This feast day celebrates a miraculous image of Mary once lost for 13 centuries

September 15, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1 Print

Rome Newsroom, Sep 15, 2020 / 05:45 am (CNA).- A basilica in Italy marks the spot of a bloody episode in early Church history — and is home to an image of Mary once lost in the hills for centuries.

On Sept. 15, a Catholic shrine in the small hilltop town of Lenola celebrates the local feast day of Our Lady of the Hill.

The day, marked by Masses and — in pre-coronavirus times — a procession, honors the day a young man repented and converted after a murderous plot, before finding a centuries-old miraculous fresco of the Virgin Mary and Child Jesus.

Servant of God Gabriele Mattei and his two friends found the image, covered by rubble and thick brambles and plants, on Sept. 15, 1602, with directions from Our Lady.

The frescoed image is believed to be from the third century AD. It was painted on the wall of a cave where Christians took refuge while hiding from the persecution of the Emperor Decius.

The Christians prayed in their makeshift shrine, but their hiding spot was discovered. The Roman soldiers killed them all and left their bodies strewn about the cave.

Other Christians in the area heard about the massacre and went up to the cave with a monk to give them a proper burial.

Tired after the work, the Christians fell asleep, only to be awoken suddenly by a loud noise and bright light flooding the cave. They heard a voice saying: “Do not be afraid, hope in God, I am among you for your comfort, here is my image.”

Before them they saw an image of the Virgin and Child, surrounded by angels waving palms and crowns of martyrdom.

This vision and message brought the Christians joy and comfort as they returned back down the hill to their brothers and sisters in the faith — and probably also to their deaths.

According to the website of the Basilica della Madonna del Colle (pictured below), “the Virgin Mother remained to watch over the glorious tombs of the martyrs, waiting for a radiant dawn marked by God.”

It was not until 1,300 years later that the 23-year-old Gabriele Mattei would find himself in the same place.

A handsome young man, Gabriele had a reputation for being prideful and licentious.

On the afternoon of Sept. 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, he and his friends went to the Hill of the Holy Cross, where solemn vespers were being celebrated.

The three young men were disturbing the celebration from the church square, and were scolded by an older Christian man. The men cursed the elder and hatched a plan to murder him in the middle of the night, with the task falling to Gabriele.

But that night, Gabriele was irritable and nervous and could not sleep, so he took his guitar-like instrument to a spot outside the town to play, looking for peace.

But when he tried to play, the strings did not emit a harmonious sound. His tuning failed; the guitar continued to make shrill sounds. Frustrated, Gabriele swore, threw his instrument to the ground, and invoked the devil.

Gabriele would later describe what happened to the local bishop: “At my invocation, a monstrous infernal figure appeared before me; frightened, I made the sign of the cross and invoked the help of Our Lady.”

“I was about to flee,” Gabriele recounted, “when from a shining light, a celestial voice said to me: ‘Stop, do not be afraid, you have called me! Be converted, climb this hill, you will find my image; I want you to build me a temple, and on the day of the consecration I will make a miracle shine which over the centuries will testify to my presence in your country.’”

Gabriele was suddenly smiling and meek. He went immediately to the parish church, waited for it to be unlocked, and prayed before an image of Mary inside.

According to the shrine’s website, “his presence in the Church, at that morning hour, aroused wonder among the faithful.”

He received the sacrament of reconciliation and went to meet his friends. Gabriele told them that he did not kill the man and explained what happened to him the night before. They did not believe him, but agreed to go with him to the spot described by the voice to find the image of Mary. They intended to kill him if what he told them was not true.

After hours of digging and cutting through brambles and bushes, they found the image of Our Lady, painted on the wall, with blood dripping from her lower lip.

The three young men began to pray and to shed tears of joy. At the same moment, some village children announced that “the image of Mary has been found on the hill! Let’s go to the hill,” and people rushed to the spot.

The local bishop wrote down the accounts of Gabriele and his friends, and gave his approval of the miraculous image.

The villagers quickly constructed a hut to protect the image until the church requested by Mary could be built.

Gabriele set out on a pilgrimage around Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal to share his story of conversion and ask for help to build the church. He carried with him a copy of the image of Our Lady of the Hill.

When he knocked at someone’s door, he greeted them with the words “Deo Gratias,” which means, “thanks be to God.” From this greeting, he became known as Br. Deo Gratis. After three years, he returned to Lenola with the money necessary to build the shrine.

Gabriele dedicated the rest of his life to the shrine, where he lived and served as a bell ringer. He died on Dec. 3, 1656, at age 77, when he was stabbed to death by three men at the entrance to the church.

“Now he rests in that shrine, which he raised in expiation for his errors, in honor and glory of the Mother of Jesus,” the website says.

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The original Image of Divine Mercy: It’s not where you might think

April 28, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Vilnius, Lithuania, Apr 28, 2019 / 03:03 am (CNA).- Among Catholic devotions, the Divine Mercy message is well-known: the iconic image of Christ, with rays of red and white pouring from his heart; St. Faustina, called the “Apostle of Divine Mercy;” and the Basilica of Divine Mercy in Krakow, Poland.

But what you might not know is that more than 450 miles north of Krakow, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, there is another Sanctuary of Divine Mercy, one which houses the first image of the merciful Jesus created, and the only Image of Divine Mercy St. Faustina herself ever saw.

Archbishop Gintaras Grusas of Vilnius told CNA that the city, often called the “City of Mercy,” is not only “a place of the Divine Mercy revelations, but also a place that is in need of mercy, throughout history, and a place that in the last couple decades has been a place where we need to show mercy.”

Since long before St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy revelations, the Mother of Mercy has been the patroness of Vilnius, Grusas said.

In fact, in the 1600s, a painting of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn was created and placed in a niche above one of the prominent city gates. Many miracles are attributed to the image, which was canonically crowned Mother of Mercy by Pope Pius XI in 1927.

It was in this small chapel of the Mother of Mercy, above the gate, that the Image of Divine Mercy was first displayed. So Vilnius has had “mercy upon mercy,” Grusas noted.

The story of St. Faustina and Divine Mercy

St. Faustina Kowalska was a young Polish nun born at the beginning of the 20th century. Over the course of several years she had visions of Jesus, whereby she was directed to create an image and to share with the world revelations of Jesus’ love and mercy.

St. Faustina received her first revelation of the merciful Jesus in Plock, Poland in February 1931. At the time, she had made her first vows as one of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.

In 1933, after she made her perpetual vows, her superior directed her to move to the convent house in Vilnius. She stayed there for three years and this is where she received many more visions of Jesus. Vilnius is also where she found a priest to be her spiritual director, the now-Bl. Michael Sopocko.

With the help of Fr. Sopocko, St. Faustina found a painter to fulfill the request Jesus had made to her in one of the visions – to “paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: Jesus, I trust in You” – and in 1934 the painter Eugene Kazimierowski created the original Divine Mercy painting under St. Faustina’s direction.

In its creation, St. Faustina “was instrumental in making all the adjustments with the painter,” Archbishop Grusas said.

The image shows Christ with his right hand raised as if giving a blessing, and the left touching his chest. Two rays, one pale, one red – which Jesus said are to signify water and blood – are descending from his heart.

St. Faustina recorded all of her visions and conversations with Jesus in her diary, called Divine Mercy in My Soul. Here she wrote the words of Jesus about the graces that would pour out on anyone who prayed before the image:

“I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. I also promise victory over [its] enemies already here on earth, especially at the hour of death. I Myself will defend [that soul] as My own glory.”

When the image was completed, it was first kept in the corridor of the convent of the Bernardine Sisters, which was beside the Church of St. Michael where Fr. Sopocko was rector.

In March 1936 St. Faustina became sick, with what is believed to have been tuberculosis, and was transferred back to Poland by her superiors. She died near Krakow in October 1938, at the age of 33.

“St. Faustina, because of her illness, was brought back to Krakow by her superiors. But she left the painting in Vilnius because it was the property of her spiritual director, who paid for the painting,” Grusas explained.

Jesus, in one of St. Faustina’s visions, had expressed his wish that the image be put in a place of honor, above the main altar of the church. And so, though St. Faustina had already returned to Poland, on the first Sunday after Easter in 1937, they hung the image of Merciful Jesus next to the main altar in the Church of St. Michael.

The history of the image

Archbishop Grusas explained that many people have only recently learned about the image because it was hidden for many years, and it was only rediscovered and restored within the last 15 years.

During World War II, Lithuania was under Soviet occupation and in 1948, the communist government closed the Church of St. Michael and abolished the convent. Many of the sacred objects and artworks were moved to another church to be saved from Soviet hands, but the Divine Mercy image was left undisturbed in St. Michael’s for several years.

In 1951, two women were able to pay the keeper of St. Michael’s church and save the image. Since it couldn’t be taken across the border to Poland, they gave it to the priest in charge of the Church of the Holy Spirit for safekeeping.

Five years later it was moved to a church in Belarus, where it remained for over a decade. In 1970 this church too was shut down by the government and looted, but miraculously, again the Image of Divine Mercy was untouched.

Eventually it was brought back to Lithuania in secret and again given to the Church of the Holy Spirit. In the early 2000s its significance was rediscovered and after a professional restoration it was rehung in the nearby Church of the Holy Trinity in 2005, which is now the Shrine of Divine Mercy.

So though it is a more recent arrival on the international scene, the painting “is also probably the most profound of the Divine Mercy paintings,” Grusas said. “It has a very deep theology, very closely tied with St. Faustina’s diary.”

The Shrine of Divine Mercy

Today in Vilnius the archdiocese has begun to set up a guide for pilgrims who come and wish to visit the holy sites, such as the place where St. Faustina lived, the room where the image was painted, and the several churches which all held the painting at different points.

The Shrine of Divine Mercy itself is not a large place, since it’s only a converted parish church, but its sacramental life “is really quite something,” said Justin Gough, an American seminarian studying in Rome who spent a summer working in the Archdiocese’s pilgrim office in Vilnius.

He said that “between Mass, the Divine Mercy chaplet every day in Lithuanian and Polish, adoration 24/7… vespers every Sunday night led by the youth of Vilnius,” the rosary and the sacrament of Confession, there is always some sort of prayer or sacrament taking place.

Of course the original Image of Divine Mercy is also there, he pointed out, and yet the shrine is not just about the image, but about connecting the image and what it represents to prayer and the reception of God’s mercy through the sacraments.

“I think it’s ironic in a certain sense that God teaches us about his mercy through a holy woman who died at the age of 33,” he said. “She lived a very devout life, endured great sufferings for the sake of Christ, and yet it’s through people like her that we’re taught, great sinners that we are, how to actually receive God’s mercy and to be merciful to others.”

In Vilnius, it’s a great blessing “to know a saint of the 20th century walked here, prayed here, and experienced Christ here, and that we can do that as well.”
 

This article was originally published on CNA Nov. 26, 2017.

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