After listening to my abbreviated conversion story, Bob explained that he’d born a Catholic but was now an evangelical Christian. Apparently feeling the need to defend his decision to leave Catholicism to a new convert, Bob declared that the crucifix is depressing and too focused on pain and suffering. After thinking another moment or two, Bob looked at at me and said, “The problem with the Catholic Church is the crucifix.”
Today, September 14th, is the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. My friend Bob’s repugnance at the horror of our Savior’s suffering and death is understandable in our world that considers suffering barbaric, especially that of the Creator of the Universe. In most Catholic Churches, that crucifix is displayed prominently, making it difficult to ignore. Without the crucifix, it’s tempting to believe the gospel of prosperity. And to think that all the blessings of our lives are merited. Just like Jesus’ thousands of followers who left him upon his declarations of the cost of discipleship, we too, choose cheap grace.
Bob’s pithy statement appears in my first novel:
Lindsey could not deny the sense of peace she had felt upon walking into St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church at six-thirty that next morning. Kneeling next to Julie, who was deep in communion with her God, she felt the silence as a tangible thing. Lindsey finally risked a look up at the huge crucifix dominating the altar of the church, realizing that she had looked everywhere but up at that cross. As she stared at that quintessence of agony and sacrifice, she thought of a paper Julie had written the year before for her theology class. Julie had started her paper with the sentence “The problem with the Catholic church is the crucifix….”
Lindsey thought of the lovely filigreed gold cross her mother always wore; the cross without the dying Christ was the sanitized version, much more comfortable to contemplate than this God-man displayed in an attitude of such shocking powerlessness and hideousness. And she had found herself asking what on earth could require such pain and suffering and wondering what kind of God would require such an agonizing death from his own son.
Because the Apostle of the Apostles tells us to do so! St Paul tells us that we preach Christ crucified in the first and second chapters of Corinthians. “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” John Martignoni reminds us of St. Paul’s exhortation: ““O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?”
The reading for the liturgy of the Exaltation of the Cross prefigures Christ’s crucifixion. We travel back to the nation of Israel’s escape from 400 years of slavery in Egypt to a forty-year desert journey. And we hear the Israelites complaining.
Again.
Ignoring the fact that their clothes and sandals are not worn out. Or recalling how they walked through the sea with walls of water on each side, saved from the pursuing Egyptians. Or that water appears out of a rock when needed by them and their livestock.
More and more, these readings about the ancient Israelites are like looking into a mirror. One that reveals my image and that of almost everyone around me. The complaints of the Israelites provoked God’s wrath until finally they see.
“We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you. Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses, “Make a seraph and mount it on a pole, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.”
“Now remember it was God who had said earlier in the Ten Commandments Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth(Ex 20:4). Yet here he commands a graven (a carved) image. Moses made it of bronze and showed it to the people who looking at it became well (Nm 21:9)
In a way, it is almost as if God were saying to Moses, “The people, in rejecting the Bread from Heaven have chosen Satan and what he offers. They have rejected me. Let them look into the depth of their sin and face their choice and the fears it has set loose. Let them look upon a serpent. Having looked, let them repent and be healed, let the fear of what the serpent can do depart.”
When we adore the crucifix, we face the awful cost of sin. Mine, yours and those of the whole world: The problem with the Catholic Church is the crucifix.
“There is something about facing our sins, our shortcomings, and our anxieties and fears. There is something about looking into the face of them in order to find healing. One of the glories of the Catholic Faith is that we have never hidden the cross. We have never run from it
There it is, at the head of our processions. There it is, displayed in our homes. And we are bid to look upon it daily. Displayed there is everything we most fear: suffering, torment, loss, humiliation, nakedness, hatred, scorn, mockery, ridicule, rejection, and death.
And the Lord and the Church say: “Look! Don’t turn away. Do not hide this. Look! Behold! Face the crucifix and all it means. Stare into the face of your worst fears, confront them, and begin to experience healing. Do not fear the worst the world and the devil can do for Christ has triumphed overwhelmingly. He has cast off death like a garment and said to us, In this world, ye shall have tribulation. But have courage! I have overcome the world.
The problem with the Catholic Church is the crucifix.
On this Triumph of the Cross Sunday,
I think about Bob’s candid appraisal of the Catholic Church he’d left behind, and the profound power of questions. Looking back on that long-ago conversation, it was my zeal that prompted his brutally honest response. He and I were speaking across a chasm: After decades of atheism and a life without any ground, I’d found the home I’d searched for ever since I walked away from God at seventeen. We were speaking two different languages without a translator.
The memories recall how it all began, with a question. The business of our lives eclipses the most important things unless we’re asked a question. One that pierces through the garbage. Like this one did me.
“What are you looking for?”
We were talking on the phone, getting to know one another, but his question startled me.
Where did that come from?
Indeed!
What are you looking for?
Recalling my journeys to Delphi, Greece, and Kyoto, Japan, beautiful but somehow disappointing, leaving me empty, I replied, “I’m looking for a sacred place.”
John replied, “I know this monastery,…”
It wasn’t a place or a religion that I found, but a person, one I could worship, adore, and give myself to.
The enthusiasm of faith fades. Just like the Israelites did, we forget the miracles. Consolations disappear as our faith matures, at times, leaving in their stead only desolation. When events conspire into chaos, and we can’t even pray, all we can do is endure. This fact is one of the countless reasons that I’ve read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship three times. The German martyr writes about the essential, critical decision to obey. Furthermore, he declares, Jesus’ call to faith comes only after obedience.
Pondering this, we realize, “How could it be otherwise?” Throughout his public ministry, Jesus, the Lord of the Universe, unequivocally and repeatedly declares that he does nothing but the Father’s will.
Obedience.
Unless we submit our whole selves, body, mind, and spirit, daily, this faith will be merely another in an endless series of meaningless phases.
“The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus. How could the call immediately evoke obedience? The story is a stumbling-block for the natural reason…
Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. It remains an abstract idea, a myth which has a place for the Fatherhood of God, but omits Christ as the living Son. And a Christianity of that kind is nothing more or less than the end of discipleship. In such a religion there is trust in God, but no following of Christ…. Discipleship without Jesus Christ is a way of our own choosing. It may be the ideal way. It may even lead to martyrdom, but it is devoid of all promise. Jesus will certainly reject it….”
Saint John Cardinal Newman wrote that obedience has a value that is recognized by reason and natural conscience. For Newman, like Bonhoeffer, faith and obedience are one. We’re wired with an innate desire to find objects to revere.
“Man,” he declared, “is born to obey as much as command.” Newman urged his parishioners to practice obedience through three methods:
Offering to God the responsible performance of mundane duties, tasks that are neither important nor interesting.
Next, in yielding to others when we need not yield and doing unpleasant service, that we could otherwise avoid.
These, Newman argued, “sharpen the virtue of obedience.”
And last to obey the Magisterium.
“God knows what is my greatest happiness, but I do not. There is no rule about what is happy and good; what suits one would not suit another. And the ways by which perfection is reached vary very much; the medicines necessary for our souls are very different from each other. Thus God leads us by strange ways; we know He wills our happiness, but we neither know what our happiness is, nor the way. We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him.” ― John Henry Newman
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1 thought on “The Problem With the Catholic Church is the Crucifix”
Mary Baxstresser
Amen. We adore you oh Christ and we praise You, because by your Holy Cross You have redeemed the world.
1 thought on “The Problem With the Catholic Church is the Crucifix”
Amen. We adore you oh Christ and we praise You, because by your Holy Cross You have redeemed the world.