Lello Scorzelli's Ferula: a return to the past

Broken, tortured, twisted, contorted are the words that come to mind looking at this crucifix. It has the sense of  being in flux, half-formed, raw in its conception. It is still incredibly disturbing, what it represents is truly disturbing, the death of Christ, which represents something beyond the story of the Gospel but actually what I find disturbing is the mind of the artist that imagined it. It comes from the era of brutalism of concrete and "machines for living in", from that artistic period when art itself hung stretched and distorted before its own death, screaming in agony at its fear of its own pain, confronting humanity with its own ugliness.

Some have suggested it is a Jansenist image, I don't know about that. It represents humanity debased. Here is the victim of man's inhumanity to man, there is nothing divine here, it is absolute self emptying. Here is man mangled and remade by the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao, and yes, of the murderous torturers of South America. Here, grace is excluded, the hand of God is absent.

It symbolises too the uncertainty of the post-concillior Church, stripped bare, in flux, not fully formed, a broken human institution, humbled, gasping in a particular moment of history, more dead than alive. It is austere without any beauty. It is the Church of Good Friday, devoid of any sense of Grace, or of Easter hope.

I can understand its appeal to Paul VI, it seems to sum up everything we know about his tortured loneliness, and for John Paul II it seemed to sum up his sense of the "victimhood" of his rather Polish spirituality, in the same way I can see why Pope Benedict rejected it, it fitted uneasily with his theology of "Joy" and "Man-Redeemed", the traditional Papal Ferula, gilt empty victorious cross of the now risen Christ, spoke eloquently of his own theology.

Last night Lello Scorzelli's ferula reappeared at the enthronement in the Lateran in the hands of Pope Francis. More than any other Papal ornament it symbolises a return to the time before Benedict and a return to the uncertainties of Paul VI, and to a more austere Church. For Pope Francis it perhaps a symbol of "the poor", and a sign of an austere Church, in an austere world. For a Pope ordained priest in 1969 it is perhaps "the" symbol of the "modern" Papacy, for someone whose priesthood was spent in Villas and in the oppression of the Peronist and post-Peronist Junta, it is perhaps the perfect symbol.

For the rest of us it is a return to a period in the history of the Church which many priests of my age and older see as being the Church of their youth, it marks a rupture with Benedictine reforms, whether Pope Francis intends this to be said I doubt but it certainly marks a return to the past.

Perhaps it was too soon to put away those arrangements of Kum-by-yaa.