although the bigger question is, what were you doing in a catholic church?

...it should be mentioned that there is no guarantee that they have anything at all to do with liturgical seasons.  This may be nothing more than a decoration, with the color being picked by someone who thought that it was pretty.  There are no regulations on ribbons used to decorate crucifixes; indeed, there is no requirement that I know of that crucifixes be decorated at all, ever.

If you're interested in the details, here they are.  If not, simply skip this section:

The Catholic Church's calendar year is different from the secular calendar.  True, both consist of 365 days, with the exception of leap years, (366 in both cases, of course,) but the religious calendar year for Catholics starts off four weeks prior to Christmas in a season called Advent.  To begin with anticipating the birth of Jesus tells you the broad outline of the liturgical year: it is a celebration of the life of Christ.  The last Sunday of the liturgical year is called the Feast of Christ the King, which has as its secondary celebration the return of Christ in glory at the end of earth's existence.

Now you're probably thinking, "Wait a minute...*secondary* celebration?  This doesn't make any sense."  Well...when you see a Catholic calendar, the celebration for *any* given day is considered to be the secondary--not the primary--celebration for the day.  This is because the primary reason never changes: the primary thing celebrated on any given day is the Resurrection of Jesus.  Thus, a unique aspect of Easter is that it is the only day throughout the year when the primary celebration and the secondary celebration are the same thing.  (This is a little bit of trivia that most Catholics probably don't even know about.)

Back to the liturgical colors.  They are a "small-t tradition," meaning that Catholics don't see anything essential about it; it is something that is kept because Catholics enjoy it.  In theory, it could be done away with, without harming the beliefs of Catholics.  (That said, don't hold your breath; even "small-t traditions" are never cavalierly cast aside by Catholics.  They will only do such a thing if they are *sure* that it is *harmful,* in some way.)  The use of colors was started in France (in the Baroque era, I *think,*) and the practice spread because, well, people liked it.  In the modern Catholic Church, the meanings associated with the colors are:

   Violet (or, rarely, blue): Penance

   Red, meaning one: the "Fire of the Holy Spirit;" this is for the celebration

       of Pentecost.

   Red, meaning two: blood, as in the blood of martyrs.  Obviously, this is used

       for the feast days of martyrs.  (As an aside: these feast days are celebrated

       on the day the martyr *died.*  This is the day that they were, so to speak,

       "born to eternal life.&quot

   White: the Resurrection.  Aside from the obvious use on Easter, this is also used

       nowadays for funerals, in effect "looking forward" to the time when it is

       believed that Christ will raise his faithful from the dead.

   Green: the color of plants becomes the "color of life" in the liturgy.  Since "life

       in the Spirit" occurs on a twenty-four-seven basis for Christians, this color

       is used on most days of the year, when no other color is used.  This is why

       green is the most common color seen.

   Gold: royalty, used to celebrate the aforementioned Feast of Christ the King.

   Black: Nowadays, the "color of mourning" is used only on Good Friday, to mourn

       the death of Jesus.  In days past, it was also used for funerals, for obvious

       reasons.

Matt, thanks for providing me with the flimsy excuse to pontificate about something that I learned on the topic of religion.  It makes all that theology seem slightly less useless.

Conor

P.S.: One other small matter is the fact that you used the word "cross" when it is much more likely (though admittedly not certain) that what you saw at a Catholic Church was in fact a crucifix.  The difference is the corpus (i.e., the body of Jesus.) The crucifix has one, a cross does not.  Catholics tend to use crucifixes because it reminds them of the price of salvation (and not, as many Fundamentalists think, because of some alleged Catholic belief that Jesus never rose.)  Fundamentalists who *do* think in this way see fit to contradict it, by using an (empty) cross, to emphasize the Resurrection. 

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"Faith does not fear reason."--Pope Pius XII

"But it should!"--Me