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By Norman Farmer | Columnist
“…At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil 2:10-11).
“Whatever you do,” St. Paul declares further to the Colossians, “in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).
To these commands, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that Jesus (meaning Savior), the name God told to Mary through the Annunciate Angel, “contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies. Jesus is the Risen One, and whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him and who gave himself up for him” (2666).
Other than St. Paul, San Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) is the person most singularly and uniquely responsible for the veneration that we offer every Jan. 3 to the Most Holy Name of Jesus. Pictured at right is the only existing portrait of the saint painted in his lifetime, Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrosio (1410-1449) shows San Bernardino holding up the Monogram (“Christogram” more precisely) that he personally designed and painted, and throughout his lengthy and spectacular preaching career caused to be reproduced by the tens of thousands on wood panels, banners, wall plaques and frescoes. One such plaque survives and is kept in The Chapel of the Holiest Name of Jesus at the Cathedral of Volterra.
By means of this famous monogram (see image below), the single-most popular preacher of his time set about (in his own words) “to renew and make clear the Name of Jesus, as in the days of the Early Church.” So, in the form of a blazing sun with 12 large rays and numerous small ones on a field of blue, which he said is “the color that signifies faith, and without faith we cannot have glory,” the monogram prominently featured three golden letters, Y H S: the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek.
For decades, walking all the way, he traveled the length and breadth of Italy between Milan and Rome and between the Mediterranean and the Adriatic until, old and exhausted, he was forced to ride “my little donkey.” Everywhere he went, the monogram was carried before him. While he preached –– to vast crowds everywhere, in city and countryside alike –– he kept a banner or a plaque of the Holy Name before him. When he finished speaking, often some hours later, he would dramatically “hold out a tablet of about an arm’s length and breadth bearing the monogram, and all the people, bare-headed and on their knees, would cry out and shed tears of tenderness and sweetness for the love of Jesus, adoring and revering him with great devotion” (Canarozzi, ed. Le prediche volgari, predicazionne in Siena).
Not unexpectedly, Bernardino’s vast popularity and the enormous evangelical success of his monogram, stoked the jealousy and politically-inspired anger of enemies who tried to destroy him. So great was the political clamor among large numbers of influential churchmen, including members of the curia whose ethics, lifestyles and egregious moral corruption were consistent targets of the friar’s sermons, that Pope Martin V called Bernardino from Viterbo to Rome and charged him with heresy.
The monogram, his enemies said, was nothing but a cult object, a pagan thing, and must, like its inventor, be destroyed by fire. Then, in one of the great courtroom stories of all times (well-told by Iris Origo in The World of San Bernardino, 1962), the diminutive little friar with his gaunt appearance of self-imposed privations, faced his numerous accusers in the presence of the pope, and even quipped at one point that “some want me fried and others roasted.” He won his case overwhelmingly, and when the pope commanded him to remain for several months in Rome to preach a large course of Latin sermons at St. Peter’s, Bernardino again quipped, “Now they want me alive, and only a short time ago they wanted me dead.”
As we reflect on the Holy Name of Jesus, may we then praise San Bernardino of Siena as well, whose special grace it was to keep us mindful that the name, JESUS, unlike any other name, “contains” each of us who says it and, in the breath of the same utterance, tells as well the very purpose of his existence.