Death by Crucifix

It was as surreal a moment as any supposable. Redemptorist priest Fr. Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari, 53 years of age, was celebrating Mass in Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in the city of southern Guayaquil, Ecuador on Oct. 17, when, after his sermon, the large crucifix on the back wall of the sanctuary above the tabernacle fell forward and killed the priest at the altar.

The inconceivable moment was captured on livestream, and the people attending the Mass ran up flabbergasted and horrified to help the poor priest. Emergency responders arrived on the scene, but Fr. Sánchez Molinari was beyond mortal assistance—sent to his death’s judgment by a representation of the Judge in death. The Archdiocese of Guayaquil announced his untimely passing with words of consolation and solidarity for his loved ones—but no official explanation for how the crucifix came to fall in that manner has been released as of this writing.

If such an event had occurred 2,000 years ago, it probably would have been in the Bible. When images and events of such significance assume a totally incongruous aspect, they bend the mind to make sense of what may simply be consequence, trying to see by faith instead of by accident. The Catholic sensibility awakens with a start to see a crucifix become like the sword of Damocles. The cross has been turned on its head before for holy and powerful purpose, as the first pope arranged for himself and for all Catholics to follow him.

The Catholic imagination leaps to find meaning when the peaceful ensign of our trust in deliverance from death delivers death itself in a painful paradox. It creates a scene where the ancient Greek principle of “divine madness” leaps into the Christian era like an enigma, when a label of apparent insanity is somehow the best way to deal with divine inscrutability.

For a priest to die instantly at the altar by a cross carries dreadful and irresistible suggestion for those who are open to witnessing the hand of God in things. It is St. Peter’s dome being struck by a bolt when Benedict XVI resigned. It is Notre-Dame de Paris in flames as France flees from her old faith. It is the lightning that blasted the keys from the statue of St. Peter in Argentina on Pope Francis’s birthday, a day before the release of Fiducia Supplicans. It’s hard not to be a signs-and-wonders person when faced with such pregnant improbabilities.

In this month when the season shifts into chilly darkness and the dead are remembered, with All Souls Day approaching fast, this shocking event bears the banner of life’s fleetingness and how death comes on swift feet. In the poetry of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, over Goldengrove unleaving, “It is the blight man was born for.” In fact, and to deepen the wonder of it all, Fr. Sánchez Molinari had just finished a homily in which he reminded his people that all of us will die, and urged them to give their time to God.

He reminded his congregation how quickly life passes and how death comes for all, often unexpectedly. “In our lives, sometimes we fail to give that time, that space, to God… God should come first: before money, before work, and before the activities of our family and our home,” he said, according to a transcript in a local Guayaquil newspaper.

“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we have spent on certain things does not hold as much meaning as the time we have spent with God. The quality time we dedicate to God, to our brothers and sisters, to our spouse, to our children, and to our family, that is time spent in the best possible way.”

God may be mysterious in His ways, though there is an almost explicit quality to these circumstances—for God can be obvious as well. Man has an inclination for irony, and the great irony of the Cross is strangely and solemnly present in this strange and solemn story—how the mean and routine execution of a political and religious upstart was actually, unbeknownst to all, the sacrificial salvific act for all humanity past, present, and future. A wonderful and terrible irony.

Here was a priest of God, assisting in the ministry of the successors to the apostles, literally crushed by the cross he set his life toward hoisting on high. Here is something of the awful weight of the cross enacted in a moment of earthly horror—and, hopefully, heavenly homecoming. Here is not the graceful miracle of the cross that danced to dodge a cannonball at Lepanto. Here is the brutal impact of an incontestable fact. The cross is as hard to reconcile in itself as this nearly unimaginable occurrence. As Chesterton wrote for his character Professor Lucifer in his romping yet reflective novel, The Ball and the Cross, in an argument with a monk named Michael:

“…The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms.”

So it is with the cross, and so it appears in this mysterious instance. It is weird, or perhaps more specifically in the Old English, it is wyrd: it is that which has come to pass, as peculiar and inevitable as a kind of fate. This is the cross with all its force, with all its hammers and its nails.

It may seem at best curious, and at worst morbid, to speculate and elaborate on this remarkable and repulsive tragedy, but it is one of those uncanny moments that invite contemplation of divine design or symbol. There are churchyard elegies that people hear in shifting suggestions without the aid of words before their own is written down indelibly in stone. Of course, it may be little better than a temptation to make grand meaning out of grim happenstance, like the gnomish Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.

But there is real purpose in paradox, no matter how outlandish or incidental it may be or appear to be. There is real and relevant—and even revelatory—truth to Hamlet’s musing that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” There’s a special and painful poignancy in witnessing such a stark reminder of the fragility of life set in the context of the liturgy of eternal life.

And though it may seem like one of those moments where God smites one off the face of the earth for incomprehensible reasons, or when He seemingly acts in opposition to the good of His own Church—as when He whipped up the winds to wreck the invincible armada of Philip II against the rocks en route to invade England and eradicate the rise of Protestantism in 1588—these are the tests that try our faith like a forge, just as the cross did on Golgotha.

Moments like these, from the destruction of a mighty army to the death of an obscure priest, push people to wonder what the meanings of such events could possibly be—and that push brings them closer to the work of the Lord in the world. Memento mori rustles in the leaves as they shudder against the creeping cold, as God leaves His writing on the wall of the whole world for all to read.

Pray for the repose of the soul of Fr. Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari. Pray for his flock. Pray for all souls and for the signs that remind us, whether gently or violently, that we all have souls to save in the everlasting life of the Cross and in whatever form death may come for us.