An Invitation to Love the Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ

By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (*)

For this year’s Lent I wish to offer for our readers’ consideration a great and supreme truth, whose remembrance should shed light on all the meditations that good Catholics may choose to make on the theme.

The holy Gospels show us with great clarity how much our Divine Savior in His mercy pities our pains of soul and body. To see this, we need only recall the awesome miracles He performed by His omnipotence to mitigate these pains.

Nevertheless, let us not imagine that this combat against pain and sorrow was the greatest gift He dispensed to mankind in this earthly life.

He who would close his eyes to the central fact of Our Lord’s life – that He is our Redeemer and desired to endure the cruelest sufferings in order to redeem us – would have misunderstood His mission.

Even at the very apex of His Passion, Our Lord could have put an end to all those pains instantly by a mere act of His Divine will. From the very first moment of His Passion to the very last, He could have ordered His wounds to heal, His precious blood to stop pouring forth, and the effects of the blows on His Divine body to disappear without a scar. Finally, He could have given Himself a brilliant and jubilant victory, abruptly halting the persecution that was dragging Him to death.

Nevertheless, He willed none of this. On the contrary, He willed to allow Himself to be led up the Via Dolorosa to the height of Golgotha; He willed to see His most holy Mother engulfed in the depths of sorrow; and, finally, He willed to cry out so that those piercing words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46), would echo till the consummation of the ages.

Through these realities we understand that by granting each of us the grace of being called to suffer a portion of His Passion with Him, He made clear the unrivaled role of the cross in the lives of men, in the history of the world, and in His glorification.

Let us not think that by inviting us to suffer the pains and sorrows of the present life He wished to dispense each of us from pronouncing, at the time of death, our own consummatum est.

If we do not understand the role of the cross, if we do not love the cross, if we do not read our own via crucis, we will not fulfill Providence’s designs for us. And, when dying, we will not be able to make ours the sublime exclamation of Saint Paul: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. As for the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day” (2 Tim. 4:7-8).

Any quality, however exalted, will avail nothing unless it be founded on love for the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ. With this love we can obtain all, even if we find heavy the holy burden of purity and other virtues, the unceasing attacks and mockeries of the enemies of the Faith, and the betrayals of false friends.

The great foundation, indeed the greatest foundation, of Christian civilization is that each and every person cultivate a generous love for the Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

May Mary help us with this, and we shall have reconquered for her Divine Son the reign of God that today flickers so faintly in the hearts of men.

(Crusade, Jan-Feb 2001)