Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla
The bodies of the men, women and children lying dead in the streets of the villages north of Kyiv are shown in the news footage, some with their hands tied behind their backs, some facing upward with bullet-ridden bodies. But in all these photos, the victims’ faces are blurred out. This is out of respect, for the face and the eyes of a person are the signs of the identity of a person, the sign of what it means to be a man or woman in the image of God, and the eyes are a window to the soul. Even in an age in which social violence is accepted as part of the contemporary scene, these images strike deeply the cords of human compassion.
The.number of Catholic parishes that are observing the traditional custom of veiling crucifixes and images from the First Sunday of the Passion increases every year. This is a small but real sign of the recovery of the liturgical Tradition that was the object of a mindless and virulent attack in the two decades after the Second Vatican Council and that surpassed the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. For this destruction of sacred art and architecture was carried out not by “enemies” of the Catholic Church but rather by Catholics themselves in the name of the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, a “spirit” that had little to do with the Council documents. The good news is that this “spirit” is dying with the generation that invented this “spirit”, whose weak stronghold is the current Roman bureaucracy and their appointees in the hierarchy.
The origin of the custom of covering crucifixes and images during Passiontide is often traced to the end of the Gospel for the First Sunday of the Passion: “So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.” (John 8:59) But like other elements of Tradition one must be content to allow those origins to lie happily within the sacred womb of liturgical Tradition. To walk into one’s parish church and be struck by the radically changed appearance of the church with the altar crucifix and the statues covered in purple fabric is startling. It is a signal that those signs of transcendent faith must be withheld from view, for the heart of the matter is now at hand and it is not the eyes but rather the heart that is now called to see what is the Heart of the Matter. The focus now cannot be those visual aids of great beauty. The focus must now be on the eyes of the heart in imitation of the joining of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the Crucifixion. The eyes of faith must be turned inward to contemplate what the Cross of Jesus Christ means for me and the world. This is the preparation for the unveiling of the Cross on Good Friday, for it is then that the reality of the Cross in one’s heart is seen in all of its wonder and objectivity and life-giving grace, sealed by the physical act of the kissing of the Cross. And so too, when the statues of the saints are uncovered during the Gloria of the Easter Vigil Mass the reality of the Resurrection and the promise of eternal life shine forth like a thunderclap of beauty.
The recovery of the Liturgical Tradition of the Church cannot be stopped by those who have deliberately forgotten that Beauty has saved the world. For young Catholics are not carrying around a false spirit that seeks to accommodate the present age. They understand that the Liturgy is grounded in eternity and that the Liturgy must always be a reflection not of a deChristianized age but rather of the eternity of heaven.
