part in the performance, which was carried out on the sidewalks of Parkway Street and North Washington Avenue in Centralia on Good Friday. The students only had two weeks to prepare and rehearse, as well.
“We didn’t have time to practice. We’ve been very busy with classes,” Garibay said.
She thanked all the students for volunteering to participate, along with the Centralia St. Mary’s and Chehalis St. Joseph’s Catholic parishes for helping to host it.
According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “The Stations of the Cross, also known as the Way of the Cross or Via Crucis, commemorate Jesus’s passion and death on the cross. There are 14 stations that each depict a moment on his journey to Calvary, usually through sacred art, prayers, and reflections … Later, for the many who wanted to pass along the same route, but could not make the trip to Jerusalem, a practice developed that eventually took the form of the fourteen stations currently found in almost every church throughout the world.”
