By JAMES MONTI
While the holy season of Lent presents several different aspects to us, patterned to imitate the forty days of our Lord in the desert and summoning us to conversion and repentance, it is first and foremost permeated by the theme of the Sacred Passion, for its specific purpose in coming at this time of the liturgical year is to prepare us to celebrate in the fullest possible measure the Church’s annual commemoration of the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Christ par excellence, Holy Week.
In late medieval and early modern Europe, and most especially in those countries and regions where Catholicism had successfully stood strong against the stultifying incursion of the Protestant Reformation, as well as those places where Catholicism had staged a strong and definitive comeback against this incursion, devotion to the Passion of Christ developed deep roots and fecundated Catholic life and culture, producing fruits of holiness, sainthood, and fidelity to the faith.
One of the countries where this “culture of the Sacred Passion” thrived was Portugal. By the sixteenth century, dramatic expressions of the Passion of Christ had developed and taken hold in the sacred liturgy that would in turn foster popular manifestations of this love for Christ Crucified in the streets of Portuguese towns and cities.
Yet great ecclesiastical movements in the Church such as this are ultimately wrought by God through the personal piety and zeal of specific individuals chosen by our Lord to renew and strengthen the faith in this manner.
When in 1553 the Jesuits acquired the site for their first church in Portugal, it was a place very much in need of the light of Christ, a section of Lisbon that four decades earlier had been consigned to the burial of victims of the Plague. The church that the Jesuits built there over the years that followed was to bear the name and enshrine a relic of one of the patron saints of plague victims, St. Roch — in Portuguese, Sao Roque.
The church was likewise an important milestone in the history of ecclesiastical architecture, the prototype for what would become known as the “Jesuit-style” church, a church with a wide unobstructed nave designed to maximize a preacher’s ability to connect with his audience.
By 1586 The Church of Sao Roque had become a hub of piety for a group of devout young men intent upon frequenting the sacraments. Among these was a painter in his thirties named Luis Alvares de Andrade. Having lost his father at an early age, Luis had been tutored in his childhood by a Dominican friar and subsequently received spiritual formation from one of the greatest ascetical writers of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Dominican Louis of Grenada (1504-1588).
Luis Alvares de Andrade began forming the idea of a new confraternity dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Cross that would carry out a procession to commemorate the journey of our Lord to Calvary, the “Passos” (“Steps”) of Christ in carrying His cross to Golgotha. He approached the Jesuit Fathers with his plan, but they did not feel they could accommodate this brotherhood within the confines of Sao Roque. Luis was directed to neighbors of the Jesuits, the Augustinian Canons Regular of the Church of Our Lady of Grace.
This community of Augustinians had a particular charism of devotion to the Holy Cross, and thus welcomed Luis and his plan for a confraternity of the “Holy and True Cross” (Santa e Vera Cruz), providing their convent as a home for the brotherhood.
At that time, an Italian sculptor was passing through Lisbon, having with him a beautiful bust of Christ he had carved. Luis acquired the bust from the sculptor and set to work to construct a vestured corpus for the bust that rendered it into a full-bodied depiction of Christ carrying His cross.
Luis very soon gained the support of the archbishop of Lisbon, Miguel de Castro, and on Holy Thursday of 1587, just a year after beginning his pious project, he was able to carry out the confraternity’s very first procession of the Passos of our Lord. There were seven stations along the procession route, which ran from the Jesuits’ Church of Sao Roque to the Augustinians’ Church of Our Lady of Grace, covering a distance intended to approximate the actual length of the route that our Lord would have traveled in Jerusalem from the Praetorium of Pilate to Golgotha.
The archbishop is said to have personally assisted Luis in selecting the individual stations for the procession. The prelate told the Augustinians, “I hope in God that this holy work will result in great glory for Luis Alvares in the next life” (quoted in Ribeiro Guimaraes, Summario de Varia Historia, volume 1, p. 228). The annual date for the procession was subsequently established as the Second Sunday of Lent, making it a Lenten tradition that has continued up to the present day.
The vicar general of the Augustinians at the time of the procession’s institution was Frei Agostinho de Jesus (1537-1609). He would have been in residence at the Augustinians’ Lisbon convent of Our Lady of Grace and thus would have most likely participated in the procession. Just a year later (1588) he became archbishop of Portugal’s primatial see of Braga.
Frei Agostinho was himself a remarkable man, who as archbishop of Braga from 1588 to 1609 fostered in a most singular manner Braga’s devotion to the Passion of Christ, doing so with great apostolic zeal and an intense personal piety that moved him to tears while celebrating Mass, the fruit of his deep perception of the Holy Eucharist as the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary. Among his personal initiatives in this regard was his effort to increase devotion to the visiting of the repositories of the Blessed Sacrament on Holy Thursday.
In 1597 a brotherhood of “Good Jesus of the Passos” was instituted in Braga and within a year began conducting an annual procession of the Passos like that of Lisbon. Eventually this custom spread throughout Portugal.
Joined to Luis’ devotion to the Passion of our Lord was his deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and a most avid zeal for the cause of the souls in Purgatory. A man who spent many hours prostrate in fervent, tearful prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, Luis translated and published in 1625 a collection of meditations for the reception of Holy Communion. The tenor of these reflections can be readily gleaned from this brief excerpt:
“Take heed further, O Christian, that when you go forth to receive Communion you imagine that you see the Heavens opened with the utmost splendor, and glory, and all the Saints, and the Angels, in their choirs singing Sanctus, Sanctus, etc., and that they all have set their eyes with the greatest reverence and love upon that Lord whom you intend to receive” (Advertencias Espirituaes para mais agradar a Deos nosso Senhor, com hum exercicio mui proveito so pera despois da Sagrada Communhao, Lisbon, 1625, fol. 12r-v).
Having resolved to empty Purgatory, as it were, by means of prayer, Luis launched an ambitious campaign to get as many people as possible to pray for the souls in Purgatory, printing at his own expense and distributing twenty thousand copies of a leaflet he had drawn up of prayers for this intention, including a prayer in honor of the Holy Shroud indulgenced by Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605). Luis likewise went about posting notices everywhere he could to remind people to pray for those in Purgatory.
In Luis’ work as a painter, his two principal subjects were the Most Holy Trinity and Purgatory, the latter specifically intended by him to foster prayers for the faithful departed. Thus he became a key figure in the development of the centuries-old Portuguese custom of the Alminhas, portrayals of Purgatory placed in churches, in wayside shrines and other public places to remind the faithful to pray for those in Purgatory.
Luis was also remembered for frequenting the hospitals, where he personally fed the sick with his own hands, made their beds, and comforted them, encouraging them to find peace and meaning in their sufferings through the acceptance of the will of God. He spent all he had on his Purgatory apostolate and in almsgiving. Luis was also a family man. His son Lukas, having entered the priesthood, became the chaplain of King John IV of Portugal and one of the country’s foremost liturgists, authoring several books in this field, including manuals for the celebration of Solemn Mass (1652) and Holy Week (1653).
The One Thing Necessary
Luis was to have his own personal share in the sufferings of Christ. For fourteen years, he was afflicted by severe gout. It was on April 3, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent, that he died in 1631.
On All Saints Day of 1755, Lisbon was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in European history, at least 8.4 on the Richter scale, with a death toll estimated to have been in the range of 30,000 to 50,000. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed by the earthquake and the firestorm that ensued from it. Yet the Jesuits’ Church of Sao Roque remained standing, and even more remarkably, in the rubble of the Augustinians’ Church of Our Lady of Grace, the statue of Our Lord of the Passos was found intact.
Unlike the other Catholic artists we have had occasion to discuss in past essays, it is quite unlikely that you will find the works of Luis Alvares de Andrade featured in any major art museum. In terms of artistic fame he was not a great success. But in the eyes of God he was a great success, a success in the one thing necessary (Luke 10:42), something to bear in mind in striving for the one thing necessary during this holy season of Lent.
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