Stations of the Cross be conducted personally by the faithful, making their way from one station to another and saying the prayers, or by having an officiating celebrant move from cross to cross while the faithful make the responses. The stations themselves must consist of, at the very least, fourteen wooden crosses, pictures alone do not suffice, and they must be blessed by someone with the authority to erect stations. Pope John Paul II led an annual public prayer of the Stations of the Cross at the Roman Colosseum on Good Friday. Originally, the pope himself carried the cross from station to station, but
Tomb of the Scipios to emphasize for ideological reasons his descent from the Scipios; on the other hand, the latter speculation seems a harsh view of a man who, on the presumption that he was emotionally normal, must have been in grief at the death of his child. Repairs on the tomb continued until the 4th century. After then the mainly Christian Romans (who did not have the same loyalties to the traditions of pagan Rome) apparently stopped maintaining it and lost track of it. Only the general direction of the tomb along the "Via Appia" to the south was known from the written