by Matthew Hayes

Holy Saturday in Breezy Point.

What should have been the most joyous weekend on the Catholic calendar became one of heartbreak when a fire tore through St. Edmund Church.

Neighbors stood watching with tears in their eyes as local volunteers rushed into the burning sanctuary, desperately trying to calm the roaring flames. As the roof at the rear of the church began to collapse, a few men emerged carrying what little could be salvaged: some chalices, a statue of Padre Pio from a side niche, the collection baskets (thank God!) — and finally, the statue of Mary that had stood behind the altar for so many years, her lily-white face now almost unrecognizably charred by the heat and smoke.

For nearly every contemporary Catholic in the West, Mary’s face is a familiar one: gentle eyes and fair skin wrapped in a sky-blue robe, with long locks of brown hair resting underneath a white veil. Although perhaps not what the historical Mary looked like, this version is nonetheless the one that predominates in the Catholic imagination and which appears to her devotees in apparitions like Lourdes and Fatima.

Yet for centuries, in great cathedrals and small shrines scattered across Europe and the Americas, Catholics of every race and ethnicity have given special devotion to a rather different portrayal of Mary — the Black Madonna. These images have long attracted the attention of both the masses and scholars of religion, curious as to the origins of their striking appearances and fierce following.

Many are alleged to have miraculous or legendary origins, such as the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland, said to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist himself before being discovered by the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine.

The academic discourse around the Black Madonna often centers the issue of origin: Were these icons blackened purposefully by the artist or as a result of damage accumulated over the years, or perhaps by an act of divine providence? The scholar Monique Scheer argues that even if the icons were made black by countless years of candle smoke, the far more interesting question is why, as late as the 19th century, rather than being cleaned, were Madonnas repainted as black?

One school of Catholic thought regarding the icons’ colors interprets the artwork through the words of Scripture, particularly the exclamation of King Solomon’s beloved in the Song of Songs, that “[she is] black, but beautiful.” The idea of “black being beautiful” proved challenging during the early modern period, as Europeans exploited the perceived inferiority of dark skin to justify the colonization of the Americas and the emerging Atlantic slave trade, Europeans often viewed blackness negatively.

Scheer quotes one German cleric preaching in front of the Black Madonna of Altotting in the early 1700s, who incredulously asked, “Who can believe [that black is beautiful]. … Who does not know that the color black has always been considered a metaphor and sign of sadness, grief, and hideousness?”

The life of Mary was certainly marked by sadness and grief. This tale of tragedy is borne out in the popular Catholic devotion to Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of Sorrows. Her seven sorrows, from the flight into Egypt to the loss of the teenage Jesus in the temple, reach their pinnacle on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Since the earliest centuries of Christianity, artists and theologians have dwelt on the unimaginable sorrow of this mother watching her son die on the cross. In their darkness, that same German cleric concluded, the Black Madonnas reveal the suffering of Mary and therefore the suffering of her Son. It is therefore not surprising that the strongest devotion to Black Madonnas can typically be found in situations of great violence and suffering.

In the case of Our Lady of Czestochowa, it is not only the Madonna’s blackness that captures her sorrow. The icon is also famously scarred by two deep gashes across its face. While the precise culprit is lost to the historical record, legends say that during a 1430 siege of the Jasna Gora monastery, a Hussite (a member of a heretical anti-Catholic sect) warrior attempted to steal the icon from its sanctuary.

Mary refused to leave her home, however, as her icon miraculously became too heavy for any man to carry. In frustration, the warrior lifted his blade to the Madonna’s face, only to be promptly struck dead. When the siege had ended, the local monks repainted the icon to restore its damaged beauty. Yet, for each time that the monks attempted to restore the artwork, the wounds simply re-emerged ever deeper and wider. Mary made her choice clear: the scars were here to stay.

In thwarting the monks’ attempts to paint over her scars, Our Lady of Czestochowa reminds us that our hope as Christians lies not in the promise of restoration, but resurrection. Restoration assumes that there is some original state that we can and should return to, an artistic Garden of Eden of sorts, erasing all the blemishes and wounds we’ve acquired along the way, but that’s not the way that God works.

Even the risen Jesus, appearing to the apostles, still carried the scars of the crucifixion on his hands, his feet, and his side. It is through resurrection, however, that God makes our scars signs of strength, our daily little deaths births of new life, and our blackness beauty.

Death and resurrection are not abstract theological concepts, but daily, lived realities for the people of Breezy Point.

The residents of Breezy Point, the most Irish and possibly most Catholic census district in the nation, have long cherished their little slice of paradise, tucked away from the rest of New York City by the surrounding waters of Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic.

Those very waters, which gave Breezy its seaside identity, proved to be its undoing on Oct. 29, 2012, when the storm surge of Superstorm Sandy rushed down the neighborhood’s narrow walks. As the surge receded, a damaged electrical transformer combusted, birthing an inferno that consumed row after row of wood-frame bungalows. Scars like those are impossible to just paint over.

The Breezy Point that existed before Sandy survives only in memories, like an Eden by the sea. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the voices of neighbors spending all night out on their porches, attempting to survive the summer heat without A/C, and I can still feel the splinters from rotting wooden deck-boards lodged in between my toes. Many years of painstaking reconstruction have meant vinyl decks and no more splinters, as well as better climate-controlled homes that are more comfortable in the summer inside rather than out.

Breezy today is certainly a more comfortable place, but it is also a far quieter one. Our restoration could not preserve everything that was taken from us.

Our resurrection, on the other hand, occurred that very first Sunday after Sandy, when parishioners packed into our still powerless church for Mass, holding onto each other, praying together that this tragedy, too, would pass.
As we bounced around from church to church, community to community, in those first few weeks afterward, our pain was transformed into promise as we learned to love each other in new ways, creating together a new future for Breezy Point.

Perhaps this is why the Black Madonna has appeared to us now, to remind us that God has promised his people to raise them from the dead time and time again. He certainly rose Breezy from the ashes after Sandy.

I know that no reconstruction project at St. Edmund can ever perfectly return to me the old, simple white and brown church of my memories. However, I hope that our parish too will be risen once more so that whatever St. Edmund looks like in the future, it will continue to serve as a welcoming home for the Breezy Point community.

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Matthew Hayes grew up in Breezy Point and is a parishioner of Blessed Trinity Parish. He is a graduate student in theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary and works as the advancement coordinator for Regis High School.

He is also the author of the Sacred in the City newsletter, which covers Catholic life in New York and can be found on Substack.