Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Dear sisters & brothers in Christ,
I pray that you are blessed and enjoying our recent weather. I also hope that you are enjoying our return to at least a little sense of “normalcy.” The staff has been meeting and planning the re-opening of many of our ministries and activities. YAH seems to be leading the way, as they are engaged in a whole host of activities. One of our priorities is to get our liturgical ministries operating again. The one we are in urgent need of is ushers/greeters. Not only are we back to taking up the collection (Thank you, Lord!), but we want to have people at the entrances and exits of our church to welcome people and to pass out bulletins, as well as, all the other things that our ushers do. This will also allow our valiant few to have an occasional break. I want to thank them for their faithful service throughout the pandemic.
Today is a big day for the Redemptorists, The Feast of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. This title, and the icon to which it belongs, is one of the most popular titles for Mary in the entire world. The icon has a long history and for a long time it was believed to have been destroyed when the church in which it hung burnt to the ground. In 1866 it was re-discovered, and since our church in Rome was the closest to where the original church had been, Pope Pius IX entrusted the icon to us with the instruction, “Make her known throughout the world.”
I am firmly convinced that if we Redemptorists are remembered for anything it will be for making Mary known under the title “Our Mother of Perpetual Help.” While many of Mary’s titles are tied to a geographic location, like “Our Lady of Lourdes,” we have not only spread devotion to OMPH throughout the world, but we have also inspired countless parishes, both diocesan and religious, to honor Mary under this title and with the OMPH novena.
Very quickly Redemptorists throughout the world began asking for copies of the icon. Until recently, one of the original 5 icons brought to the U.S. hung in The Rock church in St. Louis. It quickly became common practice to have an annual nine day novena to OMPH. To make a long story short, in 1922, a couple Redemptorists at The Rock decided to start a “perpetual” novena. Instead of nine consecutive days, the novena would be prayed every Tuesday. It wasn’t very long before the Tuesday crowds reached 100,000 people. Novenas were prayed from dawn to dusk and the city had to run special buses and streetcars that literally said “Novena” as their destination.
Of course it wasn’t very long before diocesan and other religious pastors were asking were they could get copies of the icon and start their own novena. I am pretty confident that there is not a parish in the Archdiocese of St. Louis that has not at one time or another prayed the Novena to OMPH, and most of them still do. And this is true around the world. Wherever Redemptorists go we leave devotion to OMPH. There are places like Brazil and the Philippines that have weekly crowds in the high 5 figures. Some Redemptorists complain about declining numbers at our weekly devotions, but they forget how successful we have been in spreading the devotion. Those great crowds that used to come to our churches are now praying the devotions at their own parish, and hopefully, spreading the devotion to their fellow parishioners. In almost every parish and Catholic hospital I walk into I see the icon to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. In fact, a bishop in Turkey told us that throughout his entire priestly life every convert he has met, who was converting from being Muslim to becoming Catholic, did so due to devotion to OMPH. Apparently, Muslims have a similar devotion.
Perhaps once the pandemic decreases enough we can invite Br. Dan Korn to come and give his workshop/retreat on the icon. Br. Dan is an iconographer and an expert on the icon of OMPH. Like every icon, it is full of symbols and theological meaning. If you are interested just Google her or go to https://redemptorists.net/redemptorists/devotion-to-omph/
Let us never forget that one of the last things Jesus did while dying on The Cross was to gift us Mary as Our Mother of Perpetual Help.
In the Redeemer, Fr. Rick