SIMCHA FISHER

[This essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly in 2016.]

Just before the American presidential election, Fr Frank Pavone, an American celebrity priest, released two scandalous videos. Fr Pavone co-founded and directs Priests for Life, a group dedicated to furthering pro-life causes, mainly through political action, and often by indiscriminately deploying graphic images of aborted fetuses.

In the recent videos, Fr Pavone places a naked, dead, human fetus on a consecrated altar and delivers a long political message supporting Donald Trump. Pavone has been stingingly rebuked by his bishop, both for callously exploiting a dead child as a political prop, and for desecrating an altar. An investigation is underway.

In the wake of this priest’s disgraceful behavior, a protestant friend asked me:

I understand why using a human body to make a point is wrong. Is there any resource to understand why depictions of Christ on the cross (indistinguishable from a bodily state of death) is appropriate? Full disclosure: I am Protestant and the churches I’m most familiar with almost never have the body of Christ depicted on crosses. This is even more confusing to me because we are made in the likeness of God- part of the reasoning behind why using a baby’s body to make a point is not dignified or acceptable. I think that depictions of Christ’s suffering aren’t wrong in general, but alongside of or in the centre of worship it sometimes makes me feel worried. Is this a topic you would tackle or have resources to journey through?

There is a lot I could say about the way that dead child was treated. I’ll let Mother Church speak, because her words are always more measured and fruitful than mine:

CCC. 2300 The bodies of the dead must be treated with respect and charity, in faith and hope of the Resurrection. The burial of the dead is a corporal work of mercy; it honors the children of God, who are temples of the Holy Spirit.

So let’s talk about that crucifix. Naturally, all Christians understand that death is not to be feared or shied away from, because it is the door to eternal life. But … why can’t we Catholics just focus on the “life” part? Isn’t it kind of ghoulish to have all those scenes of execution hanging around? It seems in bad taste at best, and maybe grotesquely backward at worst, as if we’re missing the point – fixating on the problem rather than the happy ending. 

No. The crucifix, corpus and all, gives our Faith and our entire lives meaning. We believe that Christ rose from the dead and that we will, too, someday; but we also understand that, just as Christ suffered on earth, so do we suffer now. And this is why we display so many crucifixes, and not just bare crosses: because we are still in the throes of that suffering. We need the crucifix to remind us that Christ is with us in our struggle. There is no pain, no sorrow, no failure, no fear, no doubt, no grief, no darkness that He did not personally feel and carry and endure.

And we need the crucifix to remind us that all of these things have already been redeemed, once and for all, by the one perfect sacrifice that came about when he willingly suffered and died to buy us back from death. The crucifix is both a reminder that Jesus shares what we suffer, and that Jesus has already taken on all the weight of the suffering we cause. 

When a priest has the immense privilege of saying Mass, Christ actually re-offers Himself, body, blood, soul, and divinity, to the Father. He does not suffer again, and He does not die again; but He does offer Himself again, as a living sacrifice, through the consecrated hands of the priest, because He never tires of giving Himself over for us, His beloved. 

And all of this happens on the altar, which is no mere table or stage set or piece of furniture. It recalls both the table of the Last Supper, where Christ instituted the Eucharist, and the altar on which Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac, in a prefiguring of the sacrifice that God the Father would make of His own son.

Heaven and earth converge on that altar. 

And this is why the actions of Father Pavone were so appalling. He, as a priest, ought to know better than anyone else that there is nothing that one can add to the sacrifice that takes place on that altar, where the actual body of actual God actually lies. The sacred altar is not the place for jokes, for ad libbing, for politics, or for anything besides the reason it was made: to be a place where God comes down from Heaven.

On that consecrated altar, not only do we join Christ in re-offering the sacrifice of Calvary to the Father, but we take his now-living body into our bodies.

And here’s the crux of it: It really is all about bodies, and how we treat them; the issue of Fr Pavone showing disrespect to the dead baby, and the issue of Fr Pavone showing disrespect to the altar? They are the same issue. You cannot separate them. You cannot take the crucifix away if you want to live. It was no accident that Jesus died such a public death, up on a high hill where everyone could see His shame, His suffering, and His bloody death. Recall how Moses cured the Israelites in the desert by forcing them to look up on the snake mounted on a cross. They had to look in order to be healed. And so must we look at a crucifix if we want to be healed.

If we were unwilling to face, to contemplate, to remember, to glory in the crucifixion, it would be like accepting a gift with thanks, but refusing to look inside. It would be like going to a doctor, but refusing to show him our flesh. It would be like joining in marriage but refusing to come to bed. You cannot refuse the body if you want life. We must look. We must show. For our own sakes, we must not turn away.

The Church teaches us to be careful with how we treat dead bodies, but also to be careful with how we treat living bodies – our own bodies, the bodies of others, and most of all the body of Our Lord. We believe that the consecrated Host is literally the living body of our living God. Before He died, He told us to remember Him, including the sacrifice He made for us. And so we honour that Ever-living God by obeying.

This is why we display crucifixes so prominently in our Churches: Because He told us to. He wanted us to know what He has done and will do for us, with his actual body. On the cross, His poor bleeding arms reached out east and west, stretching out to bring salvation to the generations who came before Christ and to all the generations yet unborn. And the crucifix also extends vertically, as He hung upright, bridging the gap between God and man. 

It’s not just an empty cross. It’s occupied Right in the middle of that intersection of worlds is the body, the body, that undeniably real human body of the Beloved Son, with the fountain of mercy pouring forth from His pierced heart.

To my protestant friend: You say that depictions of Christ’s suffering in the centre of worship makes you feel worried. It should. It should shake you to the core. 

The USCCB has announced the 2019 theme for Catechetical Sunday. It is “Stay with Us,” and here is the graphic to go with it:

My first impulse was to trash this graphic on its merits, but then I realized it doesn’t have any.

Luckily, I am very astute; and so, just for today’s post, I got together and called myself an Institute. If you’re not too lily-livered to continue reading and are ready to have some toxic modernest ideologies unmasked, then prepare to be outraged with all the infiltration that is going on in this seemingly innocuous graphic. 

First up is the blatant theme of mozzarella balls. One mozzarella ball is featured on the facade of the FranciStrocity-style “church” building, and the second is depicted barreling down the road toward Jesus.

It may seem comical for a a food item such as cheese to be included in a religious depiction, but in fact no depiction could be farther from being comical. Mozzarella is known to be associated with the region known as Italy, clearly and deliberately bringing to mind the dictator Mussolini, which obviously refers the even bigger dictator, Bergoglio, who is coming for Jesus like a giant mozzarella ball. This is in a nutshell the new fascism of the far left neo-marxist liberal agenda, and it’s mindblowing that more don’t see it, or do they and do they only wish to not see what is there to see? 

Directly under the mozzarella ball is a gray shape which at first resembles a cup but upon further examination is cleft at the bottom, like a fishtail.

This is a clear reference to the Sumerian fish-tailed god Enki, which is pagan, unlike Christianity. 

There is a whole class about this at Ave Maria.

As a final assault on the decency of the viewer, there appears dangling in the darkened doorway of the “church’s” facade a limb-like object rendered in lighter blue.

Our Lady of Fatima warned us that there would be fashions that would be grieving to Our Lady of Fatima, and to what else could she possibly be making reference to? This is clearly a leg, a woman’s leg, and it’s clad in blue, which is a reference to “bluestockings,” or educated women, which if you read Professor Tony Esolen you would know is why we’re in this fix today.  There is a whole class about this at Thomas More. 

Moving clockwise, we next encounter the smoke of satan. Extremely shocking, but there is not a lot to say about it.

Then there are some brown-skinned gals sorting fruit in a factory and we are okay with this, as long as they’re not working mothers, who should sorting fruit at home. They do appear to have their heads covered and this is commendable.

Directly to their right is depicted a depiction of two construction workers.

At first we were outraged because we thought they were gay, but then Professor Tony Esolen graciously provided us with a seminar which explained that they are simply two burly, sweaty men erecting a giant rod together before they shower in order to keep their minds off silly things. This made sense, so we stopped being outraged about this part. 

Under the wholesome heterosexual part there is a man depicted struggling against some sort of bars.

At first glance this appears to depict a man in prison, possibly referring to those pinko corporal works of mercy, but on closer inspection, the true meaning is even more nefarious. A scholar who goes by the name DeusMaximusVultDogg, who must remain anonymous because toxic feminists keep silencing him because no one understands flirting anymore, believes it to be masonic. We intend to zoom in and take a closer look later when our wife comes back from her obedience class and shows us how to zoom in. 

Can you believe we’re not even halfway through this? This is the price you pay for being rigorous in your scholarship. It’s very tiring, but sometimes this is the white martyrdom to which we are called.

On the lefthand side of the outrage, we have depicted a family with standard-colored skin, with three children and a cat.

The spacing between the ages of the second and third children seems suspiciously large, as if they may have had recourse to that modernistic tool of Satan, the basal thermometer; but the woman is wearing a skirt of a godly length and thus does not appear to be a toxic feminist. The close proximity of the cat, which has close ties to witchcraft, is troubling, but we’ll let it slide out of respect for the major donor and lifelong mentor who keeps this Institute afloat, the esteemed Baron von Tiddlywink. Baron von Tiddlywink likes to talk about how, when the white smoke come out of the chimney on that fateful day in 2013, he got a queasy feeling in his stomach, oh yes he did! And that’s how you know. 

We now arrive at the central outrage of the outrage, which is the depiction of how Jesus Christ is depicted. At first it simply appears to be simply typical of the post-conciliar “religious” art churned out by the dead-eyed spawn of limp-wristed heretics who didn’t even use Seton.

But if you turn the image sideways

you will see that hidden among the folds of the robe are very clear letters: aleph, nun, kaf. 

That’s right. These are Hebrew letters. Hebrew, as in JEW, and NOT THE GOOD KIND OF JEW, either, so it’s NOT ANTISEMITISM, OKAY? NOTHING IS ANTISEMITISM.

And that’s not where the infiltration ends! You will note that “aleph nun kaf” is strangely similar to the letters “A” “N” and “K,” which is a derivation of the wholesome ancient Anglo Saxon letter, “C.” Do you see it? Or are you blind? ANC, or African National Congress, which has clear ties to black people.

Friends, infiltration doesn’t get any more flagrant. They had a whole semester about this at Christendom. 

Also, the gentleman on the left looks like he has a mouth in his hair? Super masonic. 

There is more, but we leave the reader with one final outrage: Note the colors of the road down which the Jew-figure is mincing down: Green, orange, yellow, red, and purple.

Sound familiar?

These are all colors.

Where else have we seen colors?

That’s right: In the rainbow, as in the rainbow that’s been coopted by the pervChurch marxist LGBTQXYZ agenda-infiltrated headscarf-wearing effeminate condom-peddling amazonian nuchurch 

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EDIT 11:49 AM: In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to assume the form of Cardinal Burke.

Pax et bonum.