When I was a small boy, I was intrigued whenever I went to visit my paternal grandmother’s house. She was the last of my grandparents to die. Of her generation, I only knew her and my mother’s father. They were interesting people in my life, my grandparents. My dad’s mother in particular had a certain piety to her. Looking back now, I would say her religious pictures had a certain attraction to me. One such picture that stood out was an icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. The Blessed Mother wore a peculiar wardrobe; the Child Jesus dressed up like I had never been. The two angels were something else! But I used to like to stare at this picture. It had a strangely other-worldly quality to it. I didn’t really understand it until much later in my youth, when I enrolled at St. Mary’s College in Brockville, the minor seminary of the Redemptorists in Eastern Canada. It was there that I learned in strong terms about its significance and history, and how that would impact me as an up-and-coming Redemptorist.

Our Eastern-Church co-religionists often spoke to me of icons, impressing those of us who would listen, that these are not mere pictures. In fact, that description came to sound blasphemous. More than simply pictures, icons are windows onto the sacred. They had the power to take us beyond our mundane world, into another whole dimension, where we could touch the sacred, or rather the sacred would touch us. Eastern Christians would be horrified by the idea that iconographers simply “paint” an icon. They don’t simply paint it; they write it. The object of the medium is not simply to depict an image; it is to display a reality that calls for our reverence, our awe at the personages being depicted or the spiritual dispositions they convey. As I learned more about icons in general, and this icon in particular, my reverence for these images grew. I was more and more inclined to give icons as gifts, and to consider more than simply a gift to be given one.

We are told a story in the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. According to the legend, the Blessed Mother was holding her child Jesus in her arms one day, when the two archangels, Michael and Gabriel, appeared to them, holding the instruments of the suffering and torture of the future adult Jesus. Saint Gabriel held the cross on which Jesus would be nailed; St. Michael held the spear and the sponge by which the Roman soldiers would inflict their torture. Jesus, a mere child in his mother’s arms, is frightened by these premonitions, and runs to the comfort of his mother’s welcoming arms. So fast did he run to her embrace, that the one thong on his feet broke, leaving his sandal hanging by a strap.

So frightening was Jesus’ vision of torture and suffering, and so warm and protective was his mother’s comfort, that her embrace and assurance was all He needed. Do we ever find ourself in that state? Are we ever in such need of assurance that only a mother’s love could calm our fears and bring peace to our heart and our whole being? This is my sense of the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. I’ve never heard how the icon got its title, “Our Mother of Perpetual Help.” This is not only a lady, so I prefer not to call it “Our Lady of Perpetual Help”. I always put the word “mother” in there because I know that she is not only Jesus’ mother, she’s Our Mother.

The history of this icon is long and interesting. I won’t get into this here, but suffice it to say that at one point, the Blessed Mother made it known that she wished this icon to be venerated in a “church along the road that runs between St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran Basilicas in Rome. That street is called Via Merulana. Along this street there once was a church dedicated to St. Matthew, served by Augustinian monks. When Napoleon’s troops overtook Rome in the late 1790s, they judged there to be were too many churches in the eternal city; their solution was to tear down a good number of these, including the church where the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help was venerated. Once St. Matthew’s was torn down, the icon was declared to be missing.

For its safekeeping, the Augustinians had moved it to another of their communities just outside Rome. With the French army gone from Rome, the Redemptorists had acquired land along the Via Merulana, and built a church roughly on the same spot as St. Matthew’s had been, this time dedicated to St. Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the Redemptorists. When the original icon was discovered, the revelation of Her desire to be venerated in “a church on the road between St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran” was also brought to light, so the Redemptorists asked Pope Pius IX to entrust the icon to their care if they would replace it with a suitable image of Mary to the Augustinians. As Pope Pius made this happen, he called on the Redemptorists “to make her known and loved throughout the world”.

I believe the Redemptorists have done a fine work of this through the years and across the world.