July 12 is the feast day of St. Veronica, the saint whose act of kindness to Jesus as He walked the Via Dolorosa will be forever commemorated in the Sixth Station of the Cross: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. Although the details of her life have vanished in history, the courage and empathy of the woman who took pity on the plight of a prisoner in the middle of His agony have come down to us across two thousand years.
A statue of Veronica and the Holy Veil is one of the four original pillars of St. Peter’s in the Vatican The Relics of the Passion, kept in the loggia above the Statue, include a scrap of material with the imprint of a bearded man brought from Jerusalem in the crusades, believed to be Veronica’s veil.
As the Sudarium Christi (Christ’s Kerchief), it has been venerated during every Jubilee since 1300 by pilgrims. It is one of the three most important relics in St Peter’s; the other two are a fragment of the Cross and the spear that pierced Christ’s chest. Belief in this icon was given considerable stimulus by Innocent III when, in 1216, he saw the veil turn over in its reliquary after the customary ‘Procession of the Veronica’ from St Peter’s to the Santo Spirito Hospital. Believing this was a sign, the Pope wrote a prayer which gave an indulgence of ten days (the first instance in history of a prayer connected with an indulgence). Dante saw this relic during the 1300 Jubilee, and extols it in Paradiso XXXI. And, under this pillar, Pope Julius II laid the first stone of the new basilica (and current) of St. Peter on April 18, 1506.
Our Church is nothing if not an inexhaustible history of Incarnation. That is, at every turn we are confronted with the Divine-united-with-human, the Spiritual-united-with-the-material. As much as our current culture seeks to untie the two, the Lord of culture seeks to draw our wandering attention again and again to the reality of heaven which is, “What God has joined together, let no man take apart.”
There is little doubt that the woman who grabbed a cloth and pushed forward through the soldiers and crowd on the day before Passover in Jerusalem to try to help Jesus had any idea that her act of charity was uniting the eternal with the physical, the infinite with the finite. Much less did she perceive that her gesture would be immortalized forever. So much more should it be for us, who have the clarity of her example, as well as all the example of all the saints of the intervening two thousand years, to inspire us. Their acts of charity should compel us everyday to come out of comfort zones, as Pope Francis is fond of saying, and speak the Love of Christ through our deeds everyday during this Year of Faith. St Veronica, ora pro nobis!
Copyright © 2013, Glenna Bradshaw
Glenna Bradshaw
Glenna Bradshaw is a happy Catholic who lives in Tennessee with her family and two spoiled greyhounds. She blogs at Celebrating the Year of Faith.
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