WALL OF CROSSES
By Cian McCormack
Behind Fr Peter Byrne the red brick walls of the Church of the Ascension of the Lord are decorated with over two-thousand palm white crosses.
The layout is not modular though it is spectacular. The crosses stretch high along the cylindrical walls of the church and parish centre. Each one placed randomly from the ground to as high as the buildings’ vertical limits permit. Their light white colour stands in relief to the religious buildings’ red façade.
“They’re small little white crosses. These would have been what we would have used on Palm Sunday but Palm Sunday was closed down,” says the parish priest who is facing a microphone which connects to a camera over two-metres away.
“First we called it ‘The Wall of a Thousand Crosses and a Million Tears’ to highlight that this was a place of grief. But it is gone to over two-thousand now,” says Fr Byrne.
The crosses on the walls surrounding the priest are for the dead. It is a tribute to lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
“This highlights for us that this amount of people have lost their lives,” says the priest as he gestures towards the crosses on the walls.
“This amount of families have been in grief. It is not just one or two but this enormous grief that is around us. It puts things in perspective for us all,” says Fr Byrne who is being interviewed by RTÉ News.
He is explaining why the walls of the church and parish centre in Balally in Dublin have become a shrine to remember the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fr Byrne started hanging the crosses when the virus claimed its first victim.
“At the start of the pandemic we were talking amongst ourselves and thinking of how we come to grips with the fact that people were going to die. We decided that we would start off by putting a cross on the wall for each person. At the start it was just a few but it is growing in to this enormous walls of crosses,” said Fr Byrne.
As Fr Byrne continues the interview a trickle of passers-by sit stop to pray, reflect and contemplate. Some take a few moments and sit on foldout chairs. Others wait in their cars. Most approach the walls quickly and walk away again.
Alvaro Lopez, originally from Spain, stops with his bicycle to pray for his uncle who recently died.
He says the wall of crosses is “very powerful and is very impressive”.
“I have never seen as many crosses at the same time stuck on walls. I think it is a way to realise that many people are suffering. Many people are dying.
I think it is a good opportunity to pray for all these people. For example, my uncle in Spain passed away two weeks ago. This situation is very tough for everyone,” Mr Lopez says.
As passers-by sit still hymns and prayers are piped from a tannoy speaker above. The Eucharist is displayed in an elaborate monstrance in the window of a corridor facing them. The corridor connects the church to the parish centre.
Parishioners Kay and Patrick Hand have taken over hanging additional crosses every day from Fr Byrne. The morning after numbers of fatalities from the virus are published on RTÉ News the husband and wife climb ladders to find space to stick and place new crosses on the church’s walls.
“We come every day and we put up the crosses for the people who have died. We also look around and replace any crosses that have fallen down or blown away,” says Kay Hand.
“We have put up as many as seventy or eighty crosses in a day. Please God we will get down to zero pretty soon and we can go back to normal,” says Patrick Hand. Every evening candles are lit and prayers said in the church to remember those who have died.
“We put the cross on the wall and then we light the candle each night for everyone who has died. There was one night we couldn’t fit the candles in front of the altar because we were nearing a hundred deaths in a single day,” says Fr Byrne.
It’s a very strange feeling that we can’t see the enemy and people die here and there. But where do we as a community see it all? We can see it all here perhaps just by the cross that goes up for each person,” adds Fr Byrne.
As the numbers of people dying decreases daily, the Fr Byrne is looking forward to when he will not need to hang up another cross.
“I really do. I think the whole nation is looking forward to the day where at Six O’Clock they’ve nothing to say,” he says making reference to RTÉ News reporting daily COVID-19 numbers of deaths and infections on its main television bulletin.
He adds: “Because, each cross represents this grief - these ripples of grief that go through communities and go through families. I think we will need time to understand what this has meant,” added Fr Byrne.
At the start of the project Fr Byrne used all of his Palm Sunday crosses quicker than expected. Many more were borrowed from other parishes.
“We just had a hundred crosses to start. Now we have just a hundred left. Hopefully we won’t have to use those crosses,” Fr Byrne says
