Catholic tastes.

CROSS EXAMINATION Though the cross today is the most widely used and immediately identifiable symbol of Christianity, most scholars believe that it was almost never used as a religious symbol until some 400 years after Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.

The cross at the time was being used for crucifixion and torture," New Testament professor Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, O.P. told Catholic News Service (March 30, 1999). "To wear it around one's neck would be like wearing a miniature electric chair around your neck today. The idea was repulsive." Early Christians used other symbols such as the fish, the anchor, and various forms of christograms (combinations of the first letters of Jesus Christ in Greek).

According to Murphy-O'Connor, the cross could only be used as a Christian symbol after Emperor Constantine outlawed crucifixion as a punishment and over time people no longer knew the hideous details of what crucifixion entailed. The cross first appeared in the early fifth century as a Christian symbol, and two centuries later the figure of Jesus was put on images of the cross.

INFANT FAITH Thomas Landy, a lecturer at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, admits to always having been "put off" by the various statues portraying Jesus as an infant king. "Most puzzling," he remembers in Commonweal (Dec. 17, 1999), "were statues of the Infant of Prague. One of them stood on my mother's dresser as long as I can remember. It was a taken-for-granted part of my religious world, but not one to which I related.

"Years later, traveling in Prague, I saw in a store window a large poster depicting at least a hundred regal outfits that could be purchased to dress the statue. Impiously I saw it as a comical `Jesus-as-Barbie' sort of religiosity. A joke I heard later: `What did Mary say when she first saw Jesus dressed as the Infant of Prague?' `You're not going out of this house dressed like that!'"

AGENT PROVOCATEUR "A church that doesn't provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a Word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin--what gospel is that?

--Archbishop Oscar Romero (quoted in The Other Side, January/February 2000)

WELCOME "I welcome you to the church. Ifs got its problems, but let me tell you two wonderful things about it. This Baptism makes you related to millions of people! People who lived a long time ago and people who live in Zimbabwe and France and Brazil.... [And] the second wonderful thing: being a friend of Jesus."

--Author Jane Redmont in a letter for a child's Baptism (quoted in America, Dec. 4, 1999)

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"WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE between heaven and hell?" the disciples of a famous seer in China asked. The seer answered: "Imagine a huge mountain of rice, boiled and deliciously prepared. Around it, hungry people have gathered with long chopsticks--some 2 yards long. The utensils easily reach the rice, but people cannot put them to their mouths. They simple are too long. This is hell."

After a short while, the master continued: "In the room next door other hungry people are sitting with similar chopsticks. They too are gathered around a mountain of delicious prepared rice. But they are feeding each other, cracking jokes, and enjoying each others community. This is heaven." (From: mission aktuell, 3/1998)