The stations of the cross of this crucifixion of this King at Easter can be found on social media.

“Buckingham Palace confirms King Charles will not issue Easter message this year,” was the message that came across on X.

Great story – until you look into it a bit.

When you do, it’s clear this is more of a manufactured story with a lot of spin that spread thanks to social media.

If Buckingham Palace has confirmed that the King “will not issue an easter message” as the GB News story indicates, the Royal Family’s spokespeople have not done so with the Toronto Sun so far. Nor does it say anything about not marking Easter anywhere on the Royal Family’s X account or media pages.

In fact, what it does show is King Charles and Queen Camilla attended an Easter Maundy Thursday church service in Wales and they are scheduled to attend Easter mass on Sunday at Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel.

No Easter snub

There’s no snub on Easter on record from the head of the Church of England and reigning monarch who has been battling cancer.

What there seems to be is a different approach to honourong Easter this year.

There is no repeat, so far at least, of the Easter message the King delivered in 2025 where on the Royal Family’s X account quoted King Charles saying, “The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world – the whole world – that He sent His son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death” and “there are three virtues that the world still needs – faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love It is with these timeless truths in my mind, and my heart, that I wish you all a blessed and peaceful Easter.”

There’s still time for the King to issue a similar statement on video or print for this year but whether he does or does not, it’s not a Royal tradition to offer an Easter message as the Monarch always does for Christmas. The King’s mother, for example, Queen Elizabeth II rarely issued Easter wishes.

Criticism and concern rages on

But this has not stopped the criticism and concern.

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“It is truly a grave disappointment to learn that His Majesty, King Charles III, will not issue an Easter message this year, especially when, in a previous year, he did so with clarity and conviction, yet without a singular focus on the Christian Faith and Church, of which he is Supreme Governor in the Church of England,” wrote Bishop Ceirion H. Dewar, who heads the Confessing Anglican Church.

“At such a pivotal moment in our nation, when many across this United Kingdom feel that our Christian identity is being rapidly stripped away, this silence from the Crown is not neutrality, it is absence.”

Dewar reminds: “Let us not forget that Easter is not merely a footnote in our national story. It is its very foundation! A nation that is untethered from the Resurrection of Christ risks forgetting not only who it is, but why it stands at all!.”

Royal watcher journalist Angela Levin on Talk TV said: “I can’t understand that. I think it’s appalling and it’s appalling doubly because they’re not telling us why.”

She added that the King “does quite a lot on Muslims, and he likes Muslims and he’s with them. He only did it a few weeks when they had a holiday.”

King sends out greetings to everyone

While the King did wish the commonwealth’s Muslims greetings for Ramadan and Eid, on his Royal Family X page, you can see that he also sent out messages to the Hindu community to mark Diwali and the Sikh community for Vaisakhi. Charles also issues hundreds of messages to many communities over the course of the year, including one in this news cycle to Canada’s astronaut currently on his way to the moon, Col. Jeremy Hansen.

All opinions are important and this column is no knock on anybody who sees it differently. I looked into this story with an open mind and was prepared to write whatever I turned up. What I found was this seems to have been spun into something bigger. I reached out to Buckingham Palace and to journalists and commentators in the UK, but there wasn’t much digging necessary.

King Charles is the monarch of a commonwealth with many races and religions and his public messaging consistently reflects that reality more than it tries to favour or abandon any one particular group.

“He is the lead of the Christian wave, and he must actually behave like that,” said Levin.

She is entitled to her comments but when you investigate it, King Charles does behave like a Christian. If he didn’t attend Easter church services, her view might carry more weight. But the King did go to church Thursday and is scheduled to go for Easter Mass Sunday as well.

In fact, the most recent X posts from the Royal Family, show the King actually in the church for the service to mark the occasion of The Last Supper.

That was the King’s message sent out to the public this year, which he seems to be in social media circles being crucified for.

jwarmington@postmedia.com

Holy Week and Easter are perhaps the most important days in the Christian calendar. Many associate those celebrations with church services, processions, candles, incense, fasting and penances.

However, there is another tradition that many Christians follow – that of tattooing. Historically, Easter was an important time for tattoos among some Christian groups. Today, Christian tattooing happens in many parts of the world and all year around. Some Christians visiting Jerusalem around Easter will get a tattoo of a cross, or a lamb, usually on their forearms.

As a sociologist of religion and a Jesuit Catholic priest, I have long studied tattoos as religious practices. I have interviewed tattoo artists in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Loreto in Italy who have been continuing and recreating the tradition of Christian tattooing. Evidence is clear the practice started shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion and spread across Europe in later centuries.

The first Christian tattoos

The Romans, like the Greeks, tattooed slaves and prisoners, usually with letters or words on their foreheads that indicated their crime. Soon after Jesus’ death, around the year 30 C.E., they started enslaving and tattooing Christians with the marks “AM” – meaning “ad metalla,” or condemned to work in the mines, a punishment that often resulted in death.

Almost at the same time, Christians who were not enslaved got tattoos of the early Christian signs such as fish or lambs in solidarity and to show that they identified with Jesus.

There were no specific words in Latin or Greek for tattooing, so the words “stizo,” “signum” and “stigma” were used. The word stigma also referred to the marks of nails on Jesus’ hands and foot, as a result of his crucifixion. Christians often got their own “stigmas”: a sign – usually a cross – in Jerusalem to honor Christ’s martyrdom.

The beginning of a tradition

There are several documented accounts of the tradition.

One from the third century mentions Christians in present-day Egypt and Syria getting tattoos of fish and crosses.

Another tells about the commentary that Procopius of Gaza, a theologian who lived between 475 and 538 C.E., wrote on the Book of Isaiah after he found that many Christians living in the Holy Land had a cross tattooed on their wrists. “Still others will write on their hand, ‘The Lord’s,’ and will take the name Israel,” he noted.

When a plague hit the Scythians, nomadic people living around the Black Sea, in 600 C.E., tattoos were believed to provide protection from the deadly disease. Theophylact Simocatta, one of the last historians of late antiquity, mentioned that missionaries among them recommended that “the foreheads of the young be tattooed with this very sign” – meaning that of a cross.

Many testimonies mentioned Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land with a tattoo during the Middle Ages – a tradition that continued in early modern times, between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Christian tattoos in Great Britain

Other cultures used tattoos in different ways. When Romans came in contact with the Celts tribes that inhabited the British Isles in 400 C.E., they called them Picts because they were covered in body art.

Pope Gregory the Great sent envoys to convert the Celts to Christianity, followed by a visit from another Vatican delegation. While missionaries were against “pagan tattooing,” both delegations agreed that tattoos done for the Christian god were fine. The members of the second delegation in the late 700s even said, “If anyone were to undergo this injury of staining for the sake of God, he would receive a great reward for it.”

Similar was the conclusion of the Northumbria Council, a church gathering in Northern England in 787: Tattoos done for the right god were acceptable. At that time, the Anglo-Saxon elite also had tattoos; the bishop of York, Saint Wilfrid, for example, got a tattoo of a cross.

Tattoos in Italy

Around the 1300s, as the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land were losing control with the coming of the Ottomans, there appeared in Italy shrines called “Sacri Monti.” These shrines were placed on “holy mountains” where devotees could pilgrimage safely, instead of risking their lives going to Jerusalem, which by then was under the control of the Ottomans.

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These shrines were established in cities such as Naples, Varallo and Loreto. Pilgrims could get tattoos in some of these shrines. One place was Loreto’s sanctuary, established in the early 1300s. A relic from the “Holy House,” which, according to the Christian tradition, is the house where the Virgin Mary is believed to have received the news that she will bear God’s son, was brought to Loreto’s sanctuary.

Tattooing in Loreto’s sanctuary was a communal activity, done by carpenters, shoemakers and artisans, who brought their stalls and tools to the main square during the days of celebrations and tattooed whoever wanted to get a mark of their devotion. These tattoos typically used wood planks for transferring the design on the body, like a stamp. However, the city of Loreto banned tattooing for hygienic reasons in 1871, according to Caterina Pigorini Beri, an anthropologist, who was one of the first to document the practice.

But people kept getting them. A shoemaker, Leonardo Conditti, was among those who kept doing tattoos in hiding during the 1940s.

Present but unseen

From the 1200s to the 1700s, the custom of Christian tattooing was prevalent in Europe among peasants, seafarers, soldiers and artisans as much as among nuns and monks. They were getting crosses, images of the Virgin Mary, the name of Jesus, and some sentences from the Bible.

Following the Renaissance, however, European culture came to associate tattoos with those considered “uncivilized,” such as peoples in the colonies, criminals and poorer Catholics. Many European intellectuals viewed Catholicism as a superstition more than a real religion.

The word “tattoo” came to the Western languages after the French admiral and explorer Louis de Bougainville and British explorer James Cook returned from their trips to the South Pacific at the end of the 1700s. There, they saw local people getting marks on their bodies and using the word “tatau” to name those drawings. However, it does not mean that tattoos came back at that time. They had never left.

The practice today

These days, some churches in the Middle East, such as some Coptic Christian churches in Egypt, incorporate the practice of getting a tattoo into the baptismal rituals.

Indeed, Holy Land tattooing has never stopped. Wassim Razzouk, whom I interviewed in 2022, is a 27th-generation tattooist – his family has been marking pilgrims in Jerusalem since 1300. Razzouk claims to have some of the 500-year-old wood planks his family used for tattooing.

Another tattoo artist whom I interviewed, Walid Ayash, does pilgrimage tattoos for those who visit the Nativity church in Bethlehem – a beloved custom among Arab Christians. He said that tattooing happens all year around, as long as there are pilgrims visiting the Nativity church. Although this year, as a result of the war in Gaza, Israeli authorities have restricted access to Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

In Italy, artist Jonatal Carducci is working on recovering the tradition of religious tattooing in Loreto. In a 2023 interview with me, he explained how he has painstakingly replicated the designs of the wood planks, which are both in the Museum of the Holy House and the Folkloric Museum of Rome. In 2019, he opened a parlor where Leonardo Conditti used to work. Visitors to the parlor can choose among more than 60 designs for their tattoos, including the Virgin Mary of Loreto, crosses and representations of Jesus’ heart.

This Easter, as some Christians get tattoos, this history might serve as a reminder of tattooing as a legitimate Christian practice, one that has been in use since the beginnings of the Common Era.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Gustavo Morello, Boston College

Read more:

• Scorsese’s gods of the streets: From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to ‘Silence,’ faith is rarely far off in his films

• Tattoo regret: Can you make it go away?

• What Ötzi the prehistoric iceman can teach us about the use of tattoos in ceremonial healing or religious rites

Gustavo Morello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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