Panagia Kardiotissa: the Virgin of the Heart and the monastery of Kera

The Virgin of the Heart (Kardiotissa)

According to pious tradition this icon was made before Eastern and Western Christendom parted, and so the veneration of one and the same image preserves a quiet, invisible unity between the two Churches. In the Orthodox East it is called the Virgin of the Heart, or Kardiotissa (Καρδιώτισσα); in the Catholic West, Our Mother of Perpetual Help – the Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso, whose feast is kept on 27 June. Anyone who visits the monastery of Kera Kardiotissa on the road up to the Lasithi Plateau enters the place where the astonishing world history of a small panel painting began – a panel of walnut with a gold ground, no more than about 43 centimetres wide and 53 high.

Introduction

At the foot of the Dikti Mountains (Δίκτη), where the road from the country behind Hersonissos climbs towards the Lasithi Plateau, the monastery of the Panagia Kardiotissa stands at a height of some 630 metres beside the village of Kera, about 50 kilometres south-east of Heraklion by a paved road that passes its gate. A green, wooded valley on the western spur of Mount Karfi surrounds the buildings; the villages of Gonies and Avdou are about seven kilometres away. The monastery is dedicated to the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God and keeps its patronal feast on 8 September. No date of foundation has come down to us; the first documentary mention is of 1333. There is much to suggest, however, that a sanctuary already existed here in the second Byzantine period of Crete – that is, between the reconquest of the island by Byzantium in 961 and the Venetian rule which, after the Republic acquired Crete in 1204, took hold around 1210.

With this monastery one of the most beautiful icons of Christendom is associated: the wonder-working image of the Virgin Kardiotissa. Tradition has it that it was the work of St Lazaros, a monk, icon painter and confessor of the age of Iconoclasm in the 9th century – the Lazaros called Zographos, “the Painter”, who is said to have learned his art at the Stoudios Monastery in Constantinople, was imprisoned and tortured with red-hot iron under the Emperor Theophilos for refusing to give up painting, and is remembered as the first saint honoured specifically as an iconographer; the Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 17 November. In the Orthodox tradition one does not say that an icon is painted but that it is “written”: the iconographer invents nothing; he bears witness to a spiritual reality and hands on what has been handed down to him.

On the icon the Mother of God holds the Christ Child close against her heart – hence the name Kardiotissa, the “Virgin of the Heart”.

The image shows a young and beautiful Mother of God in a dark, almost black robe, a star on her forehead. Her gaze is filled with quiet sorrow, for she knows the fate that awaits her and her son. The little Jesus looks up at an archangel who holds out the Cross to him, seeks refuge in fright in his mother’s arms and clasps her hand with both of his – in the hasty movement one of his sandals has come loose and hangs only by its strap.

In the Roman version of the image the Archangel Gabriel carries the Cross and the nails, while on the other side Michael holds the lance, the sponge of vinegar and the vessel – the instruments of the Passion. Greek monograms on the gold ground name the Mother of God, Christ and the two angels. Art historians assign the picture to the type of the Virgin of the Passion (Panagia tou Pathous), which was especially popular in Cretan painting of the late Middle Ages: the child has a foreboding of the suffering to come, the mother shelters him and knows at the same time that she cannot spare him from it.

An image in the storms of Iconoclasm

The icon came to Crete, tradition says, in the troubled decades of Iconoclasm, when the iconoclasts, the bitter opponents of the veneration of images, had holy pictures destroyed throughout the empire. It was brought to the island – presumably from Constantinople – and hidden in a remote mountain monastery. The Byzantine emperor Theophilos (born c. 813, reigned 829–842), the last emperor to uphold Iconoclasm, who in 832 issued an edict forbidding the veneration of images, is said to have heard reports of its miracles and to have ordered the picture to be tracked down and brought back to the capital, so that he might destroy it there with his own hands. A popular Cretan version of the legend puts all this into a single sentence: the icon “flew to Crete”.

Twice, the legend relates, the image eluded its pursuers and returned to its church. The third time it was bound with a heavy chain to a marble column – but the icon came back to the monastery together with column and chain. Column and chain are kept there to this day, whereas the original is in Rome. In the monastery itself a grace-giving copy of the 18th century is venerated.

A monastery in war and peace

The Manganaris family shaped the monastery for centuries. On 18 June 1645, a few days before the Ottomans landed on Crete, Pavlos, Alexandros, Theodosios and Maria Manganaris had the katholikon, the main church, renovated and bequeathed extensive lands to the monastery, expressly for the refreshment of travellers and pilgrims. Theodoros Manganaris became the first abbot, and until the early 20th century the direction of the monastery remained largely in the hands of this family. In the 18th century the property grew through endowments from the population – it held land at Avdou, Gonies, Malia and Mochos, among other places, and as far as the neighbourhood of Heraklion.

Under Ottoman rule the position of the monastery became ever more precarious. After the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, Turkish troops did heavy damage in 1822; only in 1828 did calm gradually return. During the rising of 1841 there were fresh outrages, and the abbot Gerasimos Manganaris – later bishop of Ierapetra and Sitia – had to flee. In quieter years there was building: in 1831 the church was renovated at Gerasimos’s expense, in 1864 the bell tower with its two arches was put up under Abbot Neophytos Lambrakis, and in 1883 Abbot Zacharias Manganaris built part of the east wing. In the great Cretan Revolt of 1866 the monks left the monastery; it served the local revolutionary committee as headquarters and the legendary Kapetan Michalis Korakas as a base. In October 1866 and once more in June 1867 Ottoman troops set fire to the buildings.

The community recovered only slowly from these blows: in 1881 no more than five monks lived here. From 1951 Abbot Grigorios had the damaged buildings repaired, and after 2001, when the monastery was placed under the Metropolis of Petra and Hersonissos, a thorough restoration followed. Today the Kardiotissa is a working convent; the sisters receive visitors in the church and in the well-kept courtyards, where stone, timber and the green of the trees make a peaceful whole.

The icon and its tradition

Tradition holds that the old icon of the Kardiotissa was written by St Lazaros, a monk and icon painter of the age of Iconoclasm. It is said that the image was carried away from Crete three times and each time returned to its monastery – in the legend a sign of the miraculous protection of the Mother of God. Another version, handed down in the monastery itself, places the story in the time after the fall of Constantinople in 1453: the icon left the capital by its own power, and when it was fettered to column and chain it took both with it and spoke: “Here I will dwell, for I have chosen this monastery.” Below the monastery a rock is shown in which the faithful make out the figure of the Mother of God; there the image is said to have rested first on its journey, and on that spot there now stands a chapel of the Life-giving Spring (Zoodochos Pigi).

Today the original is venerated in the church of Sant’Alfonso in Rome – the church of St Alphonsus Liguori, in the care of the Redemptorists – as the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help; in the monastery there is a deeply revered copy of 1735, which the faithful regard as no less wonder-working. It too has had its adventures: in 1982 it was carried off by thieves, but the police tracked it down and the culprits were soon arrested. After three days of public veneration in Heraklion – first at police headquarters, then in the cathedral of St Minas – some 3,000 pilgrims escorted the icon back to its monastery on a march of about ten hours over some 50 kilometres. When the Roman panel was restored in the Vatican workshops in 1992–1994 – with X-rays, infra-red examination and analysis of the pigments, which also showed that earlier overpainting had altered the faces – its wood was dated by radiocarbon to between about 1325 and 1480; some scholars therefore attribute it to a Cretan master of the late Middle Ages such as Andreas Ritzos of Candia (c. 1421–1492), the leading painter of the Cretan school in his day. Pious tradition holds none the less to the attribution to St Lazaros.

In what follows we retell, freely and in our own words, the splendid account by the Cretan author Michalis Vrettakis that appeared in the Heraklion newspaper “Patris” in December 2021.

“The incredible story and journey of the Cretan icon of the Virgin Kardiotissa from the monastery of Kera near Heraklion – bound up with a repentant thief, two Catholic orders, the troops of Napoleon, three popes, an apparition to an innocent girl and the indelible memory of a monk; forgotten for sixty years, redeemed for 50 papal scudi and given four different names. Today it is to be found in thousands of churches on all five continents. Millions of Christians in more than 82 countries venerate it more fervently than any other Christian icon. Its name lives on in schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, clinics and sports clubs; it is the patron of states, dioceses and cities and the heavenly patron of countless churches.

This icon has crossed the frontiers of states and joined together cultures, languages and traditions of worship from all over the world. The faithful see in it the perpetual helper of the poor, the sick and the weak, an emblem of love and of hope.”

“Αλλά ας πάρουμε, όμως, τα πράγματα από την αρχή …” – But let us take the story from the very beginning …

The theft of the icon

According to tradition a wine merchant stole the Cretan icon in the year 1498 and took it to Italy – allegedly so that it should not fall into the hands of the Turks, who were then conquering, step by step, ever more territory in the eastern Mediterranean. Crete itself was at this time still under Venetian rule, and would remain so for another century and a half; some accounts relate that the thief carried the picture out of the monastery secretly by night.

During the voyage a storm broke and the ship was in danger of sinking. Then the merchant brought out the icon, the travellers began to pray, and according to the legend the sea soon grew calm. So began the long wanderings of the image far from Crete. In the monastery, meanwhile, another wonder-working image of the Mother of God remained behind.

The icon in Rome

When the merchant arrived in Rome he fell gravely ill. On his sickbed he recognised the gravity of what he had done, repented of the theft and confided the story of the holy icon to a friend, a Roman, whom he begged to have it set up in a church. The friend promised – but because his wife refused to part with the precious picture, the icon stayed in their house.

Then the Most Holy Virgin Mary appeared in a dream to the little daughter of the house and charged her to tell her mother and grandfather the will of heaven: her icon was to be taken to the church of St Matthew, which stood on the Esquiline, one of the seven hills of Rome – San Matteo in Via Merulana, where it was installed on 27 March 1499 and where Augustinian friars were to keep it for three centuries.

The translation to the church

Obeying the wish of the Mother of God, the girl’s mother turned to the Order of Augustinian Hermits. The friars accepted the icon and on 27 March 1499 carried it in solemn procession to their church of San Matteo on the Via Merulana, the long straight street that crosses the Esquiline Hill, where it became known as the “Madonna of San Matteo”. A miracle is said to have occurred even while the procession was under way: a sick child was healed. What the friars had received was a small panel, roughly 43 by 53 centimetres, painted on walnut against a ground of gold leaf.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help

In San Matteo the icon was given its place above the high altar, behind the altar table, and year after year 27 March was kept as the day of its miraculous translation. Beside it hung a parchment recounting the story of its wanderings – including the admission that a merchant had carried it off from Crete; a copy of that text is preserved in the Vatican Library. The picture remained here for almost three centuries. The more devotion to the Byzantine icon from Crete grew among the faithful, the more often it was called the “Madonna of Help” – a token of unshakeable hope and of succour for all who turned to her.

The image type of the Madonna of Help (Madonna del Soccorso), attested in Italy since 1306 and closely associated with the Augustinians, showed the Virgin rescuing a child from the Evil One. The Byzantine model from Crete – the mother sheltering her frightened child – slipped quite naturally into this tradition in the popular imagination. The Cretan panel tells its own story with great economy: the Child, startled by the archangels Michael and Gabriel, who hover to left and right bearing the instruments of the Passion – lance and sponge on one side, cross and nails on the other – clutches his mother’s hand, and in his haste one sandal has come loose and dangles from his foot.

Pope Gregory XIII and the new name

In 1572 Gregory XIII was elected pope. Among his projects was the completion of the decoration of St Peter’s, and in particular of the Gregorian Chapel on the south side of the basilica, which bears his name. The pope, who was especially attached to the image type of the Madonna of Help, chose for this chapel a 12th-century icon that was likewise known as the Madonna del Soccorso.

To prevent confusion with the Madonna of Help at San Matteo, in 1579 he gave the latter the name “Mother of Perpetual Help”. At the same time the Augustinians set above the entrance to their church the Latin inscription “Deiparae Virgini Mariae succursus perpetui” – “To the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary of perpetual help”. The icon has borne this name ever since: Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso in Italian, Our Lady of Perpetual Help (or Perpetual Succour) in English.

With the new name the icon acquired, as it were, a new vocation: it became the emblem of unfailing help and shelter for all the faithful. This won it fame and affection across the world; Our Lady of Perpetual Help became the patron of countless churches and the confidante of many hearts in every continent. Whole dioceses have placed themselves under her protection – Leeds and Middlesbrough in England among them – and in 1942 Haiti asked for her as patron of the country, a request that Pope Pius XII approved.

The photographs that follow were taken in present-day Italy.

Napoleon and sixty years of oblivion

In the course of Napoleon’s Italian campaign French troops occupied Rome in 1797–98, and Pope Pius VI was forced into exile. To clear ground for fortifications it was decided to demolish numerous buildings, monasteries and churches in the city – among them the church of San Matteo, which was pulled down in 1798 after housing the icon for three hundred years.

The Augustinian friars of San Matteo were scattered to the four winds. Those who stayed in Rome moved first to the nearby church of Sant’Eusebio and then found refuge in a small friary attached to the church of Santa Maria in Posterula, close to the Tiber – and they took with them the icon of Perpetual Help, which had been rescued only just in time.

Because another miraculous image of the Virgin was already venerated in that church, however, the icon of Perpetual Help was taken to a small private chapel on the upper floor of the friary. There it stayed for more than sixty years – without candles, without prayers, without veneration, given over entirely to oblivion. The panel that had drawn crowds to the Esquiline for three centuries was now seen by no one but the handful of friars who lived in the house.

In the first decades of the 19th century a whirl of political events shook Italy and all Europe: the Napoleonic Wars, uprisings and revolutions. In those years the icon was forgotten by almost everyone – but not by a young Augustinian named Agostino Orsetti, who had once lived at San Matteo and after its destruction had moved to the friary at the Posterula.

Decades later, around 1851, Orsetti told his young friend Michele Marchi that in the chapel on the upper floor of the friary there was a miracle-working picture, the “Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso”, which had been saved from the ruined church of San Matteo. Orsetti died in 1853; his friend Marchi entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer – the Redemptorists – in 1857, carrying the old friar’s story with him.

The Redemptorists

The Catholic Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer was founded on 9 November 1732 by Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori (1696–1787) at Scala, a little hill town above Amalfi in what was then the Kingdom of Naples; its founder was canonised in 1839 and later declared a Doctor of the Church. Its aim was to carry the teaching of Christ to the poor and to neglected communities – through parish missions and preaching, and through the founding of communities, chapels, parishes, oratories, churches and religious houses. With the support of the Church the congregation spread beyond Italy into Europe and North America: to Poland in 1786, when Clemens Maria Hofbauer and Thaddeus Hübl arrived in Warsaw and were entrusted with the parish of St Benno in the New Town; to the German lands in 1793, Switzerland in 1818, Portugal in 1826, Austria in 1827, Belgium in 1831, the United States in 1832 – the first fathers landed in New York and began work in northern Michigan – the Netherlands in 1836, and many other countries besides. Today it has well over four thousand members, most of them priests, at work in more than a hundred countries.

In January 1855 the congregation bought the grounds of the Villa Caserta on the Via Merulana in Rome, in order to move its headquarters to the Eternal City and to build there a new church and house in honour of its founder, Alphonsus Liguori. The church went up between 1855 and 1859 to the design of the British architect George Wigley, in a Gothic Revival style that is a rarity in Rome: a front of brick and travertine with three doors and a rose window, and across it the Redemptorist motto “Copiosa apud eum redemptio” – “with him is plentiful redemption”. Having acquired the land, the fathers began to take an interest in the history of their new quarter.

From the sermons of the Jesuit Francesco Blosi they learned that the church of San Matteo had once stood in this neighbourhood, and that it had also been called the church of the Virgin of Perpetual Help. Accounts by writers on Roman antiquities mentioned a church in the garden of the house with an old and greatly revered image of the Virgin, famous for its miracles. At this Father Marchi recalled what his friend, the Augustinian Orsetti, had told him, and declared that he knew where the icon was to be found.

Armed with this knowledge, the superior general of the congregation, Nicholas Mauron, approached Pope Pius IX and asked that the icon be entrusted to the Redemptorists, so that it might be set up once more at the place where it had been venerated for three hundred years. The pope granted the request and, in a letter of 11 December 1865, charged the congregation with the care of the icon – adding the wish that it should be made known throughout the world: “Fatela conoscere a tutto il mondo”.

The congregation took possession of the icon in January 1866 – on the first day of the month, by the usual account – when Father Marchi himself and Father Ernesto Bresciani went to collect it from the Augustinians. In exchange the church at the Posterula received another image of the Virgin and 50 scudi, the papal currency of the day.

Veneration around the world

On 26 April 1866 the icon was carried in a splendid procession to the church of Sant’Alfonso. Thousands of the faithful answered the solemn summons (invito sacro) of the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Costantino Patrizi; on 5 May Pope Pius IX came in person to pray before the picture. Beforehand the Polish painter Leopold Nowotny (1822–1870) had restored the damaged panel. Since then the icon has been in Sant’Alfonso, above the high altar of the church; on 23 June of the following year, 1867, it was solemnly crowned on the authority of the pope.

The pope was given the first faithful copy of the Cretan icon and had it hung in his bedchamber. Our Lady of Perpetual Help has been patron of the Redemptorists ever since, and her feast was fixed on 27 June; in 1876 Pius IX confirmed it with a rank of its own in the calendar. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, for its part, has kept the feast on the first Sunday of July since 2017 – a small sign that the image still belongs to East and West alike.

From then on a carefully considered strategy was pursued to draw the attention of the faithful to the icon and to spread its veneration not only in Rome and Italy but far beyond. It was certainly needed: after sixty years in hiding the picture was all but forgotten, and unknown to most believers.

At first the miraculous image was set up veiled, on a small throne in Sant’Alfonso. The ceremonial unveiling took place only on particular days of the week, the month and the year. This lent the picture a special preciousness and, in an atmosphere of keen expectation and solemnity, attracted more and more people; in the end it was counted a privilege to be present at the services held before the icon.

To make the image known, every means the age afforded was put to use: newspapers, photographs, medals, postcards and faithful copies, and even representations embroidered on the vestments of religious and priests. All of them were meant to acquaint the faithful with the old icon that had, so to speak, been found again.

In Sant’Alfonso prayers and intercessions were now addressed to Our Lady of Perpetual Help not only on her own feast but also on the other feasts of the Virgin and throughout May, the month of Marian devotion. Preachers told of her miracles.

The printing of images of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in every form and technique increased rapidly. Ten years after the icon’s return to public view, 176,000 pictures had already been printed in Rome; to these were added more than 420,000 small images on thin paper, which were mostly distributed to the sick. They were to be had as chromolithographs and as woodcuts, gilded and coloured.

By 1902, according to estimates of the time, publishers in Italy, France, Austria and Germany had printed more than 4.5 million pictures, and a further 200,000 were produced in Rome in that year alone. The number of small devotional cards and medals made in the larger countries of Europe exceeded 55 million. Every one of them repeated the same few signs: the Greek abbreviations for “Mother of God” and “Jesus Christ” on the gold ground, the star on the Virgin’s veil, and the Child with his loosened sandal.

At the same time the Swiss painter Jakob Wüger (1829–1892) was commissioned to produce faithful copies of the icon in his Roman studio. Wüger later entered the Benedictine abbey of Beuron as Father Gabriel and became one of the co-founders of the Beuron school of art. The first 400 copies went to the countries with the largest communities of the congregation, above all to the German-speaking lands. By 1966 a further 128 churches of the congregation dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help had been built across the world, the greatest number in Brazil and in the United States, with thirteen each.

Among the first celebrated churches, which at once became local centres of the devotion, are those in Perth (1869), Boston (1871), Paris (1874), Granada (1879), New York (1887), Montevideo (1889), Leoben in Styria (for which the date handed down is 1846), Vienna (1889), Madrid (1892), Valparaíso (1903) and a village in the Rhône valley of the Swiss Alps (1932). The first copy to leave Italy had been sent as early as 1867 to the convent chapel at Argentan in Normandy. The most frequented shrine of all today lies far from Europe: at Baclaran, on the edge of Manila, a copy brought from Germany is venerated in a church that has stood open day and night since 1958.

It was just as important to set down in writing the history of the icon, its miracles and its fame. Between 1866 and 1916 the first books, studies and monographs appeared, and were translated into several languages. The first work from the pen of a Redemptorist was Ernesto Bresciani’s “Cenni storici sull’antica e prodigiosa Immagine della Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso” (Rome, 1866) – written by one of the two fathers who had fetched the panel from the Posterula. By 1926 some 2.7 million copies of books and pamphlets about Our Lady of Perpetual Help had been printed.

In 1876, moreover, the pope founded the “Archconfraternity of St Alphonsus and Our Lady of Perpetual Help”. Its members – the pope himself included, in whose bedchamber one of the first copies hung – had the particular task of spreading the veneration of the icon among the faithful. In 1925 the confraternity numbered 1,250 branches worldwide, with millions of members. With the same aim, religious associations in honour of the miraculous image were formed in many countries; the most important was founded in Chile in 1878 for the whole of South America.

The miracles attributed to Our Lady of Perpetual Help strengthened the desire of the faithful to know the picture and to possess it themselves. Pilgrims from abroad sought to acquire copies – for themselves, for relatives and the sick, for churches and convents. In the 20th century new forms of piety were added: in 1927 the “Perpetual Novena” was introduced at St Louis in the United States, a weekly prayer before the icon that spread swiftly through America and in 1943 reached as far as Belfast by way of American military chaplains. In Singapore the Redemptorists began formal novena services at their church of St Alphonsus in 1949, and in the Philippines, where Irish fathers had introduced the image early in the century, the Wednesday novena is now kept across the country. In Spain and Latin America copies of the picture have travelled from house to house since the 1950s as the “Visita domiciliaria”.

The historical background explains a good deal. The founding of the Italian state in 1861 and the accompanying reduction of the Papal States; the laws of 1866 suppressing all Catholic orders in the Italian peninsula – with the exception of those in the territory still ruled by the pope; the law of 1867 on the sale of ecclesiastical property, which amounted to expropriation; and the excommunication that Pius IX pronounced on the royal house and the Italian politicians: all of this provoked fierce criticism of the Catholic Church and its head in those years. Sant’Alfonso itself was the last new church to be built within the walls of Rome before the city fell to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Pius IX has gone down in history not least for the dogma of papal infallibility, proclaimed in that same year.

In the view of Vincenzo La Mendola of the Redemptorist Historical Institute, the new veneration of the Mother of God as “Perpetual Help” was an almost ideal response to the needs of a Christian community which, on the threshold of the 20th century, was living through profound and violent upheavals. The icon was last restored in the Vatican workshops in 1992–1994, after an examination begun in 1990 with X-rays, infra-red and ultraviolet light had shown how earlier overpainting had altered the faces; radiocarbon analysis placed the wood of the panel between 1325 and 1480. It hangs to this day in Sant’Alfonso on the Via Merulana, not far from Santa Maria Maggiore, where a mosaic of the image over the central door announces it to the street.

The miracles of the Kardiotissa

The veneration of the Kardiotissa is attested as early as the travel notes of 1415; the monastery itself is first mentioned in a document of 1333. In the tradition of the Church the faithful turn to the icon to ask for help, healing and protection; the stories of the picture’s miraculous homecomings and of cures form the living memory of the monastery. The icon venerated there now took the place of the lost one in 1735 and is held to be no less wonder-working; it stands to the left of the iconostasis, beside the chain. To this day pilgrims bring candles, votive offerings (tamata) and written petitions into the church, and many wind the chain of the column about their bodies before kissing the icon.

The devotion reaches its height on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God: on the eve, believers from Heraklion, Lasithi and the surrounding villages stream in for vespers and the all-night vigil, and on the feast day itself the monastery is filled with pilgrims, who spill out of the small church into the walled courtyard.