Good Friday Liturgy

[FrDavid96]

That’s funny. I get what you’re saying…but I find it hard to wrap my head around a Church that is ever so precise in her meaning and wording not taking the time to make a distinction between “crucifix” and “cross”. Especially in light of what other faiths use. We are particular about things. REALLY particular. Everything has a distinct purpose and name. Except “crosses?”
As you can see, I’m really confused about this. I don’t have a dog in the fight per se…whatever my pastor wants, we do. But my curiosity is piqued now… Interesting discussion…

It’s actually rather simple. Whenever the Church uses the word cross, it means crucifix. In order to interpret that any other way, there would have to be some qualifying statements to indicate “this is an exception to the norm.”

It’s a matter of language. English has 2 distinct words, cross and crucifix. Latin simply does not.

A cross without the corpus is simply foreign to Western Catholic usage (in this context, because certainly we can find countless crosses that are not liturgical items as such).

 

[Jon_S_1]

I can see the value of what you mean. But at the same time, we cannot try to put too literal a timeline into the Good Friday services. If we wanted to do that, we would have to read each individual part of the Gospel to make it correspond to each liturgical moment. We just don’t do that.

This isn’t about how individual persons feel the Liturgy either should or should-not be done. The Church tells us what type of cross is to be used. As I’ve posted several times now, and as Fr McN---- also explained in the article quoted a bit earlier, when the Church says “cross” that word means crucifix. This same question arose with regard to what type of cross is to be used throughout the year and the answer from Rome was (in my own words, of course) “when we say cross, we mean what we always mean, a cross with an image of the crucified Christ.”

Fr McN also said that there is lots of writing supporting a plain cross for this liturgy and that there was NOTHING in the universal church law that he could find prohibiting it. Since he shares the same personal opinion as you I think he probably looked quite hard. Further, this is being done with the ok of the bishops in many diocese which seems more than acceptable.

Like I said earlier, it seems that if we had the true cross intact to adore it would be atrocious to hang a statue of the corpus on the true cross where the true body of Christ hung.

Maybe that’s just my personal opinion.

 

[FrDavid96]

It makes me a bit uncomfortable when Catholics focus on a cross representing Protestantism and a crucifix representing Catholicism. Per Brother Jay,

He has posted that repeatedly in the forum.

That’s a different issue. It’s exactly why I deep qualifying my statements to say “in this context.” Certainly we have crosses without the corpus throughout the Catholic world. The pews at my parish church all have small crosses carved in the end of each one—none of them have the corpus. There are innumerable examples of plain crosses.

I’m not writing here about a cross suspended around the neck, nor in any other context. I’m writing about a cross as a specific liturgical item.