I recently attended a conference on devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. This conference was sponsored and hosted by the Spiritual Motherhood of Priests, a beautiful apostolate in which Catholic women take on a life-long commitment of praying and offering up their lives for the sanctification of priests. At the conference, the keynote speaker gave an excellent series of talks on the Holy Face devotion as revealed to Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre (Sr. Mary of St. Peter, in English), a 19th-century Carmelite nun of the Carmelite monastery in Tours, France.
One of the profound insights delivered at this conference was the parallel between the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Face. Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and to the Holy Face of Jesus are not at all unrelated. They are, in fact, very closely united. One devotion feeds off the other, and they mutually complement each other in a beautiful way.
As Catholics, one of the key mysteries of our Holy Faith is the mystery of the Incarnation. God is pure spirit, and yet He chose to become man, to assume our human flesh and blood, for the sake of our salvation. As a consequence of this, our Faith is rich with a myriad of devotions that are oriented towards the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ. Some of these include: devotion to the Sacred Heart, devotion to the Precious Blood, devotion to the Holy Wounds, to the Sacred Side (pierced by a lance on the Cross), and many others. Many of these devotions to a particular aspect of Our Lord's Humanity are centred on the Passion of Christ, and yet they can be thought of as mystically representing and encompassing the entire mystery of the Incarnation. From Our Lord's Nativity (birth) in Bethlehem, to His Passion and Death on Calvary, to His glorious Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven where He is now seated in glory at the right hand of the Eternal Father, all of these aspects of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ are meant to help us enter more profoundly into the reality of the Incarnation. The Word truly became flesh and dwelt amongst us, as we are reminded of three times a day, every day, when we pray the Angelus.
Devotion to the Holy Face and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament are among the most powerful Catholic devotions for contemplating, and entering into, the mystery of the Incarnation. These two devotions are thoroughly traditional; they are quintessentially Catholic. One of the aspects that they both highlight in a striking way is the importance of reparation in the spiritual life of a true disciple.
The Holy Face devotion emphasizes the need of Christ's disciples to make amends or offer reparation especially for sins committed against the first three Commandments:
1) I am the LORD thy God. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him alone shalt thou serve.
2) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
3) Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath day.
These three Commandments are centred on the rights of God and the obligations that we have as His creatures to uphold His rights. These include our obligation to worship (adore) God alone, our obligation to uphold in honour and respect His Holy Name, and our obligation to sanctify the Lord's Day or the Sabbath, which the early Christians quickly realized needed to be moved from Saturday to Sunday, in order to honour the Resurrection of Our Lord.
Sins against the true worship of God (the First Commandment) include all forms of idolatry, as well as the sin of atheism (the refusal even to acknowledge the very existence of God, let alone worship Him). All non-Catholic religions, which may contain some elements of truth in them but which are also fraught with serious errors, are also forbidden under the First Commandment. Blasphemies that violate the Second Commandment specifically involve dishonouring God's Holy Name: through swearing, cussing, and speaking badly of the Name of God or of the Holy Name of Jesus. And sacrileges that break the Third Commandment involve all ways in which we might dishonour Sunday as a day of rest that is consecrated to God; for example, by engaging in unnecessary servile works, by carrying out commerce for personal gain, and especially by failing to attend Divine Worship (the Catholic Mass) without having a sufficiently grave reason for not doing so — such as being gravely ill.
Notice that these first three Commandments are all directly centred on God, whereas the seven other Commandments are related to love of neighbour. The Holy Face devotion, therefore, by focusing on making reparation for sins committed against the first three Commandments, is meant to incite in our souls a salutary respect for the holiness of God, and to awaken within us a desire to make amends (offer reparation) for all the ways in which God is not rightfully honoured, acknowledged, worshipped, and glorified by man.
HOW IS THIS RELATED TO THE MOST BLESSED SACRAMENT?
Like the Holy Face devotion, devotion to the Blessed Sacrament also encompasses a very strong aspect of reparation. While the primary goal of Eucharistic Adoration is to worship (adore) Jesus Christ as God-made-man, our Saviour and our Redeemer, in the Blessed Sacrament, Eucharistic Adoration also calls forth the practice of reparation. While, at Eucharistic Adoration, one can make reparation for all kinds of sins committed against God, it is usually more fitting during this time to focus our reparation on sins committed against the Blessed Sacrament itself. These include sacrilegious communions, sins of indifference, and sins of using consecrated hosts for nefarious purposes (such as Black Masses). But they can also include more commonplace types of sins, such as simply surrounding the ceremonies of Holy Mass with a lack of reverence or proper decorum: for example, Catholics who come to the Holy Sacrifice dressed as if they were going to a beach party, Catholics who receive Holy Communion in a casual and nonchalant way, and also Catholics who, out of pride, refuse to receive Our Lord kneeling and on the tongue. While modern Church authorities do permit Holy Communion to be received in the hand in the Novus Ordo Missae (since about 1970), the Catholic Church has always and everywhere traditionally taught that only hands that are consecrated (i.e. the hands of a priest) should ever touch the Sacred Host directly. [See my blog post on Should Holy Communion be Distributed by Priests Alone? to read more about this].
In the Holy Eucharist is contained the total and complete humanity of Christ: His Body, Blood, and human Soul. (To these are, of course, concomitantly attached His Sacred Divinity: that is, His Divine Nature as God). And in His humanity, one of the "parts" of Christ as man that is surely present in the Blessed Sacrament is His Holy Face.
The Sacred Countenance of Our Lord (that is, His Holy Face) is a privileged part of His humanity. We all know the saying, "The eyes are the windows of the soul." And we can all instantly recognize the truth of such a dictum. There is nothing more revealing of a person's humanity, on the exterior, than a person's eyes. Look into another's eyes and you will connect instantly with the humanity of the person. And of all human eyes, whose could ever be "more human" than those of Our Lord? Jesus Christ is, after all, not just God but also the Perfect Man. Ecce homo, as Pontius Pilate said when presenting Jesus to the crowd at His Passion: Behold, the man.
Reparation to the Holy Face of Jesus, therefore, is offered in the most perfect way before the Blessed Sacrament, where Christ's Sacred Humanity is fully present. I encourage you to pray the Chaplet of the Holy Face in the Eucharistic Presence of Jesus, along with other prayers of devotion associated with the Holy Face and the Holy Name (such as the Golden Arrow Prayer). As you kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, you are in the true Presence of the One whose Humanity itself is sacred and holy.
Saint Theresa of Avila famously gave counsel to her sisters never to depart far from the Sacred Humanity of Jesus in their prayers. This was to avoid the danger of entering into a type of abstract relationship with an abstract god, under the pretext that doing so would be a more "spiritual" form of prayer. The Catholic Faith is based on the Incarnation. The Blessed Sacrament keeps us grounded in this mystery, as does contemplating the Holy Face of Jesus. As St. Catherine of Siena wrote in her timeless book, The Dialogues, the Sacred Humanity of Our Lord is the Bridge that unites God and man. So what better place to contemplate Our Lord's Sacred Heart, His Precious Blood, His Holy Wounds, His Sacred Side, and His Holy Face than before the Tabernacle and the Altar, where the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ Our Saviour is both hidden from the world and exposed for all to see and adore? Venite, adoremus. Come, let us adore!