HERE AT THE HEART
HERE AT THE HEART
1.
Vintage statue gets
new pair of hands
and returns to its
original location.
W
ith its installation on
November 11 and
formal blessing by Archbishop Allen Vigneron on
December 8, a venerable
image of the Sacred Heart
of Jesus—which had not
seen the sunlight since the
late 1980s—is again a public symbol of inspiration
to students, residents, employees and to the many
visitors to the seminary.
30
Faithful Watch
The new “old” statue of the Sacred
Heart first was tucked into its niche
before the seminary’s rear entrance—now
the main entrance—in the spring of 1956,
during the rectorship of Msgr. Albert
Matyn (1952-1964). This is the same year
Monsignor Matyn commissioned the
construction of the grotto of the Sacred
Heart at the corner of Chicago and
Linwood, today’s famous “Black Jesus”
grotto. The statue was sculpted of white
Carrara marble mined from the same
quarries used by the ancient Romans
and the great Renaissance artists of Italy.
There Jesus stood for three decades,
framed by the simple stone niche impressed into the façade of the elevated
porch. Day after day, he watched over
Sacred Heart’s athletic field while seminarians played football and baseball, competed in track meets and, in winter, skated
on the flooded and frozen field.
But during the seminary renovations of
the late 1980s, the statue was removed and
placed into a third-floor storage room, safe
but really tucked away this time—and there
it has been ever since.
Sacred Heart Major Seminary | Mosaic | Spring 2015
Holding Onto His Hands
That is, until November 11. The Sacred Heart of Jesus of 1956 is again
greeting and blessing students in their
comings and goings. It has replaced
the statue of the Sacred Heart with
the more “modern” streamlined look,
which needed extensive restoration.
But the 1956 statue needed some repair
work, too. Fingers and thumbs from
both hands had been broken off. When
and how this happened is lost in the
mists of time.
Last summer, rector Msgr. Todd
Lajiness commissioned Frank Varga,
a sculptor who has been caring for our
sacred imagery for decades, to give Our
Lord a new set of hands. Varga fashioned
them from the same Carrara marble as
the body and shipped them back to the
seminary from his studio in Florida.
The hands now are seamlessly melded
to the arms of the statue today through
the loving