If you are a catholic of a certain age or older you will remember doing “stations of the cross”, a thing you can still find in every catholic church, but which is not so often practiced any longer. It should to be so that all these catholic acts were very popular, like (endless, if I have to believe it) rosaries, almost daily mass attendance and at least one member of the family a member of the clergy or living in a monastery.
Those days are long gone, but in some parts of the world the Roman Catholic church is still growing, or at least it hasn’t lost most of its appeal. Mass attendance is still relatively high, much higher than in (Western) Europe, and children born into catholic families still become Catholics themselves, even joining monasteries. Even on a small island like Jeju, which has a checkered history when it comes to Catholicism (see here: http://jejulife.net/2009/04/08/the-hwang-sa-byeong-catholic-cemetery-1901-lee-jae-soo-uprising/ why), is quite catholic. When I visited in 2008 I saw (young!) sisters and quite an interesting catholic life.
One of the most interesting things I saw was this station of the cross. I was there, in the southern corner of the island, near I think Suryong, where there is this life size stations of the cross. Even during the middle of the week, in April while it had been raining hard earlier in the day, there were several families actively walking the stations of the cross, singing very catholic songs. I could recognize them, even though the families were singing in Korean, because they were very standard catholic songs, like anyone who is over a certain age can readily sing along.
Anyway, these are the pictures of the largest size stations of the cross I have ever seen:
