Holy Week 2025: A Time to Show Solidarity and Compassion for Those Carrying Crosses

We are reaching the climax of the Lenten season and have entered Holy Week, a time laden with key events that truly tie us to Christ and His cross.

A Pilgrimage of Suffering and Solidarity
This week is a pilgrimage to commemorate the beginning of Christ’s journey to the cross, where He died for us. We are called to remember and relive His path through suffering. Similarly, we are called to show solidarity and compassion with those carrying the crosses and burdens of suffering in this world. While Holy Week commemorates Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection, it invites us to see His Passion reflected in the lives of others—the sick and the poor. We are invited to pray for hope where it seems absent.

Reflecting Christ’s Passion in Our Lives
The Passion experienced during Holy Week should affect us. Every Holy Week must be a transformative experience for us, just as it was for St. Eugene, who discovered Christ’s personal love for him and the source of his happiness on that Good Friday of 1807. We should see our suffering in the suffering of Christ. He carried His cross until the end so that we might identify with His suffering. In life, we all carry our little burdens. Holy Week is the moment to identify them and bring them to Christ, who suffered for us. It is also a moment to grow in compassion—especially for the poor and those abandoned by the world.

Transformative Experience of Holy Week
Though Holy Week is marked by betrayal, rejection, trial, and death, it remains a story of hope. The adverse events were not the end, but Christ overcame the cross and the tomb to bring life to the world. That hope becomes real when we act with solidarity and compassion. The world should see the cross of Christ as a symbol of hope.
“By your Holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.”  In this world of contradictions marked by the good and the bad, the cross must be promoted as a symbol of hope. It is fair to refer to Holy Week as a narrative of liberation, healing, and solidarity.
“By your Holy wounds, we are healed.” We should find a moment this week to contemplate Christ’s suffering and link it to the wounds of today’s world. There are wounds that need healing. There are illnesses and burdens. Like Christ, who demonstrated solidarity with the world and suffered on its behalf, we should show compassion and solidarity with those who suffer.

Hope Through Compassion and Solidarity
We are called to show concern for the poor and the forgotten, who need solidarity and compassion. Both solidarity and compassion require action. During His final journey, Simon of Cyrene helped to carry Christ’s cross. It doesn’t matter whether he was forced or voluntary. He helped. We can lighten the burden of others who carry crosses of illness, rejection, poverty, and isolation.
There was Veronica, a woman who wiped Jesus’ face with her veil. Who was she? A passerby? A woman from the nearby village? A woman disciple of Jesus like Mary or Nicodemus? Regardless, she expressed her solidarity with the suffering Christ. She used her veil, which must have been intimate to her, and wiped Christ’s face in solidarity. The world needs people like Veronica who extend their hand to those in pain or suffering.

On Christ’s last journey to the cross were Mary and John, the disciple Jesus loved, who accompanied Him during His dark hour. We should never abandon those we love in their dire moments but show compassion and solidarity like Mary. The popular Lenten verse expresses it: “At the cross her station keeping stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.” Weeping with those who weep and shedding tears out of compassion and solidarity is essential. Every story of suffering should prompt us to shed tears of solidarity.
Finally, after His death, we also find Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his reserved tomb for the internment of Christ’s body in solidarity with the dead man who didn’t have a grave. “The Son of Man has no place to lay His head” (Lk 9:58).  This statement became true with His death. It took a stranger to offer Him a grave in solidarity.

Embracing the Cross as a Symbol of Hope
Holy Week should remind us of those who die nameless—refugees, war victims, the disappeared. Our pilgrimage this week should lead us to reach out to others and walk with Christ, who is the world’s hope.  It is in seeing the connection between Christ’s suffering journey to the cross and the suffering of others that Holy Week becomes significant. Just as the cross was not the end, every suffering does not have the final word. It may be difficult for those suffering to hear words about hope, but we must continue to offer them: Christ is the world’s hope.

By Kapena Shimbome, OMI
General Councillor for Africa-Madagascar

Published on the OMI World website