By Patrick Downes, Hawaii Catholic Herald
It’s an unusual depiction of the Blessed Mother. Her hair is tied back in braids; she wears
no veil. Her dress has a tight waist and is accessorized with a short laced-up vest. She carries the Child Jesus in her left arm and an olive branch in her right hand.
She is Our Lady of Peace, the patroness of Hawaii Catholics, a unique statue with a remarkable history that intersects the story of our island church.
Last month marked the 200th anniversary of its unassuming entry into Hawaii church history. On May 6, 1806, the original image, a 13-inch tall dark wood sculpture of the mother and child, was welcomed into the life of the religious congregation that brought the faith to the islands.
The small statue was given to Mother Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie who, a few years earlier, had founded in Paris the Sacred Hearts Sisters, a companion community of the Sacred Hearts priests and brothers.
When the superior received the statue, it was already 300 years old and possessed a remarkable provenance that included the healing of a king, the attention of a pope, and the French Revolution.
It was created in 1513 by a unknown sculptor, possibly a student of 16th century French artist Michel Colombe. Influenced by the Italian Renaissance, Colombe had sculpted the Virgin of Olivet modeled after a statue of Irene, the goddess of peace, and her son Pluto made in 371 B.C. by the Athenian sculptor Cephisodote.
The statue of Our Lady of Peace had been commissioned by Jean de Joyeuse, a member of a prominent French family, as a wedding gift for his bride Francoise de Voisine. It was kept in the family until Henri de Joyeuse, a young widower, gave it to the Capuchin Franciscans when he joined them in 1588.
The statue found a place in a niche in an outside wall facing the street. There it stood neglected until the spontaneous homage of children and later adults led to purported miracles.
The treasured statue was then taken indoors. In 1658, King Louis XIV of France, after invoking Our Lady of Peace through her dark wooden image, was cured of a serious illness.
The queen mother then ordered a painting of it which still hangs in the national museum of Versailles. The same year as the king’s cure, Pope Alexander VII permitted the feast of Our Lady of Peace to be observed on July 9, the day the king recovered.
Fast forward 130 years. The French Revolution forced the flight of the Capuchins in 1790 and the statue was entrusted for safekeeping to the hands of a Mademoiselle Papin. It passed through a few more hands until it was offered in 1806 to Father Marie-Joseph Coudrin, who had founded the Sacred Hearts Congregation six years earlier.
Father Coudrin suggested the statue be given to Mother Henriette who installed it on May 6, 1806, in the young congregation’s convent chapel on Picpus Street in Paris where it remains to this day in a blue and gold shrine over the altar.
A copy of the statue, similar is size and color, accompanied the first Sacred Hearts missionaries to Hawaii. They arrived in Honolulu in 1827 on July 7, two days before the Feast of Our Lady of Peace. The island mission was dedicated to Our Lady and in 1843, the Catholic cathedral in Honolulu was given her title.
Through all the wars raging through France during the 19th century, the continual safety of the sisters and their students was attributed to the presence of their miraculous statue. “Someday we will own our safety to this holy image,” Mother Henriette had said.
When the motherhouse convent was invaded in 1871 and 84 sisters imprisoned, the statue, hidden away, guarded the motherhouse until the sisters’ release six weeks later.
In 1906, on the 100th anniversary of the reception of the statue by the Sacred Hearts Congregation, Pope Pius X ordered crowns be placed on the heads of Mary and the Baby Jesus. Reproductions today are both crowned and uncrowned.
In Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, the Sacred Hearts Sisters promised Our Lady of Peace that they would place a life-sized statue of her at each island convent if she would keep them safe. The promise was kept.
A gilded statue of Our Lady of Peace, erected in 1892 by Honolulu mission Bishop Gulstan Ropert for the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace courtyard, stands today facing the pali outside the downtown church. Inside the cathedral, another statue in white stands above the altar while a third colorful, luminous image, accompanied by angels, fills the height of a stained glass window.
Devotion is given to Our Lady of Peace through different names around the world — Mama na Boboto in Kinshasa, Congo; Shanti Rani in Bhubaneswar, India; Nuestra Senore de la Paz in churches, schools and convents in the Spanish speaking world; Maria no te Hau in Papeete, Tahiti, are some examples.
In Hawaii, images of Our Lady of Peace have propagated around the islands in wood, bronze, stained glass, plaster and marble.