The icon of St Mary of Częstochowa¹ is one of a number of black Madonnas, showing both Mary and Jesus with dark skin. Tradition says that it was painted by the evangelist Luke and rediscovered by St Helena during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, although there is no attestation of its existence before the fourteenth century. Nobody knows exactly why Jesus and Mary are black in this picture, but I really wish I’d been aware of this when I once had lunch with an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles who objected to a painting of a Black Jesus in the mission house where we met and I pointed out to him that it was likely closer to the appearance of the historical Jesus than the long-haired European-featured blond Jesus who comes to most peoples’ minds when they think of Jesus.
The parish is historically Polish, although now it’s mostly Latino (although there were a couple old Polish-looking men in my pew at the Spanish-language Mass I attended). The school door has “SZKOLA” (Polish for school) engraved in the stone over its entrance.
- For those reading aloud, in Polish names like this, cz is pronounced /ch/ like in chuck, ę is a nasalized e, like in the French en, ch is like the Scottish or German ch, kind of an aspirated k and w is pronounced as /v/.
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