Saint Veronica

It is perhaps the most moving scene on the way of the Passion. Amid the mocking crowd, the rough soldiers, the disciples who had fled, one woman steps forward, unafraid, to do something so small it seems almost useless: to wipe the face of a man about to die.

But many who make the Way of the Cross all their lives never notice that this story is not in the Gospels. Not one Gospel mentions the name Veronica. That makes her one of the most unusual of saints: loved everywhere, with a statue in Saint Peter’s Basilica, a place in Dante’s great poem, even a move in Spanish bullfighting named after her, yet almost nothing we know about her is certain.

In a text from around the fourth century that is not part of the Bible, the “Acts of Pilate”, there is an account of the trial of Jesus. There, a woman stands up to testify for Him. She says: “I had a flow of blood for twelve years; I touched the hem of His garment, and at once the bleeding stopped.” That is the very woman the Gospel tells of, who slipped through the crowd to touch the Lord’s cloak (Mk 5:25–34). The Gospel does not give her name. The “Acts of Pilate” calls her Berenice.

The Gospel of Mark tells of a woman who had suffered from a flow of blood for twelve years. She had gone to many doctors, “had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse” (Mk 5:26). Under the Law of Moses, a woman with a flow of blood was considered unclean. Anyone who touched her became unclean too. She could not enter the Temple or go near others. For twelve years she lived on the margins, someone no one dared to touch.

When she heard about Jesus, she slipped into the crowd pressing around Him, and from behind touched His cloak. She thought: “If I but touch His clothes, I shall be cured.” At that moment the bleeding stopped. She felt in her body that she was healed.

Jesus stopped, turned to the crowd and asked: “Who has touched My clothes?” The disciples were surprised: with the crowd pressing like this, who had not touched the Master? But He kept looking around to find her. The woman, frightened and trembling, came forward, fell at His feet and told the whole truth in front of everyone.

It was perhaps the hardest moment of her life: an “unclean” woman having to admit publicly that she had touched a teacher of religion in the middle of a crowd. But Jesus did not reproach her. He called her by a word that perhaps no one had called her for twelve years: “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction” (Mk 5:34).

If that woman later stood by the road of the cross with a cloth in her hand, her gesture makes perfect sense. Jesus had touched her when no one dared. Now, when He was rejected by the whole city, she stepped forward, and touched Him.

On the way up to Golgotha, the Gospel of Luke tells that “a large crowd of people followed Jesus, including many women who mourned and lamented Him” (Lk 23:27). At the foot of the cross, when the male disciples, except John, had fled, there were women standing there: Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and “many other women who had come up with Him from Galilee”. And on the morning of the first day of the week, it was women again who were the first to go to the tomb and the first to hear of the Resurrection.

In a society where the testimony of women was not accepted in court, the Gospels record that those most faithful in the darkest hour were the women. Veronica, though she comes from tradition, belongs to that company. She stands for all the nameless women who did not run away.

In the Middle Ages, the story grew many more details. One tale says Veronica had a cloth bearing the image of the Lord’s face, and that Emperor Tiberius in Rome, gravely ill, was healed on seeing it. Then little by little the story was placed on the very road of the Passion: as Jesus passed by carrying the cross, she stepped out to wipe His face, and when she opened the cloth, the Lord’s face was imprinted on it.

These details cannot be verified. But they show that people of old longed for something very human: to see the face of Jesus. Not a concept, not a doctrine, but a face, with eyes, a forehead, drops of blood and sweat.

The poet Dante, who probably came to Rome in the Holy Year of 1300, mentions that scene in the “Paradise” of his Divine Comedy. He compares himself, gazing at a saint in heaven, to a pilgrim who has come all the way from Croatia to see “our Veronica” and stands there, never tiring of it, thinking: “My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was this then what Your face looked like?”

When Saint Peter’s Basilica was rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the four huge piers supporting the dome was set aside to hold the cloth. In the niche of that pier stands a marble statue of Saint Veronica more than four meters tall, carved by the sculptor Francesco Mochi around the years 1629 to 1632. The statue is famous for its movement: her garments billow as if in a gust of wind and her trembling hands hold out the cloth, as if she had just rushed out of the niche to show us the Lord’s face. Above the statue is a small balcony from which, by tradition, the cloth is still shown to the faithful on the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

Is the cloth in Rome really the cloth Veronica used? No one can prove it. Over the centuries, several different cloths in Europe have been venerated as “the Veronica”. A famous one has been kept since around 1620 in Manoppello, a small mountain town in central Italy. On September 1, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI went to pray before that cloth, the first Pope to go there in nearly four hundred years. He said nothing about its authenticity, but spoke of “the radiance of the face of Christ” and invited the faithful to seek that face in their own lives.

Among those fourteen stations, some are not in the Gospels: the three falls of the Lord, the Lord meeting His Mother, and Veronica wiping the face of Jesus. They come from tradition and the devotion of pilgrims.

In 1991, at the Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum, Pope Saint John Paul II introduced a “Scriptural Way of the Cross”, with fourteen stations all taken from the Gospels, beginning in the Garden of Olives. In that version there is no Veronica station. But that does not mean the Church has abandoned the traditional Way of the Cross. Both forms are used, and in most parishes, including those of Vietnam, the Sixth Station with the image of Veronica is still there, every Lent.

In bullfighting, the most basic and classic pass, in which the matador uses the large cape to lead the bull charging past him, is called a “verónica”. That is because the matador holds the cape out in front of him with both hands, just as Saint Veronica is shown holding out the cloth in old paintings and statues. The Spanish were so used to that image in their churches that they named a move in the bullring after it.

Because of the story of the Lord’s face imprinted on the cloth, Veronica is also regarded as patron of photographers, those who “print” human faces on paper. She is also regarded as patron of laundry workers and those who work with cloth. These titles come from popular devotion, not from any official Church document, but they show how the woman with the cloth has entered everyday life.

The Church has never required the faithful to believe the story as dogma. It is a devotional tradition, not an article of faith. But the Church still keeps it, because it expresses a deep truth of the Gospel.

Jesus said: “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of Mine, you did for Me.” Veronica is an image of those words. She could not save the Lord from the cross. She could not make the soldiers stop. She could only do one small thing: wipe a face. And in that very small thing, she received the face of the Lord.

Here is something worth pondering: the story says the Lord’s face was imprinted on the cloth after she wiped His face, not before. She did not wipe the Lord’s face because she wanted a relic. She wiped it out of love. The Lord’s face was a gift that came afterward, to the one who dared step out of the crowd.

Perhaps no saint is closer to everyday life than that woman. For each of us has times when we meet someone carrying their own cross: a mother caring for a sick child, a friend who has just lost a job, a stranger crying in a corner of a hospital. We cannot lift the cross from their shoulders. But we can step out of the crowd and wipe away a drop of sweat for them: a word of concern, a glass of water, a hand to hold.

And who knows, like Veronica’s cloth, when we open our hearts, we may find the face of the Lord imprinted there.