Origins of Devotion to—and Artistic Depictions of—the Wounds, Blood, and Heart of Christ

Louis Charbonneau-Lassay. The Vulnerary of Christ: The Mysterious Emblems of the Wounds in the Body and Heart of Jesus Christ. Translated by G. John Champoux. Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2021. 586 pp. Paperback $30 / Hardcover $40. Available at Angelico and Amazon.

The author of The Vulnerary of Christ, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay (1871–1946; hereafter C-L), was among the most versatile and erudite researchers of Christian archaeology and symbolism the world has ever seen. He traveled throughout Europe looking at churches, monasteries, public buildings, monuments, manuscripts, paintings, vestments, stained glass, furniture, host-molds, escutcheons, banners, trademarks, objets d’art, anything that bore or could possibly bear Christian symbols, and carefully drew copies of them into his notebooks. He left behind in his files tens of thousands of drawings and notes which he planned to include in a series of books. The one major work published in his lifetime, The Bestiary of Christ, appeared in English in an abbreviated version.

To add intrigue, the finished manuscript of his masterpiece, The Vulnerary of Christ, was stolen by a visitor who arrived at C-L’s home shortly before his death. Fortunately for us, a detailed outline of the book, the notes used to compose it, and the drawings all remained in his home. Thanks to a painstaking reconstruction by Gauthier Pierozak, it was possible to publish the work in French in 2018. In 2021, Angelico Press brought out a deluxe, copiously-illustrated English translation, of which I had the privilege of reading the page proofs, and which I cannot recommend too highly.

How best to describe this encyclopedic work—at once archaeological, artistic, historical, literary, liturgical, and devotional? The author’s fundamental thesis is that devotion to the wounded Heart of Christ, far from being a pure invention of eighteenth-century French piety or even of high medieval piety, as is so often claimed, has its roots deep in the early Church, in the earliest artistic representations and symbols of Christ.

We find ubiquitous use of the “signaculum Domini” that consists of five marks (be they points, crosses, crescents, hearts, flowers, lozenges, asterisks, annulets), in which the mark that represents the wound in the side becomes progressively more important, until the Heart that was pierced and exposed by the lance becomes the object of loving adoration, the visible symbol of the immensity of divine Love: “We will see later that this particular cult of the wound in the side has quite naturally led to the exteriorizing of the cult of the heart of Jesus under its anatomical form, which it contained in potency and towards which it inevitably oriented thought; but here, as in all such cases, the symbol has necessarily preceded the thinking responsible for interpreting it” (62).

There is a gentle anti-Protestant and anti-Orthodox polemic underlying the argument: on the one hand, the Protestants do not understand the implications of the Incarnation for Christian art and liturgy; on the other hand, the Orthodox, who possess a rich iconographical tradition, too quickly write off Catholic devotions and artistic representations as decadent corruptions when, in fact, they find support in Scripture, the Church Fathers, and early artistic evidence.

C-L successfully shows that the devotion to the Passion, the Five Wounds, the Sacred Heart, the Precious Blood, and the Holy Face are all inseparable from one another, mutually implicatory and reinforcing. “At the place of the wounded heart of Jesus, as with everything that is the object of adoration, today’s Christian rediscovers, in bending the knee to the ground, the incontestable trace of the knees of all his ancestors” (84).

Protestantism, with its surface rigorism and theological sophisms, Jansenism, with its narrow and rigid conception of the idea of Christ, cast upon France a cold mist that obscured and weakened, though without extinguishing it, the broad piety for the heart of Jesus. After them, it would take the great breath of Paray-le-Monial to stir up the embers and kindle the flame. (281)

The book is organized into eight parts:

1. Representations of the Five Wounds of Christ in Earliest Christian Art
2. Depictions of the Wound in the Side of Christ
3. Representations of the Redemptive Shedding of Blood
4. Plants Emblematic of Christ’s Five Wounds
5. Stones Emblematic of the Wounded Christ
6. The Iconography of the Wounded Heart of Jesus
7. The Iconography of the Heart of Jesus in the Counter-Revolutionary Armies of the Vendée
8. Diverse Representations Relating to or Foreign to the Cult of the Heart of Jesus

Although much of the time C-L is patiently reviewing, comparing, and drawing conclusions from the hundreds of artistic objects he has sketched—there are 359 engravings and 32 plates in the book, all of them commented on—the prose rises every few pages to the heights of poetry:

Nailed to the wood of his cross, the tortured divine Victim had sensed death achieving its conquest within him, and, with one last effort towards the world, he had cried out that his redeeming work was consummated.
       Next, in the unexpected night that had suddenly fallen over it, as the earth trembled with emotion and rocks split apart, Jesus bowed his head and rendered up his soul to his Father.
       Then, as the hour of the sabbath approached, his own had to quickly take him down from the cross to be able to bury him. But, before allowing them to do as they wished, soldiers approached to break the legs of Jesus and of the two others crucified with him, so as to finish them off. But, seeing that the Savior was already dead, they did not break his legs. “But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side: and immediately there came out blood and water.”
       The wounds to his hands and feet, as well as the bruises over his entire body, had stopped the life of the Victim and satisfied justice. The wound from the spear-thrust, a wound of supererogation, brought forth from the very body of this corpse the blossoming of a divinely fecund life, and satisfied infinite munificence and love.
       And since that time, and for evermore, the Christian world has lived and will live from this life springing forth, through his side, from the opened heart of Christ Jesus! (67)

The sheer exuberance of the imagery C-L compiles—where we see, for instance, the Heart of Jesus depicted as a grape in the winepress (126–28), or as the cup of a holy water stoup (106); a chalice so depicted that its opening suggests the wound in His side (80); the Pantocrator reigning upon a heart-shaped throne (255, 277–78); the divine Blood depicted as a jewel in a cup (195); Adam and Eve in the garden, holding aloft a Heart surmounted by a Cross as a foreshadowing of their redemption (270); a trademark in which chant notation provides the “so-la” for the phrase “fides sufficit” (274); a Carthusian astronomical marble that depicts the constellations revolving around a wounded Heart glowing like the sun (354); the depiction of a flaming Heart on which has been drawn the map of the world (364); a brotherhood’s emblem consisting of thirty-three tiny hearts enclosed in a Heart surrounded by a braid of thorns (399); a carved wooden lyre in the shape of a Heart (417)—is enough to fill the reader’s mind with an ever-growing wonder at the inexhaustible profundity and playfulness of the Christian imagination suffused with faith in the Redeemer. Among the many categories of readers who would find this book enthralling must not be forgotten artists, craftsmen, and designers, who will discover in it a delightful catalogue of inspiration.

The level of detail in the book is nothing short of mind-boggling. Just to take an example at random, Part 4, concerning Plants Emblematic of Christ’s Five Wounds, tells us in chapter 11 about “The Trees of the Passion” (olive tree, trees shaped like crosses, gum trees that produce valuable sap by being wounded), in chapter 12 about “Plants of the Divine Torture” (St. John’s Wort, called “Flagellation grass”; prickly marine rushes; hyssop and sponge), in chapter 13 about “The Garden of the Wounded Christ” (the strawberry, the poppy, the lychnis, the red rose, the amaranth, the adonide, the passionflower, and the paulownia flower).

C-L shares the conviction of the medieval allegorists that everything in nature was created not only through the Word but also in some way to reflect the Word’s Incarnation, the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. Certainly this principle is required for any intelligent “reading” of the works of Christian artists from all periods prior to modernity. Indeed, C-L complains at one point that artists of the nineteenth century had lost the ability to understand iconography and therefore produced atrocious art:

The admirable and zealous movement begun at Paray, a wonderful stimulus to piety towards the heart of Jesus, did not induce, with its iconography, any return to [artistic] order. At least the religious imagery posterior to this movement did not increase confusion further. Finally, the deplorable fantasies dreamt up in the nineteenth century for the populace succeeded in crossing the bounds of the ridiculous with their absurd compositions, where we find all mixed together: grinning angels, ecstatic urchins, any flower whatsoever, hearts without distinctive features, and flights of doves that draw on high other hearts with implausible garlands or cords; the whole arsenal of a winded and fretful art (?) that had its peak around 1880, and which is now, quite thankfully, over and done with. (295)

The Vulnerary of Christ contains some “bonus” chapters that one might not have expected from its title. The legend of the Holy Grail is examined in chapter 15, and competing stories about the vessels of Jerusalem, Genoa, and Valencia, each claiming to be the cup of the Last Supper, are compared. Chapter 16 presents evidence that the ancient Egyptians venerated the heart of the supreme God. The cult of the Holy Name of Jesus and the depiction of the monogram is explored in chapter 18. The use of Christic symbols in the coats of arms of royalty is the subject of chapter 20. Chapters 21 and 22 look at astronomical sculptures and heart-shaped sundials, primarily from Carthusian monasteries.

Chapters 30 and 31 enter into the question of secular adaptations or thefts, misuses, even mockeries, of the Heart. For example, the Freemasons in France produced blasphemous versions of the Sacred Heart that they distributed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as “counter-propaganda” against the Faith. Large numbers of five-starred medals depicting the Sacred Heart bound with a chain and surrounded by the words “Psychology and Science” were sent to French soldiers on the front in World War II to combat the “threat” of popular devotional medallions.

Perhaps the most gripping portion of the book, at least for us at this time, is Part Seven, on the use of the Heart of Jesus as the identifying emblem of the counterrevolutionary armies of the Vendée (pp. 431–87). So far from fading with the passage of time, this characteristically Vendéan image has received new life in the postconciliar period as a potent symbol of the Catholic traditionalism that resists both the ideology of the French Revolution and its infiltration into the Church. The attentive reader will recognize how the ancient double heart symbol on p. 467 has gained a second career as the emblem of an important Society.

This book is a one-of-a-kind exposé of the subtle interplay between theology and symbolism, spirituality and art, faith and culture. It bears witness to the irreducibly visual, representational nature of Christianity, which (to paraphrase Maximus the Confessor) everywhere seeks its embodiment in the flesh, in matter, which it thereby seeks to illuminate and elevate as a herald of the Kingdom of God, which is both within and above. It is fitting to let Charbonneau-Lassay have the final word:

In truth, the cult of the wounded heart of Jesus Christ does not have its origin in the deep meditations and exaltations of theologians or teachers of the past, or in the conceptions of our old artists; it does not have its source in the revelations, the visions, the inspirations of the saintly men and women of any time or in the zeal of a particular religious order; it comes wholly and directly from the sole worship of the divine blood and the five chief wounds from which it poured, according to the word of the Nicene Creed, “for us men, and for our salvation.” By this well-marked route, the cult of the wounded heart goes back to the very birth of the Church.
       Of course, theologians, artists, doctors, saintly men and women, and religious orders, have added to, each has quickened, according to the providential views and according to their time, the cult of the five wounds, the worship of the open heart of Christ Jesus. But no, none of them has invented anything new. And when I look at Calvary, in spite of the darkness that enshrouds it with mourning, I see, already, worshipers of the pierced heart: Mary, “the dolorous Mother who stands upright,” John, Magdalene, and, surely from that moment, the legionnaire whose spear tip has just initialed with a flourish the “Consummatum est” of the Crucified One, who withdraws it from the open chest while his captain proclaims that this One, truly, is indeed the Son of God, whose heart, even now, pours forth blood and water through his wound! (245)

The Vulnerary of Christ is available in paperback and in hardcover.

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Interesting Saints on June 16

There are three Saints in the Martyrology for today who are particularly interesting cases in the annals of Catholic hagiography. Two of these are Ss Quiricus and Julitta, a three-year old boy and his mother who were martyred during the persecution of Diocletian. Julitta was a wealthy noblewoman from Iconium in central Asia Minor, who fled from persecution in her native city to Tarsus in Seleucia, only to have the persecution break out there on her arrival. She was tried, condemned as a Christian, and sentenced to be racked. Quiricus was then separated from his mother, but in a place where he could see what was happening to her. As she cried out in the midst of her sufferings “I am a Christian!”, Quiricus cried out “I am a Christian too!”, and proceeded to have what modern parents would call an epic toddler meltdown. As the governor who presided over the trial tried to calm him down, but still keep him from his mother, and lead him to deny the Faith, Quiricus kicked him and scratched him in the face, at which the governor picked him up and dashed him against the floor, killing him instantly. Mother and son were widely venerated as martyrs together after the persecutions ended; there is a church dedicated to them in Rome at the edge of the Monti region, very close to the Imperia Fora.

This episode is famously represented in one of the side chapels of the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, built into a part of the imperial palace in the Roman Forum in the 5th century. The frescoes are from the mid-8th century.

The church of Ss Quiricus and Julitta in Rome.

The edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints revised by Fr Herbert Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater is often highly critical of the legends of the Saints, frequently describing them with terms like “worthless” or “fabulous” in the sense of “a fable.” But even they say that “(i)t is distressing to have to discard a story so piously credited… in the East and West.” This is partly because there so are many different versions of their passion; already in the early 6th century, the document known as the Gelasian Decree mentions them twice as Saints whose apocryphal acts are not read by the Roman church, “lest even a slight occasion for mockery arise.” The term “apocryphal” in the context of this decree simply means that the books were not approved to be read in church, which is to say, to be read in the liturgy; nevertheless, it is significant that only one other “passio”, that of St George, is so noted.

(While it may seem incredible to some that a child so young confessed the Faith with such tenacity, there have been several reports of children, some of them just as young, refusing to renounce their Christian Faith in the midst of the horrific persecutions currently going on in the Middle East and Africa.)

Today is also the feast of St Benno, who was bishop of the German city of Meissen for 40 years, from 1066 to 1106. Very little is known of him historically, but popular legend makes him a model bishop in the age of the great reforms championed by his contemporaries such as Ss Peter Damian and Pope Gregory VII; to him is attributed, among other things, assiduous attendance at and care for the proper singing of the Divine Office. According to one story, when summoned to attend a council called by the Emperor Henry IV in order to depose the Pope, St Benno gave the keys to the cathedral to his canons, and ordered them to drop the keys in the river as soon as they should hear that Henry had been excommunicated. (The purpose of this would be to keep the supporters of the Emperor from taking possession of the church.) When the controversies between the Pope and Emperor had die down, St Benno returned to Meissen, and the keys were recovered by a fisherman who found them tangled in the gills of a catch, and brought them back to the Saint.

A reliquary of St Benno in one of the side-chapels of Munich Cathedral; click to enlarge and see the fish in his left hand with the keys in its mouth.

St Benno was canonized in 1523, just as the Reformation was getting into its first full-swing; Meissen and Luther’s city of Wittenberg are both in Saxony, and both on the river Elbe, which kept Benno’s cathedral keys safe for him. The canonization was seen by Luther as a purely political move designed to halt the Reformation in Saxony, and he responded to it with a more-than-typically nasty polemical treatise “Against the New Idol and the Old Devil About to be Set Up in Meissen,” in which he brutally calumniates both St Gregory VII, and the contemporary Pope, Hadrian VI. In 1539, when Meissen turned Protestant, Benno’s relics were rescued from a mob that would have destroyed them, and about 40 years later brought to Munich, where they were installed in the Cathedral. He is therefore venerated as the Patron Saint of Munich, and, as of 1921, also of the re-established Catholic See of Dresden-Meissen.

Another representation of St Benno in Munich, in the church of St Peter.

The Sacred Heart in the Sacred Liturgy: Thoughts on the Symbolism of the Thurible

It is difficult to overstate the significance of fire in the collective imagination of Judeo-Christian civilization. It is, perhaps, the ultimate symbol. In ancient Greek thought, it represented the uniquely human; in Jewish thought, the divine. Young children are fascinated by it, perhaps because they sense its paradox—so easily snuffed out, like man, and yet so powerful, like God.

In Greek mythology, there are two fires: the celestial fire, which Zeus withheld from mankind, and human fire, given to mankind by Prometheus, who stole it from the Olympian gods. The former is immortal; the latter, like man, is ever on the verge of death.

The fire men have now at their disposal ... is a fire that is “born”—so it is also a fire that dies; it must be kept burning, it must be tended. This fire has an appetite like mortal man’s; unless it is constantly fed, it goes out.... It constantly recalls both his divine origin and his animal nature; it partakes of both—like man himself. [1]

The basic Hebrew word for fire is ’ēsh, which begins with א (aleph), the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter of origins, creation, and the perfect Unity—despite apparent dualities—of the divine Essence. Fire, like God, creates ex nihilo, and enables life: from darkness, light; from cold, warmth; from grain, bread; from rock, iron. It also destroys.

The first occurrence of ’ēsh in the Bible is Genesis 15, 17: “And it cometh to pass—the sun hath gone in, and thick darkness hath been—and lo, a furnace of smoke, and a lamp of fire, which hath passed over between those pieces.” The lamp, casting light amidst the gloom, signifies the majesty of the Almighty and seals a covenant between Abram and his God. The next occurrence is Genesis 19, 24: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” The next is Genesis 22, 6: “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife; and they went both of them together.” First, the love of God, eternal and true, promised to Abraham and his seed forever. Second, His justice, enacted upon men for whom Abraham prayed. Third, His justice turned upon a Victim—Isaac, Christ—who will burn with agony to save men from burning in eternity.

In Exodus, fire becomes the prevailing manifestation of God. He appears to Moses in a bush that “burned with fire and … was not consumed,” He leads the Israelites as a pillar of fire, and He comes in elemental, awe-inspiring magnificence to Mount Sinai, “which was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”

The theophany on Sinai is a sublimely liturgical moment. The people must purify themselves, fasting from carnal pleasures: estote parati in diem tertium, “be ye ready against the third day.” They gather and prepare to encounter the living God, but only from a distance, and only through signs and wonders. The privilege of entering into the sanctum is reserved for Aaron, the high priest, and Moses, the supreme prophet. Moses returns with an inestimable gift—the laws of God, so delightful to the faithful soul that in the Hebrew Bible’s longest chapter, Psalm 118, the inspired poet sings a love song to them.

Could fire, with a sacred history as illustrious as this, be absent from the Christian liturgy? Such a thought is not to be borne. But Christianity has no place for the funerary bonfires of the pagan Greeks, nor for the burnt offerings of the Jews. Instead, we have the orderly and aromatic fire of incense, which has been burned in Christian worship since the early centuries of the Church. This Christian fire burns hot indeed, but gently and discreetly; it is a fire of coals, hidden inside the thurible, whose shape is often reminiscent of a mountain, and whose smoke is that of silent prayer.

Exodus 24, 17 tells us that for the children of Israel, “the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount.” For Christians—living in the age of grace, and called to worship in spirit and truth—the fire of the Lord is not so physically vast, not so externally tremendous. Rather than blazing in awesome splendor from mountain heights, it burns with infinite intensity in the Heart of Jesus Christ. Saint Margaret Mary saw what most of us must imagine:

Flames issued from every part of His Sacred Humanity, especially from His Adorable Breast, which resembled an open furnace and disclosed to me His most loving and most amiable Heart, which was the living source of these flames.

Catholic artists have struggled to worthily depict the Sacred Heart. Were I a painter, I would approach the task with fear and trembling, very much as the Israelites must have approached the mountain of the Lord: “when the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount,” but “whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death.”

Perhaps the most worthy depiction of the Sacred Heart is not a depiction at all, but a symbol. The thurible shows us the Sacred Heart as a beautiful enclosure in which the sacred fire burns, and which swings and flows with the rhythms of life—the slow, solemn heartbeat of the liturgy. Hanging from a chain, as Our Lord hung from the Cross, the thurible reminds us that the divine Heart burns for men, was pierced by a man, and is entrusted to men when distributed in Holy Communion. [2]

From the crown of the thurible, as from the holy mountain of which the psalmist speaks, the smoke of prayer rises steadily, ever ascending from the Heart of Christ to the throne of His heavenly Father. But Our Lord wills that it be renewed from time to time by the devotion of His servants. The priest does this on our behalf, sprinkling grains of incense as the Gospel sower sprinkled “the word of the kingdom ... upon good ground” (Matthew 13, 19; 23). Indeed, the thurible is an enclosure, but it is not sealed. The Heart of Our Lord is ineffably holy yet offered to all who approach Him with humility and love, striving to “hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11, 28). 

Finally, we can reflect on the resilience of the thurible, an object made of metal and subjected repeatedly to heat that no flesh could endure. After St. Margaret Mary felt endangered by the overwhelmingly ardent fire of the divine Heart, Our Lord consoled her with these words: “I will be your strength. Fear nothing.”

---

1. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, translated by Linda Asher, pp. 55–56. 

2. I am referring here to the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, which suggests, by means of twentieth-century scientific analysis, that the Flesh received in Holy Communion bears a special relationship with Our Lord’s physical Heart.

A Pilgrimage Revived in the Netherlands

Our thanks to Mr Ivan Zelic for sharing with us this account of a newly-revived pilgrimage tradition in the Netherlands, and the accompanying photos. This procession is held in honor of St Cunera, one of the companions of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; a short account of her legend is given below.  

According to an old tradition, Saint Willibrord, the first bishop of Utrecht, received a request from the people to elevate the virgin and martyr Cunera van Rhenen, one of the companions of St Ursula, that is, to exhume her body from its first burial place and put it in a shrine. This would make her one of the very first Saints to be venerated in the Netherlands. In recent decades, however, she slowly fell into oblivion, except in Rhenen itself, where her name can still be seen everywhere. How fitting it is, then, that the common people have revived veneration for her by resuming the centuries-old tradition of pilgrimages in her honor. This year it was held for the second time on her feast day, June 12th, after being revived last year.

The large church dedicated to her in Rhenen opened its doors at 1 p.m. to let in the crowd who were already waiting, including many new participants who read last year’s report in the newspaper and now wanted to be there themselves. The priests of the Fraternity of St Peter’s apostolate in Amsterdam once again led the procession and celebrated the Holy Mass.

The procession left the church at half past two, a beautiful sight. At the front are the thurifer and crucifer, flanked by torch bearers, followed by four young men carrying the bier with the unique, centuries-old statue of Cunera on it, kindly lent for the occasion by the church in Vorstenbosch. Behind it walked Father Knudsen with the first-class relic of Saint Cunera in a silver reliquary, flanked by two standard bearers, and followed by about sixty people, including many young children.

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A Review of Festivals of Faith: Sermons for the Liturgical Year by St. John Henry Newman

St. John Henry Newman

“He laid the finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner place in the hearer’s heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then,” recollects one listener of a famous nineteenth-century English preacher. Another reminisced: “A sermon from him was a poem, formed on a distinct idea, fascinating by its subtlety, welcome—how welcome!—from its sincerity, interesting from its originality . . . it was like the springing of a fountain out of the rock.”

The preacher in question was St. John Henry Newman, who was renowned in his day for a hauntingly sweet voice and a capacity to bring the Scriptures to life. Newman’s multi-volume Parochial and Plain Sermons have been in print for over a century, but they are a hefty investment. Other editions of Newman’s sermons contain only snippets: while more manageable, these abridgements fail to present his full rhetorical cursus across a sermon and are often bereft of helpful apparatus.

Bridging the gap between these two extremes is Cenacle Press’s Festivals of Faith: Sermons for the Liturgical Year by St. John Henry Newman, edited by Dr. Melinda Nielsen. Festivals of Faith “gives the entirety of each sermon, for it is in the whole that the richness of Newman’s thought becomes most apparent. Drawn from his decades of preaching both as an Anglican and a Catholic, these sermons also illustrate the development and consistency of Newman’s body of writing” (xiii). (Newman himself edited his Anglican sermons to ensure their compatibility with Catholic orthodoxy.)

Festivals of Faith contains twenty-two sermons on: Advent, the Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Epiphany, the Purification and Presentation in the Temple, Septuagesima, Ash Wednesday, the Annunciation, Passiontide, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, the Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart, the Transfiguration, the Assumption, All Saints, All Souls, and Christ the King. Nielsen provides a helpful Preface situating Newman’s preaching, a brief introduction at the beginning of each sermon, and useful but not overwhelming footnotes throughout. A Biography of Newman’s Writings is brief but comprehensive. The only lacuna of the volume is the lack of an index. Even so, Festivals of Faith is both thoroughly pastoral and thoroughly scholarly, without one aspect dwarfing the other.

Dr. Melinda Nielsen

Nielsen’s pairing of sermons with feasts is excellent, despite the differences between Newman’s calendar and our own. For the Feast of Christ the King, Nielsen has chosen the sermon “The Secret Power of Divine Grace.” As she explains:

Although the feast of Christ the King was established relatively recently by Pope Pius XI in 1925, Newman persistently taught that Christianity is both a kingdom “not of this world” (John 18.36) and yet a true kingdom indeed. Ruled by an all-powerful and wise King, Christianity has laws and ethics; bishop-princes and priest-ministers; its own rights and duties, banner, citizens, and soldiers. Yet unlike earthly powers, Newman declares, “it was a conquest, not of the body, but of the heart.” For the human person is insufficient for his own happiness and earth does not provide an object worthy of him. As J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a spiritual heir of Newman and raised by an Oratorian priest, puts it: the Creator “willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein.” Man’s destiny is supernatural and only Christ’s “most gentle rule” (Collect) can give him peace (280).

For All Souls’ Day, Nielsen offers the reader Newman’s “Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus.” “Every human gesture, word, and deed of our Lord is simultaneously that of the infinite, omnipotent God,” Nielsen writes:

Thus, as Newman emphasizes, “to understand them we must feed upon them, and live in them, as if by little and little growing into their meaning.” When Jesus weeps, it is not simply the impulsive movement of human sympathy. We behold the deliberate tears of God at sin and death, “the bowels of compassion of the Almighty and Eternal, condescending to show it as we are capable of receiving it, in the form of human nature.” And such divine compassion comes at his own cost — Christ himself voluntarily descends into the grave to free each soul, like Lazarus, from the stench and wrappings of sin (270).

So much for white vestments and cries of Alleluia at funeral Masses!

James Tissot, “Jesus Wept”

Other pairings are more direct. The sermon for Christmas Day is Newman’s “Mystery of Godliness,” which he preached during the Christmas season of 1837 while the Anglican vicar of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Similarly, “The Difficulty of Realizing Sacred Privileges” was preached on Easter Sunday in 1839 and hence is the selection for the Feast of the Resurrection.

Festivals of Faith makes an ideal companion to the liturgical calendar, both old and new. I recommend it to all Newman scholars, homilists, and lovers of the Church year. Melinda Nielsen is to be commended for applying her scholarly acumen to one of the Church’s greatest preachers and thinkers, thereby making him more accessible in our own day and age.

This review first appeared in Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal 27:3 (2023), pp. 375-77. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its publication here.

Pictures of a Byzantine Priestly Ordination and First Divine Liturgy

We are very pleased to share these pictures of the priestly ordination and first Divine Liturgy of Fr Philip Gilbert of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church; we have previously published a number of articles about the Byzantine Liturgy by him, as well as photographs of his subdiaconal ordination in 2018. The ordination was done by His Grace Benedict (Aleksiychuk), bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Chicago; both ceremonies took place at the Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Redwood Valley, California. Our congratulation to Fr Philip, and to all his family and friends; thanks and kudos also to the photographer, Mr James King. 

Fr Philip (in white) and another deacon incense the bishop as he enters the church. The ordination was celebrated on Saturday, May 25th, the Leave-taking of Pentecost, which is celebrated in green in the Slavic tradition.

The bishop is solemnly vested in the nave of the church before the Liturgy begins.

At the Little Entrance

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The Legend of St Onuphrius

In the Byzantine Rite, today is the feast of a 4th century Egyptian desert father called Onuphrius; he is also found on some late medieval Western calendars, mostly in Spain, and usually a day or two earlier. His life was written one of several biographies of the early ascetics written by another Saint called Paphnutius, and bears an unmistakable resemblance to two other great classics of the genre, St Jerome’s life of St Paul the First Hermit, and the story of St Mary of Egypt.

An icon of St Onuphrius, 1662, by the Greek painter Emmanuel Tzanes (1610-90).

Paphnutius went into the desert to acquaint himself with the ways of the hermits, and discern whether he was called to embrace their life. After sixteen days, he encountered a wild-looking creature covered in his own hair (like St Mary) and a loincloth of leaves. (The latter suggests a motif of early monastic literature, that the ascetics had in some sense returned to the Paradise from which Adam was expelled.) At first, he was so frightened by the sight that he ran away, but the man called him out to him, proclaiming that he was a hermit living in the desert for the love of God. He then introduced himself by his name, Onuphrius, and explained that he had once lived in a great monastery in the region of Thebes, but had then become a hermit, led by his own guardian angel out into the desert, where he suffered greatly from hunger and thirst, heat, and was beset by many violent temptations (much like Anthony.) Like St Paul, his food was provided principally by a date palm.

Onuphrius then led Paphnutius to a cave which served as his cell, where they spent the day in conversation. At sunset, the traditional time for breaking the daily fast, bread and water appeared miraculously before them, much as the daily ration of bread was miraculously brought to St Paul by crows was doubled at the coming of St Anthony. After spending the night in prayer together, in the morning, Paphnutius was very saddened to see that Onuphrius was clearly about to die, again, just as Paul died almost immediately after being visited by Anthony. But Onuphrius revealed to him that he had been sent by the Lord to bury him, and further, in reply to a suggestion of Paphnutius that he take Onuphrius’ place, that this was not the Lord’s will. Then, commending himself to the prayers of the faithful, he blessed his guest, prostrated himself, and died.

Ss Benedict and Onuphrius, ca. 1410, by the Catalan painter Pere Vall.

Just as Anthony could find no means to dig a hole for Paul’s burial (which duty was miraculously performed by lions), Paphnutius could not dig the hard, rocky ground, so he wrapped Onuphrius’ body in a cloak and placed him in a cleft among the rocks, which he covered over with stones. As soon as the burial was accomplished, the walls of Onuphrius’ cave collapsed, and the date palm withered away, which confirmed to Paphnutius that he was not meant to stay in that place.

Although his feast is not very widespread in the West, Onuphrius is represented surprisingly well and widely in art. This may have something to do with his similarity to another popular figure in Western art, that of the Wild Man, who often appears in the marginal decorations of books of Hours. Onuphrius also has a church on the Janiculum hill in Rome (famous as the place where a celebrated poet called Torquato Tasso died in 1595.) He also appears in a large fresco of the desert fathers in the great monumental cemetery next to the cathedral of Pisa, known as the Camposanto (holy field), although this was severely damaged by a bomb during World War II.

The Thebaid, ca. 1336, by Buonamico di Buffalmacco. The legend of St Onuphrius is depicted in the upper left section, with St Mary of Egypt directly underneath. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0)

Two Artistic Treasures in Florence

I recently visited the older of the two Dominican churches in Florence, Santa Maria Novella, and got to see a couple of its many artistic treasures in a very unusual way. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the walls of many churches, but especially those of the mendicants, were decorated with frescoes which were commissioned to decorate chancery altars, or as votive offerings. Since they were not designed as a unit, but painted one by one as the commissions happened to be made, the result was often a patchwork of different styles from different periods, and sometimes, the same Saint or sacred event might be shown more than once within a relatively small space. We have previously shown an example of this phenomenon in the baptistery of the cathedral of Parma.

This kind of disorganization came to be greatly disliked in the Counter-Reformation period, in no small part also because the styles of the paintings were considered extremely old-fashioned. (As I pointed out repeatedly to the students with whom I visited this church and several others, the barbarians who vandalized so many of our churches in 1960s and ’70s were not the first of the their kind.) In 1565, therefore, the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari was brought in to clear the old frescoes off the walls of the church’s nave, and replace them with new side-altars, each graced with a large altarpiece. He also dismantled the choir, which was removed behind the main altar, and of course the rood screen, over which hung one of the most famous works of the early Renaissance, the great Crucifix of Giotto (1290-95).

However, Vasari could not bring himself to destroy one of the church’s other most famous works, the Trinity of Masaccio, commissioned for a chancery altar in the left side-aisle in the later 1420s, and a watershed moment in the use of mathematical perspective in painting. Finding no way to move it or otherwise preserve it, he built one of the new altars in front of it. In 1860, when Vasari’s altars were partly redesigned in the neo-Gothic style, this altar was taken down, and Masaccio’s Trinity was thus rediscovered. The painting is currently undergoing restoration, and during our recent visit, my group and I were able to go up on the scaffolding and stand right in front of it.

Many chancery altars were made primarily for the celebration of Masses for the Dead for the family of the people who commissioned them. As I noted above, such altars were especially common in the churches of the mendicants, because they provided a steady source of income to communities which had no land-endowment to provide revenue to live on. The identity of the people who commissioned this altar is unknown, but the skeleton seen here indicates its primary purpose. Over it is written a memento mori, a rhyming couplet in late medieval Tuscan: “Io fu’ g(i)à quel che voi sete, e quel ch’i’ son, voi anco sarete. – I was what you are, and what I am, you also will be.”

Mirabile dictu, in 2018, another painting was discovered on the wall behind another of Vasari’s altars, this one a fresco by an unknown artist, which shows St Thomas Aquinas teaching a group of students. It was painted right around the time of Thomas’ canonization in 1323, and is believed by many to be the oldest image of him as a Saint in existence. (According to a friend of mine who is extremely knowledgeable about the early history of the Dominicans, this distinction may belong to a picture in their church in Bologna instead.)

The altar with the Vasari painting pushed back into its place.

A Documentary on the 1998 Ecclesia Dei Roman Pilgrimage

In October of 1998, for the tenth anniversary of Pope St John Paul II’s motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, a great pilgrimage to Rome was organized by the Fraternity of St Peter, which also celebrated its tenth anniversary that year, in cooperation with several other groups, lay, religious, and clerical, dedicated to the celebration of the traditional Roman Rite. Just today, Peter has posted to his YouTube channel this documentary about it, which has hitherto been available only to those who managed to keep their old VHS players functioning.

Cardinal Ratzinger features very prominently here, since he spoke at one of the conferences held during the pilgrimage, and we can see clearly how Summorum Pontificum was the fruit of his long meditation on the problem of continuity and rupture (not just liturgical continuity and rupture), and what they mean for the life of the Church. He contends that the essential problem in finding a way for the traditional rite to continue to exist in the Church lies in the education of the bishops, and it is very heartening to see that his prediction that it would be resolved in the better education of a new generation of bishops has largely come true.

Among the other notable speakers are Fr Joseph Bisig, the founder of the FSSP, and his successor Fr Arnaud Devillers, who I believe was at the time superior of their American district; the late Michael Davies, one of the great defenders of the traditional liturgy in the mad early post-Conciliar years; His Eminence Alphonse Cardinal Stickler, who during the pilgrimage celebrated a Pontifical High Mass for the feast of Christ the King (back when such Masses were extremely rare); and His Excellency James Timlin, bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, another staunch supporter of the traditional Mass. At 30:00, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, founder of then-very-new Benedictines of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, makes a brief appearance.

I was present for most of the major events of this pilgrimage, including the Mass celebrated by Bishop Timlin at the North American College, and Cardinal Stickler’s Pontifical Mass; this was also the occasion on which I first met our Ambrosian expert Nicola de’ Grandi. It was an exciting time, one which I look back on with joy and gratitude, and confidence that the great pastoral wisdom and charity of the bishops who participated in it will most assuredly prevail again someday in the Church.

Become an Apprentice at a Unique Catholic Art School: the Stabat Mater Studio

The new Stabat Mater Studio in Tyler, Texas, is dedicated to training the next generation of liturgical artists.

Over the last 30 years, there has been a proliferation of ateliers and small independent schools in the United states which teach classical naturalism through the academic method of drawing and painting. While it is important that the basic skills of drawing and painting be taught to a high level, typically, these schools are secular in outlook and teach a philosophy of art that undermines the Faith.  

The Stabat Mater Studio, on the other hand, is an authentically Catholic environment that offers the five core disciplines of traditional Catholic artistic training (as described in my book The Way of Beauty). 

Under the guidance of Master Artist Robert Puschautz, students are immersed in the academic method that was developed by the great artist of the Renaissance. This is not just art instruction, but a holistic formation, integrating faith, prayer and artistic practice.

I met Robert 15 years ago and have maintained contact over the years. He came to the Scala Foundation conference last year in Princeton, New Jersey, where he met renowned iconographers Aidan Hart and Jonathan Pageau and was impressed by their description of the way that Byzantine iconography training aims at forming the whole person. He has now adapted that approach to the more naturalistic Western tradition.

The unique and uniquely Catholic curriculum combines drawing and painting fundamentals with sacred geometry and design principles in harmony with Catholic theology and philosophy. Students will copy masterworks, work from life, and actively participate in real church commissions, using an apprenticeship approach that was the norm for artists before the modern age.

In an increasingly secular world, Stabat Mater stands apart by unapologetically championing sacred aesthetics and craftsmanship in service of the Church.

To find out more and to apply, go to www.stabatmater.org/study.

Sacred Heart of Jesus

St Mark, cast drawing

Still Life

The Immaculate Heart of Mary

St Joseph and the Child Jesus, after Ribera

Master Copy: from the Coronation of the Virgin by Velazquez

Ecce Homo, after Ribera