What you see ...

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa, popularly known as the Black Madonna.  She is the patron saint of Poland.

At the shrine at Jasna Gora, all one sees of the actual painting are the faces of the Madonna and Child.  All else is hidden by a jewelled overlay or "coronation", the present one being a gift of Pope St John Paul II.  So what you see is very little of the original picture.

But "original picture" it is not.

Legend says that St Luke painted the 1.3 metre image on the table top in the home of the Holy Family, and that Mary told him the life story of Jesus while he painted, which he later recorded in his gospel.  It is claimed that Constantine recovered the image in Jerusalem and took it to Constantinople where it frightened away Saracen invaders.

What we do know as historical fact is that the image was in Czestochowa (Poland) when in 1430 robbers ransacked the church housing it.  The image was badly damaged and repair efforts failed.  So the entire original paintwork was scraped off and a new image painted onto the original boards.  And we don't even get to see that as it was painted!  Soot from votive candles over the centuries have blackened the image, giving it it's popular name, the Black Madonna.

So what we see is not exactly what we think we are getting.  In matters religious it pays to check out what we are being asked to believe or do.  The truth may lay somewhat hidden behind overlays of misinterpretation and even misrepresentation.

And in this age of mass media and social media it is becoming increasingly difficult to know just where the truth lies in so much of what we see reported.