Leo XIV Prays Before Horrid Crucifix Condemned by Pope Benedict XV

Between San Marino and Rimini…

Leo XIV Prays Before Horrid Crucifix Condemned by Pope Benedict XV

This past Saturday, on Aug. 22, 2026, the Rev. Robert Prevost — more commonly known by his stage name ‘Pope Leo XIV’ — went on a ‘pastoral visit’ to the Republic of San Marino and to the Italian city of Rimini. The occasion for the trip was the so-called ‘Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples’, a ‘Catholic’ event sponsored annually by the Communion and Liberation movement.

The official trip schedule released by the Vatican notes in between the two destinations: “The Holy Father will pay a strictly private visit to the community of the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Padua of the Augustinian Nuns at Pennabilli.”

The Novus Ordo video news site Rome Reports shared the following raw footage of the private visit (direct link here):

.
Regarding Prevost’s stopover, Rome Reports explains: “After visiting San Marino and before arriving in Rimini, Pope Leo XIV stopped by a monastery of Augustinian nuns, which he had visited on previous occasions as prior. It is the St. Anthony of Padua Convent, located in the village of Valmarecchia, on the Pennabilli cliff. Pope Leo greeted the sisters and the townspeople, before sharing with them a moment of music and prayer.”

It is the moment of prayer (beginning in the video at 1:50) that we will focus on in the present post, as most people will find the crucifix before which Leo XIV knelt at least disturbing:

(video screenshot – notice also the tiny tabernacle inside the wall)

This questionable crucifix is the creation of Sr. Elena Manganelli, an Augustinian nun and sculptor who resides at the convent there.

Perusing her other works, it becomes clear rather quickly that she is no stranger to the bizarre and the twisted. There is a digital catalog with a large number of her creations that can be viewed here, but be careful, as a lot of the items are disturbing and offensive, some even lewd.

Manganelli’s name is known in the Vatican. In 2011, images drawn by her were included in the official booklet of the ‘papal’ Stations of the Cross on Good Friday at the Roman Colosseum, then with ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI.

Here is a close-up of the Manganelli crucifix. The photo is taken from the convent’s web site, where the work is identified as being Manganelli’s. Here there is also included a lance piercing Christ’s Sacred Heart, which was either removed or perhaps broke off before Prevost came to visit last Saturday.

No, we are not saying that Leo XIV praying before this crucifix is a big scandal in itself. However, the incident is indicative of the larger problem and presents a good opportunity to recall the Church’s condemnation of religious art that does not foster pious devotion but instead is more likely to evoke revulsion and disgust in the beholder.

Interestingly enough, the cross before which Leo XIV knelt as he prayed with the Augustinian nuns in Valmarecchia bears striking resemblance to the crucifixion scene drawn in 1919 by Belgian artist Albert Servaes (1883-1966) as part of a Way of the Cross series. Servaes had produced two sets of the Via Crucis: one consisting of charcoal drawings for a book, the other consisting of paintings to be used at a Carmelite monastery chapel in Luithagen, Belgium. Here is a sample:

.
In 1921, the Holy Office under Pope Benedict XV (r. 1914-1922) condemned Servaes’ renditions of the Stations of the Cross and ordered them removed from churches and other sacred places:

Their Eminences the Most Reverend Cardinals, General Inquisitors in matters of faith and morals, in the ordinary session held on Wednesday, February 23, 1921, have decreed that the following should be publicly declared:

The sacred images belonging to a certain new school of painting, a specimen of which is presented in the booklet entitled La Passion de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ [The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ] by Cyril Verschaeve (adorned with compositions by Albert Servaes. Brussels and Paris. National Library of Art and History, G. van Oest and Co., Publishers, 1920), are prohibited by the law itself according to the prescription of Canon 1399, n. 12, and must therefore be immediately removed from churches, oratories, and other places in which they may happen to be displayed.

On the following Thursday, the 24th of the same month and year, His Holiness Our Lord Benedict XV, by divine Providence Pope, in the usual audience granted to the Most Reverend Father the Assessor of the Holy Office, approved the resolution of the Most Eminent Fathers that had been reported to him, and commanded those concerned to observe it and see that it is observed.

Given at Rome, from the offices of the Holy Office, March 30, 1921.

A. Castellano
Notary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office

(Source: Acta Apostolicae Sedis XIII [1921], n. 5, p. 197; English translation by Grok 4.3.)

The canon the Holy Office document appeals to says: “By the law, [the following] are prohibited: … 12.° Any images or impressions of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the Angels and Saints or other Servants of God, alien to the sense and decrees of the Church” (1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1399, n. 12).

The “new school of painting” the decree refers to is that of Expressionism. Notice that any such images are to be removed, not merely those created by Servaes: “The sacred images belonging to a certain new school of painting … are prohibited by the law itself … and must therefore be immediately removed from churches, oratories, and other places in which they may happen to be displayed.”

To be clear, the Holy See was not condemning the artist himself, who to all appearances was a good Catholic. The Jesuit canonist and moral theologian Fr. Arthur Vermeersch wrote: “The painter himself, Servaes, has a good reputation and deserves to be considered a sincerely Catholic man” (Periodica de Re Canonica et Morali, vol. 10 [1921], n. 135, p. 288; translation by Grok 4.3). What was condemned, rather, was the particular drawings he had produced in this avant-garde style. They were not to be used for any religious purposes, private or public. However: “In an effort to support and explore Servaes’ spiritual vision, Dutch Carmelite friar Titus Brandsma had the images published in Opgang, a Catholic cultural magazine. Alongside each image, Brandsma added his own meditation” (Wikipedia, s.v. “Albert Servaes”).

It is easy to see why the Church would forbid horrid depictions of Our Lord, even though, of course, Isaias prophesied concerning His Passion that He would have “no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him” (Is 53:2). The reason is that they do not edify, they do not help; rather, they turn souls away. As Fr. Vermeersch goes on to explain: “However, the style of the paintings falls under this criticism because it, with unusual forms, induces a certain horror and rather violently disturbs the senses instead of fostering a gentle feeling of devotion.”

Similarly, in an article written specifically on the Servaes case, another theologian remarks:

…let us not forget that traditional Catholic devotion closely associates the serene grandeur of the divine Victim—through a sort of respectful modesty—with the very torments of the Passion; and that the exercise of Christian compassion in no way requires that we savagely batter our deepest sensibilities. The Church, though so tolerant of sincere forms of personal devotion—especially the devotion of the humble—is nevertheless a friend of wise moderation and wary of the unusual.

…

To avoid the Charybdis of “form,” Servaes recklessly veers toward the Scylla of deliberate “deformation” and artificial disfigurement. Not only does he fail to make his most majestic figures archetypes of human beauty—which is, after all, permissible—but he positively turns them into subhuman archetypes, sorts of degenerates, or even unevolved prehistoric beings, whose skeletons, in the eyes of an anatomist, sometimes exhibit more than one trait of lower animality.

(Joseph Maréchal, S.J., “Un décret récent du Saint-Office en matière d’iconographie religieuse”, in Nouvelle Revue Théologique, vol. 48 [1921], pp. 341, 342; translation by DeepL.)

Portrayals of the Cross of Our Lord, just like of the Christmas crib, are meant to draw people, not repel them: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. (Now this he said, signifying what death he should die.)” (Jn 12:32-33); “No man can come to me, except the Father, who hath sent me, draw him; and I will raise him up in the last day” (Jn 6:44); “Whom when Jesus saw, he was much displeased, and saith to them: Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mk 10:14).

In the 16th century, the Council of Trent had already made clear that one of the purposes of religious imagery was for the Catholic people to “be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety”, so that bishops were to see to it “that there be nothing seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of God” (Session XXV, Decree on the Saints and Sacred Images).

On Feb. 23, 1924, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — this was before he turned bad — gave a lecture on religious art, in which he addressed the condemnation of Servaes’ works. His remarks are insightful:

Sacred art is in absolute dependence upon theological wisdom. In the signs it presents to our eyes something infinitely superior to all our human art is manifested, divine Truth itself, the treasure of light that was purchased for us by the blood of Christ. It is above all for this reason, because the sovereign interests of the Faith are at stake in the matter, that the Church exercises her authority and magisterium over sacred art. I recalled a moment ago the decree of [Pope] Urban VIII of March 15, 1642, and the prescript of the 25th session of the Council of Trent. There are other instances. On June 11, 1623, the Congregation of Rites proscribed crucifixes representing Christ with arms updrawn. On September 11, 1670, a decree of the Holy Office forbade the making of crucifixes “in a form so coarse and artless, in an attitude so indecent, with features so distorted by grief that they provoke disgust rather than pious attention.” And you know that in March, 1921, the Holy Office forbade the exhibition in churches of certain works of the Flemish painter Servaes.

Here is a point that merits all our attention. Servaes is a painter of great talent, a Christian full of faith, and one can only speak of his person with respect and affection; I am happy to bear testimony to him here. The Stations of the Cross which raised such violent commotion in Belgium gave birth to deep religious emotions in certain souls, nay more, brought about conversions. Nevertheless the Church condemned it, and it is never difficult, even when the appearances and the human procedures disconcert us, to understand the wisdom and justice of the Church’s decisions. In spite of himself, assuredly, and not in his soul but in his work, the painter, fascinated by the Ego sum vermis et non homo of Isaias and conceiving his Stations as a pure vertigo of grief, happened to be false to certain theological truths of capital importance — above all the truth that the sufferings as well as the death of Our Lord were essentially voluntary, and that it was a divine Person who suffered the most appalling human suffering: the pain and agony of His Humanity were handled by the Word as the tool with which He performed His great work. At the same time, for those who cannot harmonize the poor figurations that art places before their eyes and the pure image living in our hearts of the most beautiful of the children of men (in Him, as in His Mother, as Cajetan reminds us in his treatise De Spasmo beatae Virginis, the supreme torments of Calvary, though piercing the mind still more cruelly than the body, left reason intact under the Cross, in full exercise of its dominion over the sensitive part) — for these, I say, certain plastic deformations, a certain degenerate aspect of the contour, take on the value of an offense against the Humanity of the Savior, and, as it were, of a doctrinal misapprehension of the sovereign dignity of His soul and body.

At a time when the truth of the Faith is threatened on all sides, why be surprised that the Church is more concerned than ever about the doctrinal distortions that can be implied in certain works of art intended for the faithful, whatever may be in other respects their aesthetic value and the salutary emotions they may here or there excite, and whatever may be the piety, faith, depth of spiritual life, and uprightness of intention of the artist who produced them?

(Jacques Maritain, “Some Reflections on Religious Art”, in Art and Scholasticism, trans. Joseph W. Evans [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1974], pp. 74-75; italics given; underlining added.)

Creating worthy sacred art, then, is not simply a matter of applying one’s artistic skill to a Catholic subject.

By the way: Another example of repulsive liturgical art would be the ‘bent cross’ pastoral staff first introduced by ‘Pope’ Paul VI in 1965. Sculpted by Italian artist Lello Scorzelli (1921-1997), this famous ugly crucifix is also known as the ‘twisted lizard’. Here we can see it in a mug shot of ‘Pope’ Francis:

Edified yet? Didn’t think so….

As for Leo XIV, let’s not forget that he likes to use a new type of ‘bent cross’ staff, one that shows Our Lord ascending from the cross, which is a historical fiction and theological absurdity.

In other words, it all fits. Just like its art, so too the ‘Catholicism’ of the Vatican II religion itself is twisted and distorted, and it repels.

No wonder Leo prayed before that crucifix.

Title image sources: Wikimedia Commons and archive.org (screenshot) and YouTube (screenshot)
Licenses: public domain and public domain and fair use