Fourteen stops along the road to the crucifixion, prayed one after another. It was built for people who would never get to Jerusalem, so they could walk it where they lived.
TraditionalOur Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
People walked the actual road. Pilgrims in Jerusalem went from place to place along what became the Via Dolorosa, stopping where something was said to have happened, and that is the whole devotion in its first form — a walk with stops.
Almost nobody could make that trip. So it was brought to them. The Franciscans, who were given custody of the Holy Places in 1342, put up stations in churches and along roads across Europe, and the point was explicit: if you cannot go to Jerusalem, Jerusalem is set up here, walk it on a Friday.
The number moved around for centuries — seven, eleven, twelve, nineteen, depending on the place — before Clement XII fixed it at fourteen in 1731. The meditations most parishes read aloud are St. Alphonsus Liguori's, written in 1761, which is why the same phrasing turns up in Ohio and in Naples.
You do not need a church. The form assumes fourteen markers on a wall and there is nothing wrong with praying it at a kitchen table, which is what most people who keep it are doing.
In 1991 John Paul II used a different set of fourteen, drawn entirely from the Gospels, and it has been prayed at the Colosseum on Good Friday most years since. It is not a correction of the old one. It is a second route over the same ground, and it picks up scenes the traditional fourteen leave out — Gethsemane, Peter's denial, the good thief.