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The Black Madonna loved me into Eastern Catholicism

The Black Madonna loved me into Eastern Catholicism

Last updated on: July 28, 2016 at 1:07 pm by Justin Tse

The Black Madonna loved me into Eastern Catholicism 2016-07-28T13:07:22-07:00 Justin Tse

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Black Madonna of Częstochowa, church mosaic, Poland - by Poeticbent (Jasna_Gora_-Czarna_Madonna(mozaika) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Black Madonna of Częstochowa, church mosaic, Poland – by Poeticbent (Jasna_Gora_-_Czarna_Madonna_(mozaika) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Since then, the icon itself has been subjected to the whims of all sorts of ideological fantasies, some good, some bad, all colonizing. There’s a whole mythology about why she’s black, but it’s probably just because of a lot of candles that have burned before her as a sacrifice. The lines that look like tears on her face are actually sword-inflicted cuts from the attempts of followers of Jan Hus, a Moravian reformer predating Protestantism who was burned at the stake by the Latin Catholics; they were trying to destroy the icon in the name of ridding the land of idolatry. The icon looks so different from other Byzantine icons because the damage was so bad that she had to be repainted, and when the job was done, she looked completely ‘latinized’ – colonized by an unfortunate form of Latin uniformity even though the Latin and Byzantine churches are supposed to be two cultures in communion. She’s got the fleur-de-lis painted all over her probably to show some weird loyalty to the French (likely because of Hungarian influence), and as the ‘Queen of Poland,’ falling in love with her made my life difficult because at some points I felt that I had to appropriate the rest of Polish culture for myself in order to legitimize my love for the icon – which was complicated when I found myself getting drawn into the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church and discovering that there’s a bit of a turf war as to whom she really belongs. When the Soviets took over Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century, they arrested the icon during the celebration of the thousand-year anniversary of Christianity coming to Poland, although the Polish church authorities then embarrassed the Soviets by parading her frame all over Poland. In the last stroke, the Polish people took her up as a symbol of Solidarność (Solidarity), the massive labour union that took down communism in Poland and led to the crumbling of the Iron Curtain – which is all very inspiring until one considers that St John Paul II then railed against post-Communist Poland for selling out to the logics of the global market as a betrayal of all that Solidarity meant.

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