Hi, I'm Dr. Scott Hahn, and I want to welcome you to The Road to Amas, a podcast from the St. Paul Center.

And I'm joined once again by our vice president, Rob Corzine. How are you doing?

Doing great. Welcome. So what have we decided to do for this particular episode?

We are picking my favorite of the seven last words of Christ, which you're doing all of

throughout Lent this year. Okay. So we're looking now through the seven weeks of Lent

at the seven last sayings of Jesus,

which is itself a tradition.

We've touched upon it in previous episodes,

but it's worth reminding our viewers, our audience, that this is something of a pious tradition

that goes back.

It doesn't go back to antiquity to the best of my knowledge, but it goes back to say the

1600s where St. Robert Bellarmine, a doctor of the church in 1618, published his own

reflections on the seven last sayings.

And then it was in the next century, I think, in the 1780s that Francis Hayden produced this

orchestral piece on the seven last sayings that he turned into a choral piece within the next 10 years or so.

That's always my Ash Wednesday listening is Haydn's seven last words in the same way

that Advent always begins with, you know, SISI and Rosen-Sprudin.

It's just there's a sort of musical turning point for me.

Beautiful. But it's really

become something of an American Catholic institution in the 20th century because of the late

great Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who preached on Good Friday on the seven last sayings 58 times,

I think 58 consecutive years, in fact.

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