What does the Cross and Jesus bar-Joseph dying on it mean among so many crosses in history? Crucifixion was nothing new in the Roman Empire. Crosses with men dying in agony upon them in public places and along well-traveled roads were familiar sights. In 4 BC when there had been a rebellion in Syria, the Roman governor Varius led his legions to restore, as they say, the peace. To show that he meant business, Varius ordered the execution of two thousand men at once on separate crosses. Fast-forward to the Jewish Wars of 66 – 70 AD, after which Jerusalem fell again to the Romans. The Roman general Titus, to show his mettle, crucified as many as five hundred Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem.

But if you want truly spectacular cinema, go back to 68 BC. The gladiator Spartacus was leading one hundred thousand slaves against Roman authority. When the legions eventually put down the uprising, the authorities crucified six thousand rebels. To amplify the horror, they put crosses alongside the Appian Way, one every 116 feet for 132 miles from Rome to ancient Capua. To imagine the sheer linear scale of that message, imagine a trip from where you sit here at Saint Francis to my brother Sean’s house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Take River Road to the Beltway/495 North to 95 North up past Baltimore and past Wilmington. Follow US 202/the Concord Pike north to PA Route 322 East. Take the left fork onto East Strasbourg Road, turning left on Ellis Lane. Turn right onto his long driveway. From where you are now to his door: 132 miles, all of that marked by a crucifixion every 116 feet.

A colleague, staring at the Pope’s latest encyclical, remarked, “There’s no news here. It’s all about God.”

He was right, after a fashion, for the document, the second encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI since his election two and a half years ago, is about hope and salvation. Its title, Spe Salvi, is from a phrase in St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, “In hope we were saved.”

But it is a very unusual kind of encyclical, quoting Dostoyevsky and discussing the Jacobean philosopher Francis Bacon. Enyclicals usually stick to the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. After all, they are universal letters to the Catholic faithful.

Yet Spe Salvi speaks to the anguish and foreboding that are clearly marks of the modern world. As a German who experienced some of the evil of Nazism, Pope Benedict spends a proportion of his 25-page letter pondering another letter, “a letter from ‘Hell’, which lays bare all the horror of a concentration camp.”

The Telegraph