Mozarabs, Hispanics and Cross

Veneration of the Cross plays a major role in Hispanic popular religion. But for the Mozarabs, a Catholic community that traces its roots to the Visigoths and Hispano-Romans of seventh-century Spain, veneration of the Cross--particularly the Lignum Crucis, a relic of the ""True Cross""--has served to join devotion to Christ with a powerful symbol of religio-ethnic identity and survival in the face of persecution. The Mozarabs (the term may mean ""Arabized"") of Toledo maintained their Catho...