Chapter 4

Testimonies From Sacred Tradition

The Church has received the sign of the Cross in the anointing with holy Chrism, and calls it the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, imprinting it on the forehead and on the breast and on the back and on the hands and on the feet with the holy Chrism through the priest who performs the mystery, chanting “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The sign of the Cross is in use in the holy Eucharist. The Church has received and preserves inviolably the imprinting of the Cross upon the offerings destined for the celebration of the mystery of the divine Eucharist, and imprints the Cross upon the holy bread by means of the holy lance. The sign of the Cross is imprinted many times during the divine Eucharist by the hand of the priest. We find the sign of the Cross in ordination and in all the mysteries and in blessing. The sign of the Cross in the anointing of the baptized with the holy myrrh the Church calls the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Revelation there is mention of a seal in chapter 7:3–4 and 9:4, and 14:1, and the interpreters have understood this seal as indicating the sign of the Cross of the Lord, because the sign of the Cross is the seal of the Lord by which His own are known from strangers, and the trophy against the devil.

Saint Ambrose says, “We have the sign of the Cross on our forehead, on our heart, and on our hands; on the forehead, because we must always confess Jesus Christ; on the heart, because we ought always to love Him; on the hands because we ought always to work for the divine law (in the Life of Isaac).”

Saint Ambrose, defending against the pagans who thought that Christians worship the Cross on which He died (“id colunt quod merentur”), says that it is not the Cross—the wood—that Christians worship, but Christ who suffered on the Cross. “Christ who hung on the wood… not the wood” (On the Death of Theodosius XLV). Ambrose lived around the years 380–397; the making of the precious Cross out of wood and its veneration in honor took place before the emperor Constantine the Great.

The Christians of the first centuries represented the crucifixion of the Savior Christ through symbolic monograms. Archaeologists date these monograms to the first century, at the same time when the faithful in Antioch were called Christians there, long before the reign of Constantine the Great. Rossi holds a different opinion, saying: “Although many writers and likewise many scholars wrote in 1855 (Ordo officii solesmense, II p. 552), I must confess that to this day I have not encountered any Christian monument, more or less authentic, that proves in a certain manner that the monograms existed engraved or painted before the revelation of Constantine the Great.” Constantine. This opinion of the learned writer, even if it is considered accurate, testifies that such symbols have not been preserved, not that such symbols did not exist, because many Latin and Greek Fathers who flourished during the first centuries, the second and third, speak about symbols.[1]