…Recently that Crucifix was placed in the main Church at the wall behind the Altar. Many parishioners were moved by that and have since garnered a petition to keep it in the main church.
Sounds like a great idea to me.
They have been told that there is a rule stating that we cannot have the large Crucifix in church because we use the Processional Crucifix for Mass…
Worst case, all they need to do is simply place the processional crucifix off to the side, so that people can focus on the larger crucifix. This is what we do at our parish. The large (two dimensional) crucifix is always back and center, while the processional crucifix is placed off to the right… it’s still
on the (very large) altar, but it’s not prominent or very noticeable at all. The whole crucifix on the top is solid metal anyway, so it’s very difficult to distinguish between the cross and the corpus hanging on it, especially when it’s small and at a distance.
…and we use the Church for other events like graduation (and a neighboring Methodist facility uses our church on occasion) and these types of events would show disrespect to the Crucifix.
We do the same. Now, if the tabernacle were kept up and center,
then I could see why there might be a problem. But our tabernacle is reserved in a separate side chapel at the moment (although the plans for the new Church we’re about to build will fix that)… and from the way it sounds, you’re in pretty much the same situation.
I
do not buy the argument that holding a graduation in the Church would show disrespect to the crucifix. For one, we did this just last weekend (Mass followed by high school graduation in the Church), and it was beautiful. But more importantly, there’s simply nothing wrong with it. We hang crucifixes in our dorm rooms, and in our classrooms… that’s a good thing, not a problem. There’s no reason
not to have a crucifix displayed at graduations, at Christmas concerts, or whatever. If anything, it helps keep people in the right sort of attitude, and reminds them of where they are. (And as far as the Methodists using your Church on occasion, I say they should just get over it, and deal with it… it’ll probably do them some good anyway, whether they know it or not. …although I wouldn’t say that to their faces!
)
Is there a rule about the number of Crucifixes in the main church? If so, why? Why can’t we have a large (wall mounted or stand mounted) crucifix in church all the time AND use a Processional Crucifix to lead Father in for the Mass and to place that Crucifix in a stand in the sanctuary? Why not? The crucifixes would not “Cancel” one another out. We don’t worship the Crucifix, we venerate it, we worship God, so what’s the difference if we had two or four or ten crucifixes in church?
So if there is a document or a guideline, can you reference that for me so that I can present that?
Aside from Post 9, which you seemed to have responded to, I don’t know what else to tell you. Worst case, again, see my second response above. You can have both (we do, at least on Sundays, and it works out perfectly fine), but the processional one should just be placed sufficiently out of the way… not in front of the altar, not immediately beside the altar, or anything like that. The idea, I think, is really just to make sure that people aren’t getting confused over which Crucifix they should be focusing on.
And it’s funny, now that I think about it… at college, just at the end of this last semester, I started seeing a small crucifix centered on the altar during daily Mass, in addition to the crucifix centered above the tabernacle behind the altar. The processional crucifix (when used on Sundays) was still moved off to the side, and leaned up against the right wall (it’s a small chapel, so it can’t go far)… but still. And I’m at probably one of THE most faithful and conservative Catholic colleges out there (Thomas Aquinas College, CA), so I
really can’t imagine having more than one crucifix visible like that is a horrible problem; I have to imagine that someone would have said something if it were. At any rate, just move the processional crucifix off to the side if you’ve got a permanent central crucifix, and that should be sufficient.
The San Damiano is what our parish uses as the Prosessional Crucifix. Should they be using some other type?