Of Pectoral Crosses

This coming Wednesday, the cross on the left will be given to Benedict XVI as a gift from Rome's community of artisans.... Notice the coat of arms at the center of the chain. Notice further that that is not a tiara surmounting the coat of arms at the center of the chain.

It'd be nice if he wore this new one every once in awhile, no? Since his ascent, Ratzinger has made daily use of a plain, long gold pectoral with a filigreed pattern at the edges of the arms. For choral dress, he's brought out the emeralds.

Of course, as highlighted by George Weigel and others, John Paul II was known to wear but one pectoral cross throughout the whole of his pontificate. As archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla had inherited the cross simplex given his mentor, the Prince-Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, when the latter was ordained to the episcopate by Pius X (of Econe fame). When John Paul II received then-Archbishop Francizek Macharski after his ordination as Wojtyla's successor in Krakow in January, 1979, the Pope gave the new archbishop the Sapieha cross with the words, "This belongs to the Archbishop of Krakow." Macharski immediately had a copy made, and John Paul wore it exclusively until his death. (See below for clarification.)

With thanks to the Italian desk, here's an explanation of the new cross for a new Pope by its creator, the Roman jeweller Fausto Maria Franchi

". . . I prepared myself for the project of the Pectoral Cross, seeking to express in it both my own language, as an artistic goldsmith, which communicates through its own medium, as well as the spirituality so incisive a sign wants to and must transmit. The simplicity and confines (rigor) of the form, appropriate for exalting the strength of the message, are communicated through the ‘texture’ of the surface, obtained through a detailed work of chiseling, and from the blue that leaps out from the very plain style, lightly projecting from the cross, forming a second sign of the cross (a cross within a cross) . . ."

Hey, the Big Man's already gone for modern vestments, what's a streamlined pontifical or two?

SVILUPPO: A sterling sacerdote has sent me photos proving that, indeed, the Sapieha replica cross was not John Paul's sole cross for the whole of his pontificate. Early on, he experimented with jewels, and toward the end, he donned a cross which looks conspicuously like the one used daily by B16.


Santo subito.

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