When I became Catholic my mother was distraught. As an evangelical, bible-believing, non-denominational Christian, she believed that I was being deceived by the Roman Catholic Church. Convinced by clever arguments, I was being drawn away from God.
In a letter she wrote me shortly before Easter 2014, when I was received into the Church, she said - 'the Cross is empty'. It was a reference to the Crucifix and how Catholics focus on the Passion while the evangelicals focus on the Resurrection.
St. John Paul II said that we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song. Amen. The war has been won. Christ is King and in His resurrected body He is, right now, sitting at the right hand of the Father. This is our Creed; this is our source of Hope and Joy. Absolutely.
But there is something so integral to the Catholic soul, in the Passion of Our Lord and that most beloved of all devotions- the Crucifix. There is no other subject that is more beneficial for meditation or for growing in love for our Lord and in sanctity, than the Passion.
But, you (or my mother) might say- He is no longer on the Cross, don't keep focusing on that, it's so negative, or defeatist, or morbid, etc. But does He not still hang there, arms outstretched, thirsting for souls and drawing all men to Himself? Is not God outside of time and that moment an eternal now.
It is undeniable that, while the war has been won, the battle rages on. The suffering continues in His members. Unspeakable torments of soul and body for the young and the old the rich and the poor. The dark dungeons in the bowels of the Tower of London, the Gulags in Siberia, the death camps in Poland. The mother rocking her starving baby. The suicide, the abandoned, the abused, the lonely. What comforts the soul in these things is the Man who hangs upon the Tree. And there is a solidarity in the sorrow and a solace in the shared suffering.
In my own darkness and sufferings, I have clung to the cross, or, more precisely, I should say, I have clung to the Body on the Cross. How many of us Roman Catholics have begged, in the words of St. Alphonsus Liguori, that our hearts might be nailed to His feet so that we might never be separated from Him.
Holy Mother Church, in her wisdom, holds up for her children something to cling to. And it is emphatically not an empty cross, but one that holds the Corpus Christi. There are indeed ten thousand reasons to be Catholic, as GK Chesterton said, and one of them is the Crucifix.
+Vivat Chistus Rex!
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