Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

Auden contrasts the relative “poetic” accessibility of Christian festivals that lend themselves to celebration (Christmas) or triumphant resolution (Easter) with the stark scandal of suffering and execution commemorated on Good Friday. By pairing Good Friday with Auschwitz, he invokes the modern emblem of industrialized atrocity to stress a shared quality: an extremity of pain and moral horror that resists aestheticization and easy consolation. The remark also gestures toward the theological “stumbling block” (scandal) of the Cross—why a good God would permit or require such suffering—and suggests that disbelief is an understandable human response when confronted with realities that overwhelm language, imagination, and traditional pieties.