| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 86 – November 2009 |
|
PILGRIMAGE TO TURIN
« I am looking for Veronicas to wipe and adore My Divine Face. » These are words that Our Lord said to Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre. In spite of this, there are still people who think that St. Veronica never existed!
Why « wipe » Your Divine Face, O my God? Because ungrateful men have never ceased sullying it throughout the centuries with their blasphemies, which are like so much spittle. Since the Revolution the Devil has broken loose in a way that renews the outrages of Your Passion. The fact that Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre heard this message from Our Lord on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 is proof of this:
« The face of France has become hideous in the sight of my Father. » In the XIXth century! We admire the virtues and the works of holiness of this century. In the century of our Fathers’ religion, « the face of France » was already « hideous » in the sight of our dearest heavenly Father: Then, today… how must the face of France seem to Heaven!... We cannot think about it without shuddering!
« It provokes His Justice. Offer Him, therefore, the Face of His Son, which delights His heart, to bring down His mercy on this France, without which she will be chastised. There lies her salvation, that is to say, in the Saviour's Face. »
If we seek the conditions for France’s salvation, simple good sense demands that we should be counter-revolutionary. It is easy to understand. It is not even necessary to be Catholic for that. But to make this obvious fact prevail in the life of the real country, it does not suffice to keep one’s wits. One must make reparation, and one Veronica understood Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre’s message so well that at the beginning of the year 1889, she took the name of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face; she did not wait for 14 July! For her Clothing ceremony on 10 January she inaugurated in her own way the centenary that would be the occasion for the impious to provoke our heavenly Father’s Justice.
As our Father demonstrated in his retreat on “Saint Thérèse, Miniature of the Immaculate”, the Good God took her at her word. A month later on 12 February the illness of M. Martin, « our dearest father drinking the bitterest and most humiliating of all chalices », taught her to recognise through her tears, under the features of her father’s face, those of the Suffering Servant whom the prophet Isaiah had announced. From that day on she could say: « These words of Isaiah: “Who has believed Your word… There is no beauty in Him, nor comeliness”…, etc, have been the core of my devotion to the Holy Face, or rather, the core of my whole piety. I too would like to be without beauty, alone to tread the grape in the winepress, unknown by any creature. »
Her prayer was answered without delay. After a few short years of obscurity, absorbed remembering Jesus’ tears and contemplating how the Holy Face was ravaged, bathed in sweat and tears, sullied with blood and the spittle that the impiety of the end of that century spewed, one day she herself entered upon her own Passion by closely espousing that of Jesus. On 5 August 1897, the eve of the Transfiguration, to her great joy, the Holy Face from the Carmelite’s choir was hung in the infirmary. It was the image that Monsieur Dupont, “the holy man of Tours,” had honoured and then made known: « Oh! Has this Holy Face ever done me good in my life! » Throughout the night, she looked at it.
This love-filled contemplation brought her to be continually configured to her Beloved; until the hour of agony that she suffered on 30 September; like Jesus’ own suffering, it was « unalloyed with any consolation ». At 3 p.m. the monastery’s bell chimed as it does every day to recall Christ’s death. When « with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross, resting on her two sisters, in her agony she gasped for breath and inhaled deeply to respire, the vision of the Crucified imposed itself on the witnesses » because of the outstretched arms. But the following year when the photo of the Holy Shroud would reveal that Jesus really died of asphyxiation, His distended lungs filled with tainted air, the devotion of St. Thérèse for the Holy Face« or rather, the core of her whole piety » would be propagated throughout the world by the Holy Shroud of Turin.
Moreover, it is perhaps she who did it all. For it was in October 1897, that is to say shortly after her birth into Heaven, that the petition for an exhibition of the Holy Shroud was presented to the king of Italy. Now, the photo of this alleged crude “painting” without aesthetic value, the showpiece of the Exposition of sacred art that opened at Turin on 1 May 1898, was going to produce a “divine surprise” comparable to the miracle that responded to the tender compassion of St. Veronica, according to the sixth station of our Way of the Cross: the photographic negative, like Veronica’s soft, immaculate veil, revealed a perfect positive image: Jesus’ luminous portrait on the background of the tissue, which in negative had become dark in colour.
It is a marvellous fulfilment of Thérèse’s words to Celine: « Yes, Jesus’ Face is luminous. »
Not His Face alone, but His entire Body covered with Blood and wounds: « Was it not before the wounds of Jesus, seeing His Divine Blood flowing down, that the thirst for souls entered my heart? »
The sensation caused by this discovery was immense. Thérèse’s uncle, Isidore Guérin, brought to the Carmel of Lisieux the first work by Paul Vignon, Le Linceul du Christ, as soon as it was published in 1902. His niece, Celine, whose religious name was Sister Geneviève and who was the artist of the Martin family, had entered Carmel in September 1894 after her father’s death. She brought her camera and easel.
She found herself doubly prepared, firstly as photographer and artist, and secondly as spiritual daughter of Thérèse, to understand the revelation of the true portrait of Jesus and the secret of its « hidden beauties ».
In her cell, during the time of silence in the evening, the nun spread out the plates of the photogravure reproductions of Secundo Pia’s negatives, and remained seized with emotion :
« It was indeed my Jesus, as my heart had sensed He would be… And searching the traces of His sufferings, I followed the wounds which formed the imprint of the cruel crown of thorns. I saw the Blood coagulated in the hair, then flowing down in large drops. At the top of the head, to the left, one feels that the crown of thorns must have been painfully torn off. The hair stuck together by Blood remained stiffened by this effort. The left eye seems to be very slightly open, whilst the right eye is swollen. I saw that the upper part of the nose was fractured, the right cheek and nostril swollen from the servant’s blow, the beard all covered with Blood… Then, unable to contain the feelings of my heart any longer, I covered this adorable Face with my kisses and watered it with my tears. And I resolved to make a painting of the Holy Face after this ideal image that I had glimpsed. »
The result was an authentic masterpiece, which won theGrand Prixat the International Exhibition of Religious Art of Bois-le-Duc in 1909. Because of its majestic and tragic realism, which shows a very attentive study of the photo, which had been examined and understood in its every detail, and because it was so much in tune with the taste of the time, a million copies of the picture were rapidly and widely circulated.
Fr. Prévost brought it to Pius X. The holy Pope returned the precious image to him at the bottom of which he had written:
« To all those who meditate on the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ before this image, we grant each time, in addition to the Apostolic Blessing, all the indulgences conferred previously by the Sovereign Pontiffs to the Crown of the Five Wounds. »
Thus, St. Pius X’s favour enthroned the Holy Face in all the Christian families of the universe at the same time as the image of Thérèse herself whom he desired to have canonised rapidly: « Bisogna far presto questo Processo », he said to Mgr de Teil. He granted an indulgence of three hundred days to a prayer to the Holy Face that the holy Carmelite had composed, which is now inseparable from the image that her sister painted.
PRAYER TO THE HOLY FACE
O Jesus, who in Your cruel Passion became the “the most abject of men and the Man of Sorrows”, I venerate Your Divine Face. Once it shone with the beauty and sweetness of the Godhead: now for my sake it has become as the face of a leper. Yet in that disfigured Countenance I recognise Your infinite Love, and I am consumed with the desire of loving You and of making You loved by all men. The tears that streamed in such abundance from Your eyes are to me as precious pearls that I delight to gather in order to ransom the souls of poor sinners by means of their infinite value.
O Jesus, whose Face is the sole beauty that ravishes my heart, I accept not to behold here upon earth the sweetness of Your Glance, nor feel the ineffable tenderness of Your Kiss, but I pray You to imprint in me Your Divine Likeness, and I implore You so to inflame me with Your Love, that it may quickly consume me and I may soon reach the Vision of Your glorious Face in Heaven. Amen.
300 days of indulgence were granted to this prayer
to the Holy Face in favour of the souls of Purgatory
by the Sovereign Pontiff St. Pius X in 1906)