Also called the Cross of Forgiveness. It is one of the quieter things we make, and it is bought for one of the hardest reasons: somebody is dying, or somebody has just died.
Where it comes from
The Cross of Pardon was described in 1873 through Marie-Julie Jahenny, the Breton stigmatist of La Fraudais — five years before the Purple Scapular came from the same source. Like the scapular, its design was specified rather than left to the maker.
The invocations are the devotion
This is the part people miss. The words cast into the arms of the cross are not decoration and not a label. They are what the devotion asks you to say — short pleas for pardon, for mercy, and for grace at the hour of death.
The cross is a prompt. Worn against the skin or hung where you will see it, it exists to put those few words in your mouth several times a day for the rest of your life, so that at the end they are already there and do not have to be found.
Why it is given to the dying
Catholic tradition has always taken the hour of death seriously as its own event, worth preparing for specifically rather than generally. There is a whole vocabulary for it — the happy death, the good death, final perseverance — and a set of devotions aimed squarely at it, of which this is one.
In practice we see it bought in three situations: for a person with a terminal diagnosis; for an elderly parent, often by an adult child who does not quite know what else to do; and for a household after a death, where it is hung and left.
The honest note we make on every devotion of this kind applies here too. Marie-Julie Jahenny's communications are private revelation. The Church has not pronounced on them, no Catholic is obliged to accept them, and the promises attached are not mechanical. A cross is a sacramental, not a transaction. It works by getting a person to pray, and it is the prayer that counts.
How it is kept
Worn, on a cord under clothing, which is the form the devotion assumes — the invocations said through the day.
Hung, usually near a door or at the head of a bed.
Given, which is what most of our orders are. It is inexpensive enough to buy for a whole family, and it is a thing you can hand to someone when there is nothing useful to say.
Solid cast metal with defined lettering, supplied ready to wear or hang. In stock and shipping within 48 hours.
Cross of Forgiveness (Cross of Pardon)
Kept alongside
Households that keep this devotion very often keep the Purple Scapular as well — the same source, five years apart, one for the protection of the house and one for the hour of death. We sell them together more often than separately.
