praypointThe Holy Face

The Holy Face and the Golden Arrow

One sentence, said in reparation for blasphemy and for Sundays treated as any other day. It takes about twenty seconds. There is no schedule, no count and nothing to complete.

This is the only item on the site that carries the indulgenced label. Our rule is that we use it only where a grant can be named, and for a long time nothing here qualified — every claim we chased turned out to be a sentence repeated without a document behind it. This one has the document.
The Golden Arrow
Said slowly. The whole thing is one sentence, and it is meant to be.
May the most holy, most sacred, most adorable, most incomprehensible and unutterable 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.
Nineteenth century, public domain. The name comes from the account that it was described as an arrow that would wound the Heart of Christ — delightfully, with joy.
And the short invocation
TraditionalO Jesus, cast upon us a look of mercy; turn thy Face towards each of us as thou didst to Veronica; not that we may see it with our bodily eyes, for this we do not deserve, but turn it towards our hearts, so that, remembering thee, we may ever draw from this fountain of strength the vigor necessary to sustain the combats of life. Amen.
Where it comes from

It begins with a Carmelite at Tours in the 1840s, Sr. Marie of St. Peter, who reported that what she was being asked for was reparation for two things in particular: blasphemy, and Sunday treated as an ordinary working day. Those were her century's complaints and they have not aged into irrelevance.

She died in 1848 and it would have ended there. What carried it was a layman — Leo Dupont, a widower from Martinique living in Tours, who kept a lamp burning before an image of the Holy Face in his own house for thirty years and let anyone in who wanted to come. He is why there is a devotion at all, and he is the reason this page exists on a site that keeps noticing how often these things run through people nobody was watching.

The devotion is not the Shroud of Turin, and it is not the Holy Face of Manoppello. Those are relics with their own histories and their own arguments. This is a devotion to the face of Christ as the Gospels describe it being treated — struck, spat on, covered — and to what it costs to look at that on purpose.

On reparation, before you start

The same note as everywhere else in this lane, because it is the one that matters. Reparation is a love response, not a debt being serviced. Nothing is owed and nothing is short. You cannot make up a deficit on Christ's behalf, because there is no deficit.

And it is not a way of keeping score against other people. A prayer offered about blasphemy that leaves you more contemptuous of whoever said the thing has done the opposite of what it is for.

There is nothing here to finish. Say it when you want to say it — often when you hear the thing it answers, which is how most people who keep it end up praying it.

· prayers 19th century, public domain · standing sourced to the Archconfraternity's Manual, Tours, 1887
praypoint · Devotions · Novena to the Sacred Heart