By JAMES MONTI
The return of the Church’s autumnal feast, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14, will have an added importance this year, for more than one reason. In a year when most of us were prevented from celebrating Good Friday in church, the arrival of this “little Good Friday” in September, at a time when thankfully many are again free to attend the Church’s liturgical rites, affords us an opportunity to revisit the mystery of Calvary and the victory won by our Savior there.
Yet over the months since the Good Friday of April, the need to venerate the Cross has taken on a new urgency. For this sacred trophy of Christ’s battle and victory over Satan must steel us in a spiritual battle for the very symbols of our faith, including the Holy Cross itself.
As we have been documenting in this column, the campaign of those who by acts of iconoclasm would deny us our right as Catholics to venerate our holy images is nothing new. It is a battle that was initially fought in the first millennium of the Church, and it resumed in earnest in the sixteenth century. The horrific wave of anti-Catholic destruction and bloodshed perpetrated by invading troops during the “Sack of Rome” in May of 1527 has been aptly described as having “had the effect of a second Passion of Christ” (Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, SJ, Jesuit Art and Spirituality, Principle and Foundation: The Spiritual Exercises and Aesthetic Education, Artes de Mexico, volume 70, June 2004, p. 86), an expression that could well be applied to all such incidents of rage against the things of God.
For what is at stake extends far beyond the holy images and objects being desecrated and destroyed. Such iconoclasm is in fact a veiled attack upon the most fundamental tenets of our faith and the very existence of the Church.
It has been observed that the perpetrators of iconoclasm, whether they admit it to themselves or not, are by their actions tacitly seeking to attack not just the religious image itself as a piece of stone or wood but in many cases the very person that the image portrays. For whatever the original motive of the iconoclast may be, iconoclasm is a slippery slope in that the very act of mocking, desecrating, and smashing an image of Christ or the saints can easily morph into hostility against Christ Himself.
As early as 1520, a crucifixion scene in the Swiss village of Toggenburg was attacked by a local farmer. Protestant rhetoric calling for the removal and destruction of crucifixes together with other religious images, instigated largely by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt in Germany and Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland in the 1520s, escalated over the decades that followed.
From the sixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, the cross, whether as a crucifix or without a corpus, came to be seen and despised as the ultimate symbol of the Roman Catholic Church, derided as “the Greatest Idol in the Church of Rome” and the “Badge of the Whore of Babylon” (quoted respectively from a seventeenth-century New England manuscript in Francis Bremer, “Endecott and the Red Cross: Puritan Iconoclasm in the New World,” Journal of American Studies, volume 24, n. 1, April 1990, p. 18, and Captain John Endecott, quoted in Susan Juster, “Planting the ‘Great Cross’: The Life, and Death, of Crosses in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, volume 74, n. 2, April 2017, p. 264).
At a Protestant colloquium in Montbeliard, France, in 1586, the French Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza (1519-1605) declared, “I avow to detest from my very soul the image of the crucifix” (Acta Colloqui Montis Belligartensis, Tubingen, Germany, 1587, session of March 29, 1586, thesis 6, p. 418).
In 1607 the English Puritan cleric Robert Parker (c. 1564-1614) published a tract denouncing both physical crosses and the making of the sign of the cross with one’s hand as “a very ringworm that spreadeth mightily” and “a fertile mother of much superstition”; attacking the Church’s liturgical veneration of the cross, he remarks:
“. . . The Cross as long as he resembleth Christ, he must needs be an image of him and of his death. And seeing his death is represented, mediately by the Cross, on which he died, it must be an image of it likewise. Which, is it not the greatest devil amongst all the idols of Rome, against which the Turk is loosed by God himself? For this Cross though more base than the worm himself of Egypt, which the Apostle maketh the basest, hath nevertheless attained to the honor of the Most High, to wit, to latria, wherewith God himself is honored, and that be means that are more mean than ever any idol had.
“It pleased the Lord to die on a cross, a cursed tree, to show that he did bear our curse,…This saith the Cross hath made me blessed, and worthy ever to be honored. A senseless sophistry; yet so plausible, as that it hath prevailed with many in most places of the earth” (A Scholastical Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies: Especially in the Sign of the Cross, Middelburg, Netherlands, 1607, chapter 21, n. 28, and chapter 2, n. 2, pp. 41-42, 59 — from Early English Texts webpage).
In 1641, as the Puritan Roundheads were nearing the height of their power in England, John Vicars, a Presbyterian, published his virulently iconoclastic tract, The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness of Having or Making the Picture of Christ’s Humanity. Condemning a resurgence of images of Christ in Protestant churches that had arisen during the reign of King Charles I, Vicars decried such images, including crucifixes, as an “epidemical evil,” and that “the simple and mere making and having of the picture of Christ” was “absolutely sinful.”
In Vicars’ arguments one encounters as elsewhere in iconoclastic polemics a reasoning scarcely short of anti-incarnational, condemning the depiction of Christ crucified in a physical form as blasphemous, a profanation, unspiritual, worldly and dangerously carnal, a crude appeal to “all sorts of carnal men and women” (quoted in Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm in England, 1640-1660, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2000, pp. 31-32).
Iconoclasts like Vicars also opposed crucifixes because they depict Christ in death, evoking associations with the Catholic doctrine of the Mass as a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary. There was also a fear among Protestants that the crucifix by its very straightforward appeal to the senses of the believer had an irresistible attraction that “lured” people into the Catholic Church.
It was only in the face of the growing presence, success, and cultural influence of the Catholic Church in America that by the late nineteenth century many Protestant denominations had begun to allow the cross, albeit a plain one, a place in their church architecture.
Despite this concession, most Protestants continued to oppose the crucifix, made uncomfortable by its unflinching representation of the tortured body of Christ. A nineteenth-century Protestant who had visited a Catholic convent condescendingly complained, “One revolts at the endless pantomime of pain, and wearies of the pine or marble Christs in versatile and studied agonies….Gladly, thankfully, gratefully does the Protestant looker-on turn from this low physical plane to that sublime life which is the Light of men” (C.E. Robins, Putnam’s Monthly, November 1868, quoted in Ryan Smith, “The Cross: Church Symbol and Contest in Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History, volume 70, n. 4, December 2001, pp. 718-719).
The Intellectual Heir
The iconoclast is not content with destroying only the physical objects of Christian worship but seeks also to break into the depths of the human spirit and hack away at the sanctuary within the believer’s soul.
In the words of James Simpson, author of a recently published monograph making the case that modern liberalism is the intellectual heir of the Protestant Reformation, “…the hammer-wielding iconoclast needs above all to move into, and through, the psyche itself, there to lay waste to the imagination” (Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Belknap Press, 2019, p. 173).
This can be seen in the writings of John Calvin (1509-1564). Labeling the rank-and-file Catholic faithful as “the common herd, whose madness in profaning the truth of God exceeds all bounds,” he goes on to denounce their very concept of God:
“The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity . . . it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God. To these evils another is added. The god whom man has thus conceived inwardly he attempts to embody outwardly. The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth…idolatry has its origin in the idea which men have, that God is not present with them unless his presence is carnally exhibited” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, Edinburgh, Calvin Translation Society, volume 1, 1845, book 1, chapters 5, 11, pp. 77, 129).
As for the relationship between early Protestant iconoclasm and the more modern iconoclasm of rationalistic, leftist, anticlerical, and atheistic militants, which we are witnessing anew in 2020, James Simpson observes, “…the archetype for later revolutionary image destruction in the West is, however, the early modern Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Simpson, Permanent Revolution, p. 159).
The answer to the spiritual battle we are facing is the Cross. Our own devotion to the Holy Cross and to the Passion of our Lord and our willingness to suffer for and in union with Christ are the best ways we can respond. In a May 2020 Sunday Mass homily at St. Mary’s Shrine in Warrington, England (administered by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter), Fr. Alex Stewart, FSSP, reflected upon the value of offering our personal sufferings in the face of present evils, in imitation of Christ Crucified:
“Our Lord travels into the faithless city of Jerusalem, so that He can suffer…this is how the Lord wins the very battle against death itself. This, this is the medium He uses to redeem the human race; not a giant heavenly army, a great battle at the gates of Jerusalem, the overthrowing of the Sanhedrin or the Roman authorities, but by suffering, silently, humbly, in affliction and abandonment, by suffering. . . . By our growing ability to suffer because of the love of God, we are able in fact to deal a death blow to the reckless hatred that our world now drowns in” (Sunday Traditional Latin Mass, May 10, 2020 — transcribed from livestreamed broadcast of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, Warrington).
Ave, Crux, spes unica. “Hail, O Cross, our one hope!”
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