| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 87 – December 2009 |
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PILGRIMAGE TO TURIN
DEVOTION OF REPARATION TO THE HOLY FACE
Before the exhibition of 1898, it was not the Holy Shroud kept in Turin that was the object of devotion to the Holy Face but the image that “the holy man of Tours”, Monsieur Dupont, honoured and made known, from 1851 on.
This image was the reproduction of the “veil of Veronica” venerated in Rome from time immemorial. A miraculous manifestation marked the solemn exhibition of this precious relic in 1849 at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, when Pope Pius IX was in exile at Gaeta. On the third day of the exhibition, the Feast of Epiphany, the veil became suddenly coloured and revealed the Face of the Saviour amidst a sweet light for three hours. The canons had the Basilica’s two great bells rung: people rushed there and were filled with wonder.
After having noted this fact, an apostolic notary informed the Pope. The news spread like wildfire: in its issue of 28 January 1849, the French newspaper, L’Univers, echoed it. A few white veils on which the Holy Face was depicted were touched to the miraculous veil.
Everywhere people asked for facsimiles. Many Sisters strove to produce them. But it was Monsieur Dupont, the “holy man of Tours”, who became the fervent propagator of these images.
Two years later, in 1851, on Palm Sunday, he received two copies of this holy effigy from Mother Marie de l’Incarnation, prioress of the Carmel of Tours where Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre had died three years earlier.
Starting in 1845, Our Lord Himself had asked this nun to make reparation, as we recalled last month (in the editorial), in terms that remain bitterly relevant today.
The “holy man of Tours” would become the herald of this message by exhibiting the Roman Holy Face, the “Veil of Veronica” in his study, soon to be transformed into an oratory. Through anointings made with the oil from the lamp burning in its presence, the “Veil of Veronica” worked miracles, attracted crowds of pilgrims, but above all, it raised up “Veronicas” in accordance with the desire expressed by Our Lord to Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre: « I am looking for Veronicas to wipe and to honour My divine Face. »
In the year 1885, we find recorded in the register of the confraternity set up by the Bishop of Tours, the names of the entire Guérin family of Lisieux, then of Monsieur Martin and of his daughters, the last of whom, Thérèse, was twelve years old. When the latter entered Carmel at the age of fifteen, Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus was, therefore, already a member of the Confraternity of the Holy Face...
Providential encounter.
VERONICA’S COMPASSION
On 10 January 1889, the day of her clothing, Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus ended a note to Sr. Martha with a new signature: « Sister Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus de la Sainte-Face. » This was a prophetic foretelling of the great trial which was to befall her a month later, on 12 February: the dementia of « our dear Father drinking of the bitterest and most humiliating chalice of all ». Then, through her tears, Thérèse learned to « recognise », in the facial features of her humiliated father, those of the suffering Servant foretold by the Prophet Isaiah in chapter 53:
« The soul of the prophet Isaiah was already immersed as is ours in the hidden beauties of Jesus [...]. Céline, since Jesus was “alone in treading the wine” that He gives us to drink, we in our turn should not refuse to wear garments tinged with blood... let us tread a new wine for Jesus that will slake His thirst and repay love for love. Ah, let us not keep back a single drop of wine that we can give Him… then, looking around Him, He will see that we have come to help Him!... His face was as though hidden!... Céline, it is still hidden today, for who is there that understands the tears of Jesus? » (Letter to Céline, 18 July 1890)
In the Song of Songs, the Bridegroom, whose head is covered with « drops of night » that are the sweat and blood of His Passion, comes and knocks at the door of the bride’s heart in order that she follow Him on the way of the Cross. The answer of Israel, the unfaithful bride of the Old Testament, would never come to Thérèse’s lips: « I have taken off my tunic, am I to put it on again? I have bathed my feet, am I then to soil them? » (Sg 5:3)
Is the star that guides my footsteps.
Ah! You know that your sweet Face
Is my Heaven here below.
My love uncovers the charms
Of Your Face embellished with tears.
I smile through my tears
When I contemplate Your sufferings... »
The humiliation of her father, her dearly beloved “king”, foretold that of his daughter, his “queen”. To be like him and having the premonition of the great apostasy, as Mgr Sarto, the future St. Pius X, had at the same time, St. Thérèse would desire to share the humiliation of God and of His Church outraged, covered in wounds and put to death.
It was in these sentiments of passionate love for Jesus, desiring to suffer and to die for Him, that Thérèse made her profession, on 8 September 1890.
Soon after her death from love, on 30 September 1897, Thérèse created a means to engrave this Holy Face in the hearts of all men, if possible. In fact, it was in October 1897, that the King of Italy was presented with a request for the Holy Shroud to be exhibited. The royal authorisation bears the date of 10 November 1897.
From then on, the Holy Shroud and St. Thérèse, « the greatest saint in modern times » according to the judgement of St. Pius X, would travel together in the ascent towards glory. L’Histoire d’une âme was given the imprimatur on 7 March 1898, and the first edition was dated 30 September. Between the two: an exhibition of sacred art opened in Turin on 1st May 1898…
ECCE SPONSUS
Pilgrims crossed the city in serried ranks, beneath the pastoral staff of their bishops, often come from very far away to contemplate and venerate the Holy Shroud exhibited on the altar of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist. Indifferent to the sarcasm of the anticlerical, positivist and scientist press, who denigrated this crude “painting” of no aesthetic value, their ardent zeal received its reward, in the form of a “divine surprise” comparable to the miracle worked in answer to Veronica’s tender compassion, according to the sixth station of our Way of the Cross: the photographic negative of the venerable Relic clearly and unequivocally revealed a perfect positive image, the photograph of Jesus!
It is His self portrait! It is really Him in His essential being, but He has chosen that expression as though He had recreated Himself. Here, “the artist who depicted Himself” has got involved in this work. The artist is the Son of God made man who had already created Himself a body in the womb of the Blessed Virgin with the intention of making it the image of the divinity, the image of God His Father. Thus, the image that He has created on the Holy Shroud is the image of the image of God. He, the Son of God, has taken a “snapshot” of this Body that had shown Itself to his contemporaries in Its earthly condition as the image of God. This “snapshot” corresponds to the state that He wanted to leave us as the true image of His mystery.
A sublime and moving contemplation emerges from the theology of the image of the Holy Shroud, a theology that is entirely dependent on the Mystery of the Incarnation: not only is it He, but it is He just as He wanted us to know Him!
What do we see on this image? The ugliness of the suffering servant, according to the fourth poem of the Unknown of the Exile (Is 53), or the beauty of the most handsome of men according to the psalmist (Ps 45)?
Ugliness means: affliction, humiliation, pain and horror that are not merely exterior, but that ravaged the very depths of Christ’s soul from the time of the agony in the garden and no doubt well before that! And yet His beauty as Son of God nevertheless shone from His bruised face and from His adorable body even from the last of His wounds. In the eyes of those who loved Him to the end, did He not remain the most beautiful of the children of men?
Yes, indeed! That is why for every Christian mystic from St. Paul and St. John to St. Therese of the Holy Face, Charles de Foucauld, Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre and the “holy man of Tours”, the Holy Face of Christ remains the centre and the summit of all human aesthetics.
« Now, here is the most clamant illustration of the message of the Holy Face: one day I opened my breviary to find that my two images of St. Thérèse on her death bed and Christ came together. I experienced a shock, a suddenly vehement message: it was the twofold sleep of two recumbent figures who died for each other. Sleep of love, of a death by love, of a death from love, death in an act of perfect love. If the image of the Bridegroom is joined with that of the bride who has silently given her life for Him, we see two solitudes that have met, two faces, two bodies awaiting the resurrection for their eternal nuptials.
« For Him, the resurrection is already accomplished: this Face is that of Christ who is risen into Glory. For Thérèse, the hour would come soon... Glory to God, to the Son of God in Heaven and peace on earth to the holy bodies who are awaiting their resurrection to go and be united to Him in eternal Life! » (Brother Georges of Jesus-Mary)
« Oh! I love Him... My God... I love You!... »