The Holy Face of Jesus Devotion: the Work of Reparation

Today is Fat Tuesday, or Carnival. It is the day before Ash Wednesday and is also known as the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus. There is a Devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus that seems to be growing in popularity, based on an unscientific sampling of suggested YouTube videos and random things crossing my social media feeds. I first learned about it several years ago when a priest gave a talk on it after a Latin Mass I had attended; soon afterward I began to discover some free pamphlets in area churches. They promoted various prayers to the Holy Face, most notably the well-known “Golden Arrow Prayer,” which may be familiar to you:

“May the most holy, most sacred, most adorable, most incomprehensible and ineffable Name of God be forever praised, blessed, loved, adored and glorified in Heaven, on Earth, and under the Earth, by all the creatures of God, and by the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. Amen.”

During the late 1840s, Our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to a Carmelite nun in Tours, France, and revealed a message to her that was to be shared with the world. That message was the Devotion to His Most Holy Face. Sister Marie of St. Peter was tasked with making this “Work of Reparation” known.

This Devotion is intended to make reparation for the sins of blasphemy against the Holy Name of God and the profanation of Sundays and Holy Days. In addition, it is to be a spiritual weapon against Communists.

The apparition of Our Lord to Sr. Marie was timely. The French Revolution had infected Christendom with the errors of Modernism just over half a century before; among these errors were radical secularism, anti-clericalism, and especially the seeds of what would become Communism. Just two years after the initial apparition, Europe was convulsed in Leftist riots and revolutions that shook the established order. Karl Marx got to work on his Communist Manifesto. While his criticism of capitalism has some merit, his solutions are like that of a cure being much worse than the disease, thus rendering his criticism irrelevant.

Jesus anticipated the rise of Communism in the 1848 European Revolutions, much like Our Lady did at Fatima in 1917.

The essence of the Holy Face Devotion, and why the Holy Face is the object, is reparation for sin; and since our sins were taken upon Our Lord in His propitiatory sacrifice on Calvary, there is a scriptural basis. Take a look at Isaiah 52:13-53:12; those passages contain many of the verses of the Messianic Prophecy of the Suffering Servant.

When you open your Catholic Bible to those verses in Isaiah, you’ll find numerous references to the Face of the Servant: that it is disfigured and despised and is the face of a leper. And Isaiah 53:5 mentions that He was wounded for our sins. Take all of this and go to the all of Gospel accounts of the Passion of Our Lord, how He was buffeted about His head, spat upon, and Crowned with Thorns which most definitely disfigures the Face, and the Face of Christ becomes a symbol of the effects of our sins upon the Divine Countenance.

Divine ratification of the devotion to the Holy Face began when Veronica wiped the Face of Jesus while He was on His way to Calvary. His reward for her kindness was the imprinting of His visage on the cloth she used. (The cloth is in existence today, see the “Sudarium of Oviedo.”)

This is a devotion gravely needed for our times. Western Civilization is conceivably in a state of collapse as evidenced by the political and popular responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, riots and mob thuggery in our cities, and political extremism on both the Left and the Right. Add to all that war in Europe, and the increased likelihood of war in Asia (China and Taiwan, North and South Korea), and we are reminded of what Our Lady said at Fatima.

“War is punishment for sin.” 

NOTE: Portions of this article were adapted from a series of posts on Sober Catholic, an archive of which can be found here. Some of the posts contain useful Holy Face resources.