The Virtual Oratory

It would seem impossible for anyone to write something new about the religious art of Rome, even if they elaborate a lovely exposition of spirituality. But this year...2009...Sister Wendy Beckett did it. Encounters with God, In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary is her latest book and it is a remarkable teacher's personal account of her faith and her encounters with the most ancient icons of Mary...the few that survived the iconoclasm struggle in the early Church. The Eastern Church, that part of the Church we associate with the centrality of icons, once had leaders, religious and secular who tried to wipe icons out. Some survived...by being hidden or put away in the Sinai monastery of St Catherine outside the Byzantine empire or in Roman churches also outside the reach of Constantinople. It is ironic that the Roman church since it did not experience the iconoclast upheaval preserved the great religious treasures of the East which finally not only restored icons but now glories in them.

The icons are not the splendid "classical" ones we now associate with the East, especially the genius of Russia. But Sister Wendy is looking at these icons not only as a teacher of art and religion, but as a believer and a woman responding in a special way to these difficult to locate and difficult to see icons. 

I leave the rest to Sister Wendy:

 This [the [the Virgin of San Sisto] is the last or the [earliest] Virgins in Rome, the most difficult to track down, was also a dazzling revelation. She was essentially rediscovered in the 1960s and there are certainly art  historians who consider her 'perhaps the most beautiful cion of the Virgin in Rome.'...It is the only one in which Mary is not holding her child. ... The icon is found in a contemplative convent
[Dominican nuns on Monte Mario, the outskirts of Rome]  and you will see a beautiful, human woman, bright cheeked, red lipped, large eyed, but the gold background tells us that she unites her humanity to the holiness of the Godhead. Those empty hands and that look of indescribable peace, of an inner and transforming certainty, speak very powerfully to our own condition...After Iconoclasm, no one would paint so living and breathing a young woman, and know her as being Christ's mother. Later centuries imposed so great a reverence, that the simple sweetness of the San Sisto icon, its fleshly, vibrant beauty, was no longer possible. [p. 94]. 

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 March 25

Feast of the Annunciation

"More blessed was Mary," says St. Augustine, "in receiving Christ's faith, than in conceiving Christ's flesh;" and St. Chrysostom declares, that she would not have been blessed, though she had borne Him in the body, had she not heard the word of God and kept it. This, of course, is an impossible case; for she was made holy, that she might be made His Mother, and the two blessednesses cannot be divided. She who was chosen to supply flesh and blood to the Eternal Word, was first filled with grace in soul and body; still, she had a double blessedness, of office and of qualification for it, and the latter was the greater. And it is on this account that the Angel calls her blessed...

Sermon by John Henry Newman

Pope John Paul II, ever mindful of the eastern Church, promoted as Benedict XVI did as theologian Joseph Ratzinger, the older tradition found in Greek of translating HAIL MARY (the Latin version) as Rejoice Mary. This proclmation of joy will be the central theme of these Mary pages. 

PS In 2008 the Italian lectionary will have this translation in Luke: REJOICE MARY, full of grace.... 

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The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary: 
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. 

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of
our death. Amen. 

Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word. 

Hail Mary . . . 

And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us. 

Hail Mary . . . 

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. 

Let us pray: 

Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts; that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord.