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The Bride - The Church

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The Bride - The Church

“The Bride : The Church”
At the heart of most of the recent Marian apparitions is the prophecy that the Church will undergo death and resurrection to be conformed to the Lamb of God. This past August a staggering new pageant of victims of violent abuse came forward as the Retinue of the Lamb. New Mexico had gone through this same horror in the early 1990’s, before most every other diocese. During that time I had to find an image of the Church that has always existed and will always exist . I turned to Cardinal Henri de Lubac, SJ’s written masterpiece “The Splendor of the Church” ( which he wrote while being silenced by the Church) in which he identifies the image of the Bride as eternal, coming originally from the Letter to the Ephesians by St Paul, as well as the Hebrew Bible’s beautiful marriage symbolism with God.
In my image of the Bride are representations of the Trinity. The Bride is always young moving toward Jesus Christ, her Groom, through two thousand years of the existence of the Church. She is pregnant with the ever-new members of the Church to be born until the return of Christ the King. On all sides she is threatened by violence from within the Church and without. But, the protective Radiance of the Trinity surrounds her, and she cannot be touched or harmed. This is the only image of the Church ( as well as the millions of loving Christians that still love her in their frailty too ) that gives me comfort in our very vulnerable and fragile world. I hope you will find some loving icons of guides in this exhibit , none who are perfect, but still (while they were on this earth) moving forward towards the Groom, Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Fr Bill McNichols
For the Exhibit in Denver 20 September 2018 “Light In All Darkness”