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The Importance of The Holy Face Devotion

Articles | October 28, 2024 | by Catholics for Catholics

The Holy Face Devotion as a Social Balm during Times of Conflict

The last several years in the United States have seen a growing radicalization and destabilization of our political life. Tensions and division are thick in the air as we enter the final week before a monumental election. Many of us live in fear of a coming period of deepening oppression that might include serious persecution of Church.

Both the Old and New Testament and the unfolding of history give ample witness that peace can be lost, and tyranny can take over societies as a punishment allowed by God for personal and collective sins, as large numbers of people, and especially leaders, forget the ways of the Lord and rebellious groups rise up against God and his representatives and the stability of the social order provided by observance of a public and private morality that is in harmony with the natural law and the Commandments.

In Colossians 3-5 St. Paul calls on us as followers of Christ to turn resolutely from ways of living that reject the love of Jesus:

“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is the service of idols. For which things the wrath of God cometh upon the children of unbelief. In which you also walked some time, when you lived in them. 1″

St. Paul is revealing the roots in all of these as idolatry and a lack of faith in the one true God. He is also implicating all of us in these sins that both result from living under the domination of the spirit of the world and deepen our personal and collective bondage to it. St. Paul then provides a list of sins that are part of this fleshly way and calls us to spiritual renewal in Christ:

“But now put you also all away: anger, indignation, malice, blasphemy, filthy speech out of your mouth. Lie not one to another: stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds, And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him. 2”

A common factor in all of these severe transgressions is sinful personal anger, and the remedy St. Paul proposes is renewal in the Spirit by being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

The French Carmelite nun Mary of Saint Peter received a series of visions in the 1840s in which Jesus revealed to her the Holy Face Devotion. This devotion allows those who pray it to inwardly become more like Christ by contemplating and consoling his wounded visage as a continuation of the comfort offered to him in his Passion by Veronica with her veil, according to the tradition that inspired the Sixth Station of the Cross.

“Drawing me strongly to the contemplation of His adorable Face, our Divine Savior made me see through a ray of light issuing from His august Countenance that the Holy Face 

1 Col. 3:5-7, Douay-Rheims
2 Col. 3:8-10, Douay-Rheims

which He presented to mankind for their adoration, was indeed the mirror of those unutterable Divine Perfections comprised and contained in the Most Holy Name of God. 3″

In February 1848 Sister Mary of Saint Peter received locutions from our Lord instructing her about a rapidly approaching time of social storms. Jesus revealed to her the deepest causes of this crisis:

“The Savior made me understand that His justice was greatly irritated against mankind for its sins but particularly for those that directly outrage the Majesty of God — that is. Communism, Atheism, cursing, and the desecration of Sundays. 4”

It should be noted that the locutions regarding the Holy Face came exactly eight days prior to the publication of the Communist Manifesto. 8 is the number of perfection because it reflects the day of creation perfected in the day of Salvation. The Holy Face Devotion thus appears to have been an anticipatory response from God to bring His perfection to the grave errors of Communism.

Soon after receiving this revelation with its call to make reparation, France was struck by a violent revolution, and King Louis Phillipe was forced into exile. Sr. Mary of Saint Peter was moved to intense prayer centered upon devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. Jesus told her in a subsequent vision that her devotion had saved France from total disaster:

“The Lord has told me that in consequence of the initial efforts made to establish somewhat the Work of Reparation, our country which was to be almost entirely destroyed by the darts of His justice, would now only be partly punished by the terrible flames of His anger.”

Through the 19 th and 20 th centuries France would be rocked by periods of intense war, revolutionary uprisings and Nazi occupation, but the light of the Church was never extinguished, and there were limits to the destruction and loss of freedom, even the darkest periods. A great debt for God’s protective hand on France is owed to cloistered religious such at Mary of Saint Peter and great Saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux, who herself embraced the Holy Face devotion.

We face an election in which one of the parties embraces an agenda that utters blasphemy with its murderous violence against God’s unborn children and its confused rejection of how we as his creations reflect his divine image in our gendered natures, and the less destructive party has fallen short of an unequivocal rejection of these things. We live in a society in which some actions promote these errors with full knowledge and great malice, but many more people in desperate need of God’s redemptive healing are coming under their noxious shadow and assent to them in a less culpable ignorance not motivated by willful hatred of God or others but that nevertheless contains hidden roots of anger.

At this time, we can find consolation in regularly praying the Holy Face Chaplet and Golden Arrow Prayer and make a reparation that can bring peace and spread the grace of conversion to the society around us, helping to prevent a full outbreak of revolution (and / or counter-revolution), regardless of the outcome on November 5. Praying the Holy Face devotion will help us to grow to be more like Jesus as he was horribly violated, beaten, spat on and mocked on his way to the Cross, responding only with eyes full of love, praying ceaselessly for those who do not know what they are doing, and never with destructive, revengeful anger. May we grow

3 Sr. Mary of St. Peter. The Golden Arrow: The Revelations of Sr. Mary of St. Peter, Ed. Dorothy Scallan The
Basics (Gastonia, NC: TAN Books, 2015), Location 2051-2052, Kindle.
4 Sr. Mary of St. Peter, Location 2026-2028

into his image and become bearers of sanity in this way even if God leads our society into a time of greater darkness.

Mark Aquilano

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