Behind the Scenes: July 2022 Update
Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet: Vetus in Novo patet.
The New Testament is hidden in the Old, the Old is made clear by the New. - St. Augustine
This month our explanation of the Marian symbols contained within the Immaculata is continued, describing six of the twelve typologies depicted in the coffered ceiling medallions surrounding the seven sacraments.
Transcript of the Video
PART 1 of 2
Good morning and welcome back to the Immaculata Church Project here in St. Marys, Kansas. Today we're going to talk about an update on construction progress and explain more about the liturgical painting.
So on the exterior over the last month we have gotten some things done but we did get a lot of rain here in Kansas so we still have a lot of roof sheets to put on. The cupola stucco did get completed and they're almost ready to put the color code on the north transept and clerestory. We have started work on the front porch footings and planter boxes and over the next few weeks the front stairs will be complete. So we still have a lot of framing going on; for framing here we are in the narthex. We have the towers being framed, we have rooms in the basement being framed, sheetrockers are closely following them, finishers behind them. We have our MEP contractors still here hanging duct work, installing pipes. The upper ceiling and halfway down the main church has all the sheetrock installed, all the finishes are on and they're ready for their final coat of paint. Now let's go on up there and take a look.
Now we're here at the 52-foot elevation. All of the ceiling work, the sheetrock is complete, all of the finish work is done. We have the first coat on most of the of the ceiling: this area here, the north transept, has the finish coat on the coffer beams and in the ceiling panels. You can see they have the first coat on the walls. We are almost complete; these surfaces are ready for the liturgical artwork. All the trims are installed. They are finishing in the nave right now and getting these spaces ready for the liturgical artwork.
Now we're in the cupola at the 80-foot elevation. Our artists are here working. All of the artwork was done in Brooklyn, New York in the studio, the paintings on canvas. Those canvases all get rolled up and shipped here in tubes. Those tubes are all down at the 52-foot elevation. The artists are making paper templates of those to fit and balance on the ceiling and then they'll start to apply them. As you can see above me here they've already applied their first image: God the Father.
In our next video we'll talk more about the process of applying the art, but now we're going to turn it over to Father Rutledge to talk about the explanation behind the symbols in the artwork.
[Fr. Rutledge] So last month we explained to you the images that will be going up in the ceiling of the Immaculata, the images of the seven sacraments that would be going up the center coffers of the ceiling. If you didn’t see that video, the explanation, please refer back to our June video.
Today, we’re going to continue on and explain to you what we’ll be going into the side coffers of the Immaculata. And here we’ll start branching out now into some Marian symbols that will be going into those coffers.
So before we dive into the details of these different Marian symbols, we need to understand a little concept that’s called typology.
There’s a little Latin aphorism that goes, “Novus in Vetere latet: Vetus et in Novo patet” which means: the New is in the Old Testament contained, while the Old is in the New explained.
What that means is, God who stands outside of time and who foresees what He wants to reveal in the New Law, He foreshadowed these things in the Old Testament. So for example, we have Joseph, the son of Jacob, as a type of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was sold by his brethren into slavery. But it was by that means of being sold and abandoned by his own brethren that he would eventually save his brethren; he would become number two in the kingdom of Pharaoh, and would, by that means save his family. And so God does the exact same thing. Because of the dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, He has foreshadowed her coming in the Old Testament, not only through different figures, but also through other symbols that we see in the Old Testament.
And so the ceiling of the Immaculata is full of these Marian symbols. The church, literally, will sing the praises of the Mother of God through all these different types of her in the Old Testament. Today, what we’re going to do, though, is we’re just going to dive into the first six. The first six types of Our Lady that are going up into the ceiling. And then next month, we’ll move in to the last six. Because the symbols are so rich, they take some explanation.
So as we dive into the first two symbols going up into the ceiling of the church, we start in the very back of the church, and we’ll work our way forward. But the first two symbols that we have in the back are taken from the book of the Canticle of Canticles. And in fact, five of the images going up in the ceiling are taken from this book. So a short word on Solomon’s Canticle of Canticles. The whole book describes this intimate union between Almighty God and the souls of the just, but especially the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was the holiest of all the just. And we know that this union, this espousal of God with his people and with her, begins especially at the moment that God takes flesh and becomes a man like us. And this happens in her, in the Blessed Virgin Mary. And so again, much of this book of the Canticle of Canticles describes God’s intimate union with his Blessed Mother.
And so as I said, these first two images from the book of the Canticles are what are in Latin called the Fons Signatus and the Hortus Conclusus, the sealed off fountain and the enclosed garden. As we hear in the book of the Canticles, “My sister, my spouse is a garden enclosed and a fountain sealed up.” Our Lady was a fountain entirely pure and sealed off from the muddiness of sin, a fountain that the enemy could not disturb. She is sealed with the seal of the Holy Trinity. She is a seal that no one dares to break and that the enemy must respect. And yet she is not sealed off from us. This fountain pours out even to us that she’s full of grace. Her bounty of grace is open to us as an abundant source. She’s a fountain that can’t issue from a spring, unless the spring is superabundant. And so in this first image of the sealed fountain, we see her overflowing grace that is pure and uncontaminated.
So with the enclosed garden, we have similar themes as the sealed fountain, themes of something unspoiled, something that is untouched. But while with the fountain, we see this implication of something flowing with the garden we have a true work of art, something that is manicured and thoughtfully nurtured. And indeed, God obviously made the Blessed Virgin Mary His masterpiece, He nurtured her soul, He manicured her perfectly, and He loves her because her soul is the most beautiful. He is the gardener who loves her beauty. And that also ties in certain themes for us men. A garden, you know, is a place of relaxation and contemplation far from the desert, which we see in scripture as a place of battle – the battle between Christ and the devil. And so Our Lady’s soul is an enclosed garden where we men can find rest, a New Eden from which new life comes.
So now we move on up to the next image, which is Jacob’s Ladder, and you’ll see written underneath Scala Super Terram which literally means the ladder rising up above the earth. When Jacob, son of Isaac, received the blessing of the firstborn and took it from Esau, Esau vowed to kill him. And so Rebecca, in her great love for her son, sent him away, sent him to her father in Mesopotamia. In his long journey, Jacob rested at one point and in his sleep he saw a ladder stretching from the earth all the way up to heaven. And he saw God leaning upon this ladder, and he saw angels descending and ascending up and down this ladder. So this ladder was a figure of Our Lady and the Fathers have always said that this was an image of her, because she is a spiritual ladder. Not only because she is constantly tending from this earth up to heaven in her aspiration, but also because the Angel of Great Counsel – a phrase we use to describe Our Lord – this Angel of Great Counsel descends down to earth through the Blessed Virgin Mary. Also, you could say that those who live on this earth, the souls who live on this earth tend by their angelic lives up to heaven through the Blessed Virgin Mary.
But this image is so rich, we can continue on. Just as Jacob’s Ladder stood erect, so during her whole life, the Blessed Virgin Mary was ever positioned up towards heaven. Never once did she fall down, because she was never tainted by actual or original sin. St. Bonaventure even says that, just as the ladder has two sides, so he says, Mary was the rung that united, the sacerdotal and the royal tribes since she was with the tribe of Judah, but closely related through Elizabeth to the Levitic tribe. And then we have the notion of Jacob. Jacob who is a patriarch, but has to leave home. And so the human race driven out of paradise are now strangers on this earth. And just as Jacob lays prostrate at the foot of the ladder, so we by sin lay prostrate on this earth and by ignorance we sleep. And so St. Peter Damien says, “Mary is the heavenly ladder by which the great king descends in humility and man who lay prostrate ascends in sublimity.”
Lastly, we can say that this ladder is an image of Our Lady, because just as those who climb up a ladder are sure that they are ascending, rising up, touching that ladder with their hands and their feet, rising up without delay, so through devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, we’re absolutely sure to make our way to heaven.
The next symbol that we have is a reference, in fact, to Our Lady strength and we returned here to the Canticle of Canticles. We call our Lady, terribilis ut castrorum acies orinata, she is terrible as an army in battle array. And again, this reference is applied liturgically to the Blessed Virgin Mary in one of the antiphons at Vespers on the Feast of the Assumption.
So while many of the different images up in the ceiling refer to Our Lady’s beauty, to her impeccability, to her sweetness, this image refers to her strength. And here we can think of, for example, Judith, who in the Old Testament is an image of Our Lady as well, who goes into the camp of the enemy, the Assyrians, and cuts off the head of her Holofernes, thus destroying a whole army by destroying their leader. So Our Lady and her strength helps us against the enemies of the kingdom of God.
So remember in Genesis 3:15, when God promised to send a redeemer, He promised too that the woman would crush the head of the serpent. So again, Our Lady doesn’t just exercise passive virtues. She helps us in this fight against our enemies. And we’ve seen that throughout Christendom, where she has helped different figures in Christendom to spread the kingdom of God. Look at Don Pelayo starting the Reconquista from Our Lady’s cave in Covadonga in Spain, or the aid that she gave to Christian Europe at the Battle of the Lepanto, or the help that she gave to the Catholic Lithuanians, Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, where she helped them route the Protestant Swedes from their cities.
But Our Lady doesn’t just help Christendom or she doesn’t just help Catholics in a social way, she also crushes heresy. And in fact, the liturgy says that she alone crushes heresy. So Our Lady will not retreat when she sees the head of the enemy raised to her in the midst of her children. She through her soldiers, especially through Christians who are devoted to Our Lady, go on the attack of the enemy, hunt down the souls in the enemy’s camps, and helps convert them. We’ve seen this again, through Our Lady’s intercession, the Miraculous Medal converting Ratisbonne and many other examples like that. We always have to remember that the Mystical Body of Christ is the Body of Jesus, which is the body of her Son. And just like any mother, she won’t allow it to be attacked without herself rising up against the enemy.
Now, on to the next image, which is that of a burning bush. We say on the octave day of Christmas in the liturgy, “The burning bush, which Moses saw unconsumed is a figure of thy perpetual virginity, Oh Mother of God”. So Moses, when he had to flee from Egypt, he abode in Midian and there he acted as a shepherd. And one day he saw up on Mount Horeb, he saw a bush that was on fire. And so Moses went off to see what it was. And as he came there, he saw that the Lord rested on the bush. And he saw that the bush, again, was not consumed by the fire.
Well, so again, we have an image of Our Lady. The Lord rested on the bush: so Jesus Christ dwelt in Mary. The bush was not consumed: and so Mary’s virginity remained intact, notwithstanding her Divine Maternity. And what else could the fire in the bush represent, but the charity that inflamed the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a charity that is never lessened nor extinguished and being constantly fed by the flame of love by the Holy Ghost, her Spouse. And so the whole scene is summed up by St. Bernard, “Blessed art though, Oh Mary, for neither humility nor virginity were wanting in Thee, a singular virginity indeed which was not sullied, but enhanced by fecundity, and truly an extraordinary humility, which a virginal maternity did not destroy, but extol, and assuredly an incomparable maternity, accompanied both by virginity and humility”.
The last of the images that we have is the Ark of the Covenant. We remember in the Old Testament, God commanded Moses to make a precious ark. And that ark was basically a chest that was made of incorruptible wood, and plated with the purest of gold both on the inside and on the outside. This ark also had two-winged cherub placed on either side of the top, which formed basically a throne for God, the God of sanctity. And this is why for the Israelites, the Ark of the Covenant was the most precious of treasures. Well, we see Our Lady in the incorruptible wood; she is the Immaculate Conception, she was preserved from all contagion, and even of actual sin. She was also free from the corruption of the tomb being assumed both in her body and soul up into heaven. But we also see that Our Lady is an image of the ark because the Ark contained three things: it contained the tables of the law of the Old Testament, it contained some of the manna that fed the Israelites in the desert, and lastly, it contained Aaron’s rod.
And so just as the ark contain these three things, so Our Lady contained within her not only the laws, but she contains the law giver. She contains in her Our Lord Jesus Christ, who will become the Blessed Eucharist for us men, who will give Himself body and soul to us men, a more perfect manna to feed us in this pilgrimage. And again, just as the ark contained Aaron’s rod, so we have this symbol of Our Lord’s royal descent from the line of David, which came through the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Lastly, for this image of the ark, remember that the Ark of the Covenant came and remained in the house of Obed-Edom in the Old Testament. And during those three months that it was with him, it was a source of tremendous graces. Well, that was fulfilled in the New Testament when Our lady, expecting Our Lord, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and remains with her for three months, being herself a source of many graces for their family, and as we know, sanctifying St. John the Baptist in the womb of her cousin Elizabeth.
And I’ll finish with a quote from a priest writing about this imagery of Our Lady in the Ark of the Covenant:
“Oh most glorious and living ark of the author of the new and eternal testament, Mary, Mother of God, visit thy servants and the followers of thy Son. Dwell in our midst. Grant that Thy sweet memory, and the love of Thee may ever reign in our hearts, until our eyes behold the sublime vision described in the Apocalypse: And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and the Ark of the testament was seen in the temple, and a great sign appeared in the heavens, a woman clothed in the sun.”
And so as we explain these types and images of Our Lady that are going into the church, we hope you’re getting a sense for how beautiful this temple that’s dedicated to the Mother of God is going to be. And we hope that because of this, you’ll be inspired to continue to pray for and support this project, and pass these videos and information on to anybody else who you think might be interested.
