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Notes -
The theological differences run quite deep. The Catholic Church requires that there be a cross-with-corpus on or near the altar in full view of the congregation for the celebration of mass. This is as a reminder that the sacrifice of the mass is the re-presentation of the sacrifice of the cross, and that the bread and the wine presented on the altar are the real and substantial body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.
The protestant view is to deny the physical presence of Christ in the church, and so the crucifix is disfavored over a symbolic cross.
I think it has more to do with a general tendency towards aniconism in general, rather than a rejection of the substantial presence. Though there still remains a gap where theoretically someone could say the Eucharist should be adored but we shouldn't have icons
-- it's just that it's never happened, depending on how you understand the sacramentology of the Byzantine iconoclasts.nvm, my amateur opinion is this was probably exactly what the Byzantine iconoclasts thought.Lutherans are happy to display images -- and the trad Lutherans are very insistent that crucifixes are a traditional Lutheran custom. They don't assent to Nicea II however, and hold a position (condemned by the council and rejected by the Pope) suspiciously similar to that of no less than Charlemagne that images should be displayed as reminders and teaching aids, but never venerated.
I suspect this view was rocking around in western Europe for a long time, and it was only the Calvinists' iconoclasm that forced the Latin Rite to enforce orthodoxy on that point. Eastern Europe has the Triumph of Orthodoxy, Western Europe has the Baroque period. And both times the attitude was something like, "you don't like us venerating images? Fine, we're going to venerate them even harder."
You find a mixture of crosses and crucifixes in Lutheran churches in the United States, though in my experience it leans towards bare crosses, presumably under Calvinist and credobaptist influence. Though almost always these crosses in Lutheran churches are paired with images and statues of Jesus prominently displayed.
Further, Latin Rite Catholics are perfectly happy coexisting in communion with various rites where the tradition is not generally to display the corpus in a central location, or even to have a prominent cross at all. The difference is those rites* don't object to depictions of the crucifix and use them in other contexts.
Just to say that I believe it's more complicated than you're saying. The mass would still be the mass even if there were a bare cross, though I agree it's an important aid to religious devotion and suits the Latin rite well.
*assuming they find 3d religious artwork acceptable at all
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