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I don't believe it shouldn't be a piece of jewellery. But if you have either no idea why it's important, or if you simply want to wear it because it looks nice with that particular dress, that's appalling to me, because there's a huge cosmic significance in the subject.

Otherwise, you may as well just wear a gibbet round your neck, or an electric chair. And in fact if you look back at the history of the cross - that is what you're doing. So it has to mean something a good deal more than that to be something tolerable at all.

Ann Wroe, writer and historian

I think we're in an era of "pick and mix" religion now, particularly with celebrities. So when you see girls like Catherine Zeta Jones, Liza Minnelli and Renee Zellweger wearing the crucifix, I don't think it's purely secular. They've probably just borrowed that little bit from Catholicism and I do think that they look on it as a talisman, as a protective force.

Liz Hurley, for example, wears a Theo Fenell cross and she calls the public "Civilians" - it's "Us and them" basically. And I do think it is a superstition, obviously, because they're not gonna hold the cross up to the public and make them wither away like vampires - that's ridiculous. But there is still enough respect in this world for the cross, that when these girls are wearing it it gives them a kind of added piety. It lends them that sort of veneer of piety, which is obviously misplaced in a celebrity.

James Sherwood, fashion journalist

We were coming to the last part of the run on a Sunday morning, about 8.15 - a lovely, sunny summer's day, when I'm told it got dark all of a sudden and I was struck by lightning. Lightning attacked the gold cross round my neck that was given to me by my grandmother and put me six feet in the air. I landed head first into the concrete into a deep puddle, landed face first. I stopped breathing. Ray resuscitated me and Norman held me in the recovery position while Ray ran for help. They put me in the ambulance.

Unbeknown to me some of my friends had gone back to where it happened, and had found the gold cross which was lying on the concrete, not a mark on it. So they brought that up to the hospital, and I came out of the coma on the Friday. On the Monday I had a 6 hour operation where they rebuilt my face, basically. They put 12 plates in my face. So I don't remember anything of August. I don't remember much of September. But things become much more clear in October.

In a way, the lightning was attracted to the cross. If it saved my life, why did the lightning strike it? So I'm in "catch 22" over the situation. But I'm alive - and I don't know who I have to thank for that, but I thank them, because I was an inch off checking out, y'know? I will start wearing it again one day. My mother's offered to get me a chain for it, but I'm just not awfully confident at the moment, for obvious reasons. I have it in my drawer but I don't wear it at the moment.

Campbell Gillespie, lightning strike survivor

I make two types of chocolate crucifixion. I make a series in dark chocolate and a series in white chocolate. At first, I was using the two different types of chocolate, one to represent bronze and one to represent marble.

Chocolate is a very seductive material, and I found that I was seduced by the Biblical stories, the commandments and Jesus's miracles. I was looking for a material, and chocolate seemed to be the perfect balance. It was the perfect connection with childhood; chocolate can as a gift, it's a reward - but it's also a punishment if it's taken away or not given.

George Heslop, maker of chocolate crosses

Now, you take a movie like, for example, Ken Russell's film The Devils. The Devils of Loudan - it's a true historical case about 17th century France. The background to the story is that it's a political story in which Cardinal Richelieu was trying to knock down the walls of Loudan. What Russell attempted to do was show that how the organisation of the church and the organisation of politics was becoming corrupted whilst this man, the priest was quietly finding his own faith and the central scene in the film was a scene which unfortunately has now been tagged "the rape of Christ". What happens in this film is that Grandier is seen having a roadside communion, very quietly breaking bread, taking wine, blessing... realising that he has a purpose in life which is to save the town. This is intercut with a terrible spectacle going on in the cathedral at Loudan in which these nuns believe they are possessed.

They've been whipped up to believe it by these evil politicians; they perform all manner of sacrilegious blasphemies in the church and the climax of this sequence is that the group of nuns charge the altar, tear down this enormous crucifix, lie it on the floor of the cathedral and proceed to assault it. Now the reason that scene is interesting to me is that when that film was made, although it contained many things to many people that would find unacceptable even today, the one scene that came out of the film in total was the sequence with the cross. The whole thing came out because when Russell made the film he showed it to his distributors and his distributors looked at it and said no. There is no way you are putting that kind of defilement of the cross on any screen with our money, thank you very much.

Mark Kermode, film director

Ah well. As a lapsed Catholic, Madonna is more than aware of the power of the cross. And that means when she subverts it or plays with it, it's a more powerful message I suppose than somebody like Catherine Zeta Jones, who may just like to wear a nice Tiffany cross, or Judy Finnegan, who wears the Tiffany diamond cross every day on the television. I can't imagine Judy Finnegan is trying to challenge the Church or challenge conventions by wearing a diamond Tiffany cross. It's just a present that Richard gave her and she likes it. Whereas Madonna, writhing around on the floor in a very low-cut gown grasping a crucifix - that's a different story.

James Sherwood, fashion journalist

In recent years there seems to have been a tendency to use the cross as a fashion ornament. I can only say that you cannot, you can never judge an individual person's reason for doing things. Because God is God... we can't hurt Him; He's beyond that. But He's always thinking of us and in human terms, if people in any area or any religion or belief take something that's sacred to a group or a religion and mock it, and use it in a sacrilegious or blasphemous way, then that's not a good thing. And it has repercussions - not so much hurting that group or religion - it hurts that person in their soul, in a way they're probably not aware of. That's why the Christian tradition would be quite wary of people maybe using it as a fashion symbol in a profane way.

Mother Claudia, Tyburn Convent

Well the violence of it appals me. I can't really come to terms with that part of it. I absolutely understand the strength of the huge gesture that somebody gave their only son. But that they gave their only son to that degree of torture, followed by death, does seem very hard. Crucifixion was the way that people were killed. I mean it wasn't chosen especially on that day.

Deborah Warner, theatre director

I've noticed that the decorations that are the highest fashion at the moment after the Mel Gibson film are nails that you wear round your neck - crucifixion nails, three inches long.

That's a pretty nasty idea when you think about it. But again, I think that's an attempt to recoup the power of the cross, realising that the symbol has probably lost the power to shock. But the nails have not lost the power so now you have the nails.

Ann Wroe, writer and historian

What's happened with the Gibson film is that people, because they have to think about it again, are not just simply shocked by the astonishing level of abuse prior to death. Had Christ been shot by a firing squad I don't know that we would've chosen the symbol of the gun. It was very handy that it was that shape.

Deborah Warner, theatre director

It was later exploring the ruins by himself that he found lying on the ground, under the burnt out beams, the enormous medieval nails which had held these beams in place - they are extraordinary - they are so large. I would say the ones I'm looking at the moment are about 18" long and some are bigger than that. They are beautiful in their own right, as if a craftsman had made them.

My father brought a handful of them home. Moving these nails around on the kitchen table, they seemed to move easily into place as a cross. My father found a firm in Coventry who were able to weld these nails together and another firm who put a coat of silver to cover them.

When the designs were made for the new cathedral, it was decided right from the very beginning that these nails must have a special place in the new cathedral.

Mary, daughter of Coventry Cathedral clergyman Philip Wales

In that sense, the cross within Christian thinking marks the end of disruption of a relationship, and of a new future. And we see, in the work we do now in the Community of the Cross of Nails and in our reconciliation world-wide, that the cross is a powerful way of demonstrating hope. Because it speaks of the possibility of new harmonious and peaceful relationships. First with God and then with others.

I work very often in areas of conflict. And you take people round the cross, or you talk about the cross of nails or allow them to hold the small cross of nails that we wear round our necks, you begin immediately to find a transforming of attitudes. There is a power within the cross which reaches deep into the human heart and into the human emotions, that challenges hatred and challenges unforgiveness, and challenges a commitment to violence.

Canon Justin Welby, Cross of Nails community

The physical symbol of the cross - there's a vertical coming down from heaven, entering into the earth, implanted in the earth. There's the horizontal, the human, crossing the vertical, crossing the divine.

If you take away one of those parts, the vertical - there's no cross. If you take away the horizontal - there's no cross.

So it's the fusion, the union of those two aspects - the divine and the human - that gives the cross its power and its significance and its meaning; that God is always with us and He's particularly with us in our sufferings, in our cross. And he cannot and will not separate Himself from us in our sufferings - he's always there to help us and console us, give us the strength to go on.

So it is a great symbol of hope in that way. You can look up at the cross and see the vertical, and keep going up to God, to Heaven.

Mother Claudia, Tyburn Convent

The point of all this is no matter how poppy or trashy one's sensibility of the cross becomes, thanks to the Madonna videos and it turning up in horror videos and gangster movies, there is behind it, still, an absolute anxiety that it means more than that. There is something about that symbol that you have to be careful with and it's interesting that very often, when that form of cinema oversteps that boundary as far as the censors or distributors or audience are concerned, the symbol of the cross is involved in it. People are more reverential about the symbol of the cross than perhaps the secular world that we live in would suggest.

Mark Kermode, film director