Carl Demma believed a statue could bring people into closer communion with God–believed it enough to sell his liquor store, use the money to commission a 33-foot stainless-steel rendering of the Virgin Mary, and truck the sculpture from parish to parish for more than a year.
His unlikely act of faith transformed an ancient form of Catholic devotion into a popular phenomenon for 21st Century Chicago. To the surprise of church officials, scholars and just about everybody but Demma, the towering statue has drawn emotional crowds at each of its 34 stops in and around the city, as the curious and the fervent lined up by the thousands.
It even inspired another donor to commission a massive statue of Jesus, the Icon of the Divine Mercy, which was unveiled last weekend at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side. Demma went Sunday afternoon to see the new, 18-foot bronze statue for the first time, and he made plans with its sponsors to help transport it to 15 parishes around the city this summer.
A short time later, the 68-year-old Demma died from a heart condition while sitting in his car outside his Oak Lawn home. His legacy will forever be linked to the Our Lady of the New Millennium statue, and the praying, smiling, weeping crowds that began to follow her wherever she went.
In an age of self-conscious skepticism, when even the Roman Catholic Church has pared down much of its iconography, the enormous sculpture of the praying Virgin echoes the piety of bygone ages, demonstrating the strong pull of tactile and visual symbols on the religious imagination.
“I think it is a popular hunger for the beautiful, for knowing God in the beautiful. There is this longing for something of the presence of God,” said Rev. Richard Fragomeni, a scholar of worship practices at Catholic Theological Union and vice-rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii on Chicago’s West Side. “Culture likes to say it big, and religious cultures like to say it very big.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago, which at one point encouraged Demma to give his money to the poor instead of commissioning the artwork, ultimately put the statue at the center of its jubilee year plans. Our Lady of the New Millennium greeted worshipers, including Demma, at the “Field of Faith” mass at Soldier Field Saturday.
Demma’s death, attributed by the Cook County medical examiner to a heart condition, puts a note of uncertainty into plans for the statue. But more than 200 Chicago parishes are on a three-year waiting list to host the statue, and churches in the Dioceses of Rockford and Joliet also have requested visits.
Meanwhile, parish officials at St. Stanislaus Kostka were working Monday to find a way to put their new bronze statue on the road for the summer without Demma’s help. That statue depicts a robed Jesus pointing to his heart, with water and blood pouring out in stylized rays. It is scheduled to go on permanent display just feet from the southbound lanes of the Kennedy Expressway near Division Street this fall.
Monday morning, as a light drizzle fell, a handful of parishioners sat on folding metal chairs or stood near the massive feet of the Icon of the Divine Mercy, which is based on a vision by the early 20th Century Polish nun and mystic, St. Maria Faustina.
“Now it’s all money, TV, sex. This is something different. God gives you everything for nothing,” said Gloria Navarro, whose eyes filled with tears as she talked about the statue. “This is a miracle for us. I can’t explain my feelings.”
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An anonymous donor, who was friends with Demma and inspired by Demma’s generosity, commissioned the statue by a Mexican artist last year and arranged for its shipment to Chicago last week. More than 1,500 people attended a blessing of the statue Sunday, and hundreds more came back to say a prayer based on Faustina’s vision in the afternoon.
Rev. Anthony Bus, pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka, said the statue’s origin and inspiration nicely tie together the Polish and Mexican communities worshiping at the parish, both of which have strong ethnic traditions of iconographic devotions. More than tradition, however, Bus said the statue has real power for all believers.
“It’s got a life of its own. It’s a symbol and sign of the faith, and it will bring people back to the Lord, I’m convinced,” Bus said. “I had one woman who hadn’t been to confession in years who came in to confess after mass, she was so moved by it.”
Grand, artistic depictions of gods go back to the Egyptian sphinx and beyond. They have shown up through the ages in everything from Greek statues of Zeus to giant Southeast Asian shrines to Buddha.
Some religions, including Judaism and Islam, prohibit such representations of deity. Christianity has wavered on the issue.
“The root of all (Christian) iconography–stained glass, paintings, statues–goes back to the incarnation, the idea that God became visible, that the invisible became visible,” Fragomeni explained. “It was God’s choice to reveal himself to us in ways … that we can apprehend with our senses.”
While western Catholicism has a history full of artistic renderings of both divine and human figures, most early representations in the East were destroyed during an 8th Century backlash known as the Iconoclasm. Eastern Christian artistic depictions today are limited to painted icons that follow strict rules of style and composition.
During and after the Reformation, many Protestants rejected the Catholic Church’s devotional art as baroque excess at best, or, at worst, idolatry. Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, many Catholic churches also have scaled back on iconography, a process Fragomeni likens to “scraping off the barnacles.”
But the theology behind statues and other artistic depictions has not changed, he said.
“Deep within the icon, deep within the material world, something profoundly other is making itself known to us,” he said. “They become the ways in which the attention is focused so that all our senses can know God.”
Fragomeni said that the outpouring of devotion to Our Lady of the New Millennium is a sign of Catholics’ hunger to retrieve the beauty that is a part of the church’s tradition.
Al Castillo, director of the archdiocesan Millennium Office, noted that with the strong response from local Catholics and Pope John Paul II’s linking of the jubilee year to the Virgin Mary, it was natural that the archdiocese should incorporate the Our Lady of the New Millennium statue into its celebrations. He did not anticipate, however, that the statue would quickly make its way to the center of those events.
“This was supposed to be about 3 percent of my job, but it’s turned out at some points to be 50 percent of the job, with calls coming in from all over, from people who want to know where the statue is and where it will be next,” Castillo said.
Immigrant families have brought relatives into the country to see the statue, he said. Other groups have held overnight vigils, waiting for the arrival of the truck on which Our Lady of the New Millennium lies during transport. The 4-ton statue is then raised hydraulically to a standing position on the trailer for a week of devotions before moving on again.
Travel is not as large a portion of the plan for the Icon of the Divine Mercy, which will be put on a 10-foot pedestal in front of the St. Stanislaus Kostka rectory at 1351 W. Evergreen Ave. There, just above eye level of traffic rounding a curve, the statue will look down over the Kennedy Expressway. Bus hopes that it will lure more than a few drivers to a new Divine Mercy chapel planned for the church’s basement.
“At rush hour, with traffic bumper-to-bumper, it can’t help but make people think,” he said.
And as Fragomeni pointed out, devotion to these religious statues–the patient and peaceful-looking Icon of Divine Mercy, the strong but compassionate expression of Our Lady of the New Millennium–is not just a one-way street.
“It’s not just that we’re looking at those icons,” he said. “They’re looking at us too.”