Your reaction to my Valentine Flowers issue persuaded me that I ought to produce another newsletter with color pictures. This time the pictures are my own, illustrations of the most vivid examples I have ever seen of the Catholic sacramental imagination -- the faces of the saints at San Xavier Del Bac.

San Xavier (HAV-ie-air) is the ultra-baroque mission church just south of Tucson. The congregation is celebrating the church's 200th anniversary this year.  It has served the Native Americans on the San Xavier reservation continuously for two hundred years In preparation for its anniversary a civic group in Tucson commission a restoration by some of the people who worked on the Sistine Chapel.

The faces of the saints are remarkable exercises in folk art by the Mexican craftsmen who created him -- real human faces and not the usual frozen pieties. My photos are of  the main characters of the Easter experience, Jesus, the Mother of Sorrows, two of the apostles, an angel (worthy of inclusion in one of my angel stories) and (I think) St. Francis of Assisi. .
Happy Easter!

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Check out Andrew Greeley's Columns for the Chicago SunTimes's Daily Southtown.