Papal Death Hammers and the Unreasonably Hot Jesus
The Son of God never skipped leg day. Know this.
Catholic school. I went for one year (2nd grade), but I’ve spent several decades laying awake at night, thinking about how weird it was to continually subject kids to the body horror that’s part and parcel with this particular branch of Christianity’s folklore.
(CW: There are a bunch of descriptions of gore after Willem Dafoe, if you want to nope out now.)
During just one school year, I learned the following:
Although most depictions of the crucifixion feature the nails going through Jesus’s palms, they’re not historically accurate; the nails would rip right through his palms once the cross was hoisted. He was nailed through the wrists. I don’t know if Jesus was actually nailed through his wrists, I’m just relaying what we ( 7- and 8-year-olds) were told.
Crucifixion is a horrifically painful way to go that involves the person’s legs being broken so they lose the muscle support required to take a breath and eventually asphyxiate. From Gizmodo:
One common form of crucifixion didn't involve a cross. A person was crucified with their hands over their head. This made it so difficult to breathe (once their strength had given out) that they were dead within an hour. Being crucified with arms outstretched was comparatively much worse. After a person's arms had come out of their sockets the chest would sag downwards, stretching out to its full extent. If you strenuously stretch out your arms, even while seated, you'll recognize the difficulty. It's easy to inhale with arms fully outstretched, but difficult to exhale again. The body needs to work its muscles to breathe in and out, and it is used to doing so with little resistance. Once the chest is fully expanded, it's impossible to breathe in anything more than sips of air. The victim slowly suffocates, unable to get enough oxygen, over the course of a day. Cool!
I vividly remember my teacher, Mrs. Donnelly, acting out this dance of death for us, with her outstretched arms and exaggerated gasps and moans. Extremely normal shit, watching your teacher pretend she’s dying on a cross.(Again, we were 7- and 8-year-olds.)
According to the Book of Matthew, King Herod tried to have the baby Jesus killed by ordering the slaughter of every child under the age of two in Bethlehem, aka “The Massacre of the Innocents.” Burned into my memory is a picture book where the illustrator apparently relished his job drawing Roman soldiers impaling infants to the wall with spears. That shit was so gory, it made the Rubens painting look like a Peanuts cartoon.
This is a longwinded-ass way to say that amid all this Cronenbergian body horror, I’m pissed off that the teaching faculty dropped the ball on disseminating one crucial piece of information:
The Vatican denies this ever happened, but the Vatican likes to deny a lot of things. Still, I don’t care that this is most likely an urban legend. This alleged institution of learning taught us about virgin births and a dead guy busting out of his tomb after three days. They couldn’t have added this rad, exponentially more believable yarn about about how a cardinal acting like a mob hitman delivering one final kill shot to the dome? Unacceptable.
Maybe this was something they saved for the third graders. By that point, I was back in public school, but I wasn’t free from Catholicism’s clutches.
In my house, attending church on Sunday was mandatory. The one we went to was particularly memorable. You see, above the altar at St. Mary’s in Cherry Hill, NJ hung a giant crucifix comprised of several baffling creative choices that have haunted me for decades.
Computer, enhance:
Let’s start with what’s missing from the more traditional representations:
Long hair
Blood
Eyes cast down in sorry or plaintively looking toward the sky while presumably asking, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A beard. Or body hair of any kind
Any appearance of suffering
Any evidence of the torture he endure from Roman soldier or the bodily trauma resulting from carrying a cross through Jerusalem’s stone streets
There’s nothing I want more in this world than for this artist to walk me through each decision, step by steps. For starters, did the Romans wax Jesus’s entire body prior to crucifying him? Why is the Son of God rocking the center-part chin bob mid-90s “butt cut” made popular by Boy Meets World’s Will Friedle and Jonathan Taylor Thomas? At what point did the artist decide that Our Lord and Savior had a gym membership? Did the artist make these choices on his own or did the diocese ask him to make sure Jesus was built like a professional soccer player? Was the artist trying to provoke an unsettling sexual awakening among all the tweens and teens in attendance? (Mission accomplished!)
In any case, Mrs. Donnelly would be stoked to see that the St. Mary’s Jesus was nailed through the wrists instead of the palms.
Anyhoo, Catholic school. Avoid it at all costs.
See you all in hell,
Maggie
Is that the church on Springdale Road by the strip mall that used to have The BOYZ Subs & Steaks in it? I used to love making fun of their sign. It had the word "BOYZ" in huge letters. Like, for YEARS. And no one ever said "hey maybe this is a terrible name for a sandwich place."