“Crucifixes, like depictions of saints carrying their breasts and eyes,

being flayed alive, boiled in oil or cooked on a griddle, are a hangover from pre-literate society when people needed such aids to devotion because they couldn’t read and couldn’t imagine anything which wasn’t interpreted for them visually”



The internet is now rife with comments about the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling that crucifixes should not be displayed in Italian classrooms because they can disturb children who are not Catholics. I have trawled through scores of them, read the remarks of politicians in Italy and of the Archbishop of Malta, and find myself astounded that not one person seems to have grasped the essential point. If some people have done so, then they are keeping their views to themselves.

The court has not ordered the removal of the Christian cross, but of the Catholic crucifix. The distinction is fundamental to the decision and should be essential in the current debate, but it has been overlooked completely, perhaps because most people cannot distinguish linguistically between a cross and a crucifix or understand that there are differences in religious tradition between both. The Christian symbol is the cross, and not the crucifix, which is used mainly by Catholics. The crucifix bears the representation of the tortured body of Christ. The cross does not.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled for the removal of crucifixes – and not crosses – and then only from classrooms, on the grounds that these might disturb children who are not Catholics. Unfortunately, the meaning of the ruling was blurred by unnecessary references to religion, when essentially this is not about religion at all, but about psychology and the exposing of young children to depictions of torture and cruelty which are entirely unsuitable for their consumption. The European Court of Human Rights is correct: depictions of cruelly flogged and bloodied men nailed to crosses through their hands and feet, with a crown of thorns rammed onto their head and a spear rammed into their abdomen, are (not ‘might be’) profoundly disturbing to children who are not inured to them by constant exposure in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture.

Even Catholic children are disturbed by such things. I was one of them, which is why I am in agreement with this ruling and why I understood it immediately to have little or nothing to do with religious freedom, and everything to do with protecting children’s sensibilities from horrific depictions of extreme cruelty, torture and murder.

Though I was raised a Catholic, I grew up in a home without crucifixes. There was the occasional saint and Madonna, maybe even a cross, but absolutely no crucifixes. I can only assume my mother thought she shouldn’t hang depictions of terrible torture in a household with four young children, because I once found an inherited crucifix carefully concealed in a drawer. Whenever a present was bought for baptisms, it was a little gold cross and not a little gold crucifix. If you were on the receiving end of a crucifix rather than a cross, and you were going to insist on hanging that little tortured man around your neck, then you would have to conceal it completely beneath your clothing and refrain from wearing it with open-necked shirts, because displaying a crucifix around your neck, unlike displaying a cross, was considered unseemly and tasteless.

I went to two Catholic schools, one of which was housed in a properly old-fashioned convent of nuns in an ancient building in Mdina. I don’t recall that there was ever a crucifix hanging in any one of the 12 classrooms in which I sat over the years. My chief encounter with a crucifix outside a church, in my childhood, was at my paternal grandparents’ home (my maternal grandparents had none on display). I realise now that it must have been a magnificent thing, with an exquisitely-wrought Christ nailed to a vast, ebony cross, but though the room in which it hung was right next to the room in which we sat when we visited, that crucifix kept me out. It horrified me.

Though I lacked the language with which to form the thought coherently, as a child I somehow understood that this was not a religious symbol but a graphic description of terrible torture and murder, and that its routine display in banal contexts detracted from the hideous reality of what was being depicted. I still detest crucifixes. They make me shudder. My reaction to them is no different than it is to other depictions of torture, which I cannot bear to look at. When I was a little older, I thought it very odd that children were shielded from extreme cruelty in films and books, but exposed to it in the name of religious devotion. I was in London for the last two weeks and visited every special exhibition going on, except for The Sacred Made Real, which is replete with graphically realistic images of a suffering, tortured and torn Christ, from the extreme end of Spanish Catholicism. When I am exposed to too much of this sort of thing, I am left with the lingering impression that this kind of Catholic-inspired art was a refuge for people of suspect psychology or sadomasochistic inclinations, just as it is today with that nasty little Catholic drunk who produced The Passion of the Christ and, in quick succession, a revoltingly bloodthirsty and graphically sadistic epic about indigenous central American people.

Crucifixes, like depictions of saints carrying their breasts and eyes, being flayed alive, boiled in oil or cooked on a griddle, are a hangover from pre-literate society when people needed such aids to devotion because they couldn’t read and couldn’t imagine anything which wasn’t interpreted for them visually. They are, essentially, a portrayal of torture and murder and as such have no place in rooms where children are exposed to them. Most children are incapable of understanding abstract concepts and the idea of a symbol, and will see a crucifix with startling clarity for what it is: a bleeding and cruelly beaten man nailed to a piece of wood. It makes no difference to them that he is Christ. He is still a man, in the shape of a man.

But to my mind, what is worse than exposing children to this kind of horror is inuring them to it. A classroom of children glossing over the fact that on the wall above their head hangs an image of a tortured man nailed to a cross and dying fills me with distaste so profound, so disturbing, that I cannot find the words to describe it. It is perverse beyond description.



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