From Your Parish Priest – 12th September 2026
On Monday, the Church will celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. This feast traces its origins back to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Basilica was consecrated on 13 September 335 and the following day the True Cross was brought out for public veneration. On this feast, the Church asks us to celebrate and reflect upon the Cross, the instrument upon which and through which, Our Lord achieved our redemption by his Passion and death.
As Christians, we will, of course, be very familiar with the Cross. We worship and celebrate Mass beneath the image of the Cross, many of us wear a cross around our necks and hopefully we all have a crucifix in our homes. While this familiarity with the Cross is a good thing, it can sometimes dull our sense of wonder. How often does the Cross become merely a symbol, or even a trademark? At times, it can lose its true meaning and become simply a means of identifying someone as a Christian, rather than a sign of what we actually believe. I think we can all be guilty of this. It is only natural that, when we become too accustomed to something, we can lose sight of its significance. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is an excellent opportunity for us to pause, realign ourselves and deepen our devotion to the Cross of Christ. It is an opportunity to restore the sense of wonder and reverence that we should all have when approaching the Cross.
A good indication of whether we are taking the Cross seriously in our lives and whether its meaning truly resonates within us, is the way in which we make the Sign of the Cross. Hopefully, we make the Sign of the Cross several times each day. We begin and end all our prayers with it. We make it when we bless ourselves, when we enter church and when we offer even the briefest prayer.
We should be very familiar with making the Sign of the Cross but we must never allow it to become a hurried or thoughtless gesture. If we stop to think and are completely honest with ourselves, have we allowed the Sign of the Cross to become an action devoid of devotion and reverence? Have we, in fact, been blasphemous in our use of it? In recent years, the Sign of the Cross has sometimes become something done almost in jest, like giving one’s scout’s honour, or as a gesture used to underline a promise. In this way, something sacred can easily become something flippant.
If this is the case, then it is especially important that we take the opportunity presented by the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross to strengthen our devotion to the Cross and correct any bad habits we may have developed in the way we make its sign. The Sign of the Cross should not be laboured, exaggerated or ostentatious. It should, however, be made thoughtfully and reverently, as an outward sign of what we truly believe.
When we make the Sign of the Cross, we profess our faith in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim our belief that the Son of God was born into this world so that our sins might be forgiven and washed clean through his Passion and death, through his great sacrifice and the shedding of his Precious Blood upon the Cross.
God bless, Fr Hilton