They

Visiting Europe’s great cathedrals and museums, you encounter a lot of religious art that depicts the sufferings of Christ and the saints. It can almost seem that religion in the West makes a fetish of suffering and pain, which is in stark contrast to the many images of peaceful Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the East It would be nice if we had more depictions of a peaceful and happy Jesus, of peaceful and happy saints, radiant with the peace and love of their connection with the divine. At the same time, however, an unexamined rejection of the suffering of Christ and the saints betrays our cultural denial of life’s difficulties and the reality of death. Though they can reflect an unwholesome fascination with the terrible, all these depictions of suffering are offered in a context of transcendent meaning, and ultimately aim at affirming that life is good even though we suffer.

This is a rather long text. I suspect who ‘they’ are here. Are they 'depictions of the sufferings of Christ and the saints,' or 'depictions of a peaceful and happy Jesus'? And one more thing, does 'the terrible' mean suffering?

A silly question.

Thanks in advance!