The peasant on the cross

The 14th and 15th centuries must have been marvellous times if you were an artist in Italy. Not only did the commissions for great works of art flow freely but one would have worked in the midst of a throng of like minded creative geniuses. Sparks of inspiration would have sprung into the air over a glass or two of vino and the competition engendered would have provided a spur to minds already overflowing with artistic fervour - there is nothing like a little competition to encourage the pursuit of excellence.

The two great artists, Donato di Niccolo do Betto Rardi (aka Donatello) and Filippo Brunellesco were like minded friends and this is the story of how they vied with one another to produce the finest figure of Christ to grace a crucifix.


"Donato, who was always called Donatello by his friends and relatives, was born in Florence in the year 1383, and produced many works in his youth; but the first thing that caused him to be known was an Annunciation carved in stone for the church of S. Croce in Florence. For the same church he made a crucifix of wood, which he carved with extraordinary patience; and when it was done, thinking it a very fine piece of work, he showed it to fellow artist, Filippo Brunellesco that he might have his opinion upon it. Filippo, who expected from what Donatello had said to see something better, when he looked at it could not help smiling a little.

 Donatello, seeing it, begged him by their friendship to speak his mind truly, upon which Filippo, who was frank enough, replied that he seemed to him to have put on the cross a peasant and not Jesus Christ, who was the man most perfect in everything that ever was born. Donatello, feeling the reproach more bitterly because he had expected praise, replied,

"If it were as easy to do a thing as to judge it, my Christ would not look like a peasant; but take some wood yourself and make one."

Filippo without another word returned home, and, saying nothing to anyone, set to work upon a crucifix, and aiming to surpass Donatello that he might not condemn himself, he brought it to great perfection after many months.
Then one morning he invited Donatello to dine with him. Donatello accepted his invitation, and they went together to Filippo's house.
Coming to the old market, Filippo bought some things and gave them to Donatello, saying, "Go on to the house and wait for me, I am just coming."

Brunellesco's Crucifix

So Donatello, going into the house, found Filippo's crucifix arranged in a good light; and stopping to consider it, he found it so perfect that, overcome with surprise and admiration, he let his apron drop, and the eggs and cheese and all the other things that he was carrying in it fell to the ground and were broken. Filippo, coming in and finding him standing thus lost in astonishment, said, laughingly.

"What are you about, Donatello? How are we to dine when you have dropped all the things?"

"I," said Donatello, "have had enough. If you want anything, take it. To you it is given to do Christ’s, and to me rustics."

From Vasari's 'Lives of the Painters'

Of what use is an empty cross?

None, really. It is just a piece of wood, or two pieces of wood, it signifies a hollow, sanitised Protestant version of.......what?.......certainly not the sacrifice of the Son of God on Calvary...... no sign of the redemptive power of suffering and God's love for us in allowing His Son to be shamed, humiliated, beaten and executed as a common criminal.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen called it a symbol of totalitarian regimes, a cross without the saving Victim has no sacrificial element, it has no saving grace.

Bland, meaningless, insulting!

A number of comments have been made following my post regarding the ten things you would not find in a Catholic home; my tenth item was a wooden cross.

This may have been puzzling to some people so I set about finding Archbishop Sheen's famous talk on the value of the crucifix as opposed to the cross.

I recalled that I gave my CD set to my terminally ill sister in the hope that it would bring her some comfort in coping with her suffering. I do not know if it did. She died some six months later with no acknowledgement, not that I was looking for any.

My next step was to Google the matter and, much to my chagrin, I found that Mundabor had beaten me to it with a post in July. I cannot improve on that post. I wish I knew some Italian swear words.

So, straight from Mundabor's Blog comes part of ++ Sheen's sermon on the cross....

Re-browsing the exceedingly beautiful “Life of Christ” from the great Fulton Sheen (a book that, if you ask me, should be obligatory reading in every RCIA, or confirmation class) I stumbled upon this very beautiful concept which, once again, made on me a profound impression (emphases always mine).

“The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is the Christ”. [...] Communism comes along and picks up the meaningless Cross; Western post-Christian civilization chooses the unscarred Christ.”

“Communism has chosen the Cross in the sense that it has brought back to an egotistic world a sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supraindividual goals. But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentrantion camps, firing squads, and brain-washings”

“The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces. [...] Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears”.

Ben Trovato of Countercultural Father pointed out that Opus Dei members keep an 'empty' cross to remind them that they must be prepared to shoulder it throughout their lives, some religious orders also display a cross for the same purpose. All  that is good and fine.

 But, for those Catholics who put a cross rather than a crucifix on their wall they might like to consider the implications. Is it a denial of Christ? Is it just a euphemistic symbol? Is it a means to avoid meditating upon the shame and the agony associated with the crucifixion? ( Some Protestants believe that we Catholics enjoy keeping Christ permanently crucified without realising that the sacrifice on Calvary was not a one off and that the same sacrifice is made in an unbloody fashion at every Mass celebrated every day throughout the world).

Reflective, saving, poignant and fulfilling!

It is a scandal that, at one of the churches that I travel to for Sunday Mass, a large empty wooden cross hangs over the altar - the ultimate insult to one who made His sacrificial offering on our behalf.

WHY IS THE HUMAN RACE SO SCARED OF THE CROSS?

No cross no crown!

The cross is the prime symbol of all time and will remain so until the end of time but it seems to be an object of fear among the secular world.

The latest incident involves a group of atheists who are campaigning to have a cross that was erected on the site of the Twin Towers 9/11 atrocity, removed. The cross was constructed from two of the steel girders salvaged from the debris and found already fused into a cross formation.

There have been many incidents of nurses or others wearing  a cross worn on a chain or as a brooch in the workplace and even of a van driver who displayed a Palm cross in his vehicle. All of them were subject to dismissal type procedures.

There has been agitation in Italy and other mainland European countries, to have the crucifix removed from classrooms and public sector offices. What is eating at these people?

If the humanists or atheists wanted to put a logo on their advertising and poster hoardings I wouldn't bat an eyelid; if they wanted to erect 3 dimensional logos on their own land that would be fine provided that it complied with planning regulations.

So why does the material world throw a hissy fit when a cross is displayed?

Of course, we know that a cross without Christ is a contradiction anyway; you can't have the cross without the victim. You cannot have Easter Sunday without first having Good Friday. The bare unadorned cross is really a Protestant emblem but, sadly, there are quite a few Catholic churches who have also opted for the sanitised version - no saving victim.

Archbishop Sheen called the bare cross "effeminate" and so it is. Take away the Man and you are left with two cross sections of wood.

There is an old but good story of a woman who walked into a jewellers store and asked to be shown a chain with a cross on. "Certainly" Said the jeweller. "Would you like a plain one or one with the little man on?"

We have moved so far away from knowledge of the truth, in another twenty years most of the educated world will not even know who Jesus Christ is.

The world is drifting away from the reality of the crucified Christ and adopting a format that does not challenge or require thoughts of redemption, suffering and sacrifice.

That is what the American atheists are scared of......the reality of God's kingdom made apparent through the ordeal, humiliation and torture of His sacrificial Son. And that is why the world fears the cross. The world wants success, triumph, self promotion: it does not want to be reminded of the Good Friday element of redemptive pain, suffering and humiliation.

We are never far from the demonic!

Much as in the same way it is said that in big cities one is never more than 12 feet from a rat, so it is with the demonic. The devil and his demons go rampaging throughout the world looking for souls to master and destroy and the evil one is never more than a few feet from us..


"Even priests can be affected
by the demonic"


Archbishop Fulton Sheen (whose cause for beatification is being forwarded in Rome right now) made a telling statement in one of his retreats for priests series. He said that, out of an audience of 50 or 60 priests, there would always be one or two who were tinged with the demonic.
 "Mention the sacrifice of Calvary as re-enacted in the Mass and they would begin to shift uncomfortably in their seats.
                                                    By the end of the day they would be gone!"

He would go on to state that this contact with evil surrounds us in our daily lives.

I do not mean (and the Archbishop did not mean) that such people were actually possessed of a demon (although that may have been the case in some instances), it was more a situation where some element of the demonic had been allowed to enter their minds. The avenues for such a possibility are, of course, endless and they perhaps pervade the life of the Church today more than at any other time in its history.
Pornography, paedophila, marriage breakdown, drug abuse, homosexuality, perversions of every form, disbelief in the the Sacred Species, "liberated" nuns, women priests, apostasy and just plain everyday secular wrongdoings.

All have an essence of the demonic but, normally, due to our practice of regular Mass attendance and reception of the Sacraments and the subsequent graces we receive, we are able to automatically fend off most, if not all that Satan sends our way. We should not forget, either, the power of our Guardian Angel who must be fully occupied in overseeing our spiritual welfare.

The author, Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book "A time to keep silence" records that, in monasteries, the holy men enclosed are subject to bombardments by Satan. He describes one monk stating that the skies over the monastery at night are dark with demons. This is a very real and powerful threat and it is only their strong mindset and inherent spirituality that keeps them safe.

But open minds are empty vessels awaiting the devil's potions. When we used to attend Mass at the Mill Hill Fathers rural base, Courtfield, on the Herefordshire/Monmouthshire borders, the great Father Hughes often used to include accounts of his travails in Africa in his sermons. He spent many years in the wilds, like most Mill Hill Fathers and Brothers, and most of the time he would be the only priest for many miles around. I remember his account of receiving a late night call to attend a dying woman some 30 miles distant.
Packing up his case containing the Blessed Sacrament and the sacred oil and all other materials necessary for the administration of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction (it was called that 50 years ago) he mounted his motor bike and set off for the distant village.
Arriving finally he was shown to a hut where the sick woman lay. He entered holding aloft his Tilley lantern only to see the woman lying on  a settle against the far wall. He had not fully entered the room before she turned to glare at him ferociously whilst her whole body levitated upwards for about 3 to 4 feet and she screamed: "I do not want you or He whom you bring with you."
Now, according to Fr Hughes, it was at this point that he turned on his heels and fled; returning to the Mission a damn sight faster than he came.
I am sure that he did flee for his life. A priest untrained in exorcism and unprepared physically and spiritually would be very hard put to counter a full on demonic attack. The great danger being, of course, that the demon might overpower him and take control.

But possession is not rare in underdeveloped countries where people have, for many years, been under the influence of pagan beliefs and ceremonies. And it is becoming increasingly common in the developed world where poor education (I mean poor Catholic education) and a lack of intellectual rigour are becoming increasingly prevalent. That is not just a malfunction of the social framework, it is, undoubtedly, Satan weaving the web of despair, dissolution and dissipation that affects so many young people today.

He has an easy target (although, since 2005 and the advent of Pope Benedict, we have begun to re-consolidate and even started regaining lost ground) but we now have two or three generations of 'latch key' children who are now parents and grandparents in their own right. And the seeds of indifference and neglect have long since grown to fruition even to the stage of being beyond recovery.
Economic statistics used to indicate (and probably still do) that, when a person has been unemployed for more than  18 months, the likelihood of them returning to the workplace was negligible. The habit of being idle and taking state handouts had become too ingrained.

 So it is with the spiritual life. Do nothing, take the handouts of violent video games, cheap cider, drugs, street crime, pornography and abortion as a means of birth control and you have a potent mix that provides easy pickings for you know who!

What can be done? How can one rewind the clock and get matters onto a footing where at least the young, the down and outs and homeless  are given a chance. We don't have the vocation numbers yet to launch a crusade, I'm not sure that, in episcopal circles, there is even a will to do so. But, we should not be prepared to roll over and accept what Satan throws at the world.

The best of weapons -
recourse to Our Lady

We must keep in mind the weapons that are at our disposal; heading the list, of course, is Our Blessed Mother, she whose heel is firmly planted on the head of the serpent. The Rosary is all powerful in this regard and is positively hated by Satan. Next comes recourse to the saints, especially those with accredited powers to overcome the devil and all his works and pomps (St Anthony, St Michael, (Padre) St Pio and St Paul of the Cross spring to mind, I am sure there are more).

Next come the outward signs of our faith that so many families neglect today. The blessing of one's house by a priest, the Epiphany chalk, a crucifix in the home, holy candles at hand, a holy water font at the side of the front door, a palm cross, statues of the saints and mementoes of the holy life - forget the strings of garlic......these things are the real McCoy and your doorstep need never be fearful of a visit by the dark angel.
And your children and friends will become encouraged to do the same; visitors to your house will benefit from exposure to the sacred rather than the profane.

Prayer to Defeat the Work of Satan

O Divine Eternal Father, in union with Your Divine Son and the Holy Spirit, and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg You to destroy the power of Your greatest enemy – the evil spirits.

Cast them into the deepest recesses of hell and chain them there forever! Take possession of Your Kingdom which You have created and which is rightfully Yours.

Heavenly Father, give us the reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I repeat this prayer out of pure love for You with every beat of my heart and with every breath I take. Amen.

Even if you can only do one thing, make it the placement of a blessed crucifix in a prominent position in your home and ask your family and friends to do the same. It may not get rid of the rats but it will certainly get rid of Satan.

The Cross in the room, another sign of Grace

Archbishop Vincent Nichols has asked British Catholics to consider ways in which we can demonstrate our faith - to let the light of Christ shine out.
A previous post covered saying an Act of Grace before Meals, in public as well as private but we can also make a statement in our own homes.
The crucifix has become, for many non Catholics, a mark of repugnance, something to shy away from. Even many young Catholics, will not display a crucifix on a wall in their flat or house for fear of offending friends.

32 Crucifixes may be too many but one on the wall
sends a message

We need to overcome this and pretty damn quick! Every Catholic home should have at least one crucifix and preferably two, one in a public room (kitchen or living room or hallway) and one in the bedroom (s).

It is a constant reminder to us of our need for piety and a silent call to prayer during the day.
If you have friends who object to the presence of Our Lord on the cross, then, they are not true friends.

And remember, at Christmas, the crib and the Irish custom which has always been practised in my family, of lighting a candle in the window to show that the Holy Family would find a welcome in your home. As for Epiphany chalk, does anyone else know of this custom?

Sikh daggers yes, Catholic crosses - NO!

Yet another example of appalling hypocrisy as reported in today's Daily Telegraph. A British school headteacher has agreed that Sikh students may take their "religious" daggers into school with them provided they are kept sheathed and out of sight. Daggers may be as much as six inches in blade length, more than enough for a Police Officer to get alarmed if you produced one out of your pocket or glove compartment upon request. In fact,  I am pretty certain that you would have a dose of CS gas and a free trip in handcuffs to the nearest Police Station PDQ if one was found in your possession.

Compare this with current views in the NHS and with certain national airlines (and, indeed, most public sector organisations) that public displays of crucifixes and crosses worn as jewellery are not allowed.

For a start, a dagger is an extremely dangerous weapon (but then, Satan would say the same about a crucifix!). I am sure that young Sikhs are responsible people but they share classrooms with others who may be less susceptible to virtue and who may swipe the knife to do some mischief.