Procession of the Cross

EsmoEpchois

Can anyone shed some light on the origin, meaning, and purpose of the Procession of the Cross? Also why do we do it on Palm Sunday? Thanks

coptic_deacon

This is just conjecture, but I'm guessing the cross was paraded extensively when it was rediscovered by Helen and Constantine, so we do the same thing.

As for Palm Sunday, we do the same thing to represent the way parade Christ was paraded through the streets of Jerusalem.

Maybe.

I think.

EsmoEpchois

With tomorrow being the Feast of the Cross, bump

katanikhoros

My conjecture (a little more than conjecture since this is what happened with Palm Sunday), is that originally this procession was a public procession of the Cross in the streets heralding the victory of the weapon of the Cross while stopping at certain points in the city and blessing it with appropriate passages from the Psalms and Gospel. Undoubtedly this caused tension with our Muslim occupiers and the practice became constricted within Church property over the centuries (the same happened with the Palm Sunday Procession and the Blessing of the Waters [Laqqan] for Theophany, Apostle's Feast and Covenant Thursday).

God Bless

cyril

From Febe Armanios' book "Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt":

As Huda Lutfi argues for the Mamluk period, by the fifteenth century, it appears that many Coptic popular rituals, which were often celebrated by Muslim Egyptians as well, had been displaced from the public to the private sphere. See “Coptic Festivals of the Nile: Aberrations of the Past?” in The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society, eds. Thomas Philipp and Ulrich Haarmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 263.