Our Lady of Perpetual Help

The story of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is the story of an icon that would not stay lost. The image is Byzantine in form: Mary holds the Child Jesus, while the archangels Michael and Gabriel show Him the instruments of His Passion. The Child has run to His Mother with such haste that one sandal hangs loose. This is not a sweet domestic picture only. It is the Passion seen through the eyes of a child who knows what He has come to suffer, and through the arms of a mother who receives Him without refusing the cost.

The icon came from the East and was long venerated in Rome in the church of St. Matthew on the Esquiline. Tradition says it had been brought there after a troubled journey and was entrusted to public devotion under this title. For centuries the faithful came to pray before it. Then the church was destroyed during the upheavals that followed the French occupation, and the icon passed into obscurity. It was not destroyed, but it was hidden, almost forgotten, kept among religious who did not yet know what place it would again occupy in the Church's devotion.

In the nineteenth century, the Redemptorists built the church of St. Alphonsus near the old site of St. Matthew. The history of the icon came to light, and Pius IX entrusted it to them with the charge to make her known. That is exactly what happened. Perpetual Help spread across parishes, missions, homes, and weekly devotions because the image speaks so plainly. The Mother does not remove the cross from the Child, and she does not remove it from us. She holds Him. She holds us. Her help is perpetual because the Passion is not a passing trouble but the road of salvation, and Mary's mercy remains close on that road.

This is why the icon is so often loved by people in ordinary trouble. It is not remote art. It is fear brought into Mary's arms. The Child sees the instruments of suffering and clings to His Mother; the Mother looks outward, as if drawing the praying soul into the same refuge. Perpetual Help means that Mary is not useful only at the beginning of conversion or the end of life. She is a mother in the middle, when courage has to be renewed again and again.

The icon also teaches families how to pray. Bring the frightened child, the threatened marriage, the anxious parent, the repeated sin, and the grief that has become familiar. Mary's help is not occasional because her motherhood is not occasional.

The devotion is commonly made before the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, asking Mary's constant assistance in suffering, family need, temptation, and perseverance.