From the London Times-
The Stations of the Cross is a traditional popular Christian devotion. Participants walk between and pray at 14 representations of specific moments in Jesus’s final journey from His sentencing to death to His grave. Most Roman Catholic churches and many Anglican ones have a series of stations round the walls of the church. The Stations are meant to encourage people to meditate on the Passion in order to bring home to them their own great value to God who went through this painful and humiliating death for them.
My impression is that the Stations are now unfashionable. There seem to be two reasons for this. One is that it is seen as morbid or unhealthy to “brood” on physical suffering. For people who find it too gruesome it is worth remembering that the Stations grew out of the same spiritual movement as the crib scene, which offers another “take” on the divine generosity. Both the Nativity crib and the Stations of the Cross were made popular in the 14th century by the Franciscans, who wanted to bring a deeply human embodied Jesus into the consciousness of illiterate communities. Christians of earlier generations wanted a strong sense that Jesus was fully human and freely endured the same sort of pain as everyone else. Nonetheless, in the face of this modern objection, it has become common to add a 15th Station to the end of the sequence, representing the Resurrection.
The rest is here-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5903553.ece
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