Magis Center

The Tilma of Juan Diego should not still exist.
It is woven from agave, a coarse cactus fiber. Cloth like this normally breaks down within about 20 years. Juan Diego's cloak has lasted nearly five centuries, and for more than 100 of those years it hung in the open air with no protective glass, exposed to candle smoke, heat, and the press of millions of pilgrims.
The image on it is harder to explain than the cloth. In 1936, Richard Kuhn, who would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, examined the coloring and reported that it matched no known pigment, whether animal, mineral, or plant. In 1979, the biophysicist Philip Callahan, a consultant to NASA, studied the image under infrared light and found no underdrawing, no corrections, and no brushstrokes beneath the original figure. It looked less like a painting and more like something that simply appeared.
This is not offered as proof that settles every question. It is offered as evidence worth honestly weighing. Too often, people are told that faith and reason pull in opposite directions and that a thinking person has to choose between them. The tilma is a quiet argument against that idea. Here is a physical object you can examine that has been examined and that still has no natural explanation.
Faith does not ask you to stop asking questions. It asks you to follow them further than you thought you could.
On the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we remember the woman this image has pointed countless people toward.
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Anthony of Padua died in 1231 at the age of 36. Within a year, the Church declared him a saint, one of the fastest canonizations on record, and in 1946, he was named a Doctor of the Church. He was the rare preacher whose reputation outran the buildings meant to hold his audiences.
So it is worth noticing what he chose to emphasize. Not eloquence. Not volume. "Actions speak louder than words. Let your words teach, and your actions speak." The line comes from the sermon notes he wrote to train fellow Franciscans, and it reads almost as a warning to anyone who speaks for a living: a message carries only as far as the integrity of the person delivering it.
Eight centuries later, it still holds. Teach with your words, and let your life make the argument.
Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, June 13.
Art: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, "San Antonio de Padua y el Niño" (1668-1669), painted for the high altarpiece of the Capuchin convent church in Seville. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

On June 13, 1917, three shepherd children came back to the fields near Fatima for the second time. Lucia, the oldest at ten, asked Our Lady to take all three of them to heaven. The answer was hard for a child to hear. Francisco and Jacinta would be taken soon. Lucia would remain, and she would spend her life spreading a message that the others would not live to see take root.
It was into that exact moment, the moment a child realized she would be the one left behind, that Our Lady spoke the words on this card: "My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God."
It is worth sitting with what a refuge actually is. Not a hiding place. Not a way around grief or difficulty. A refuge is somewhere you are held while you keep going. Lucia did stay. She lived to the age of 97 and spent those decades pointing people back toward that same Heart.
This year, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary falls on June 13, the same calendar date on which those words were first spoken. If today feels like you are the one left to carry something, this promise is offered to you as well.

There is a tendency to treat the Sacred Heart as a sentimental image. A glowing heart, some flames, a quiet holy card. The devotion rests on something far more concrete.
In 1986, William Edwards, an anatomic pathologist at the Mayo Clinic, published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ." Working from the historical and medical evidence, Edwards and his coauthors concluded that Jesus died of hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia, and that the soldier's spear, thrust between the right ribs, likely perforated the right lung and the pericardium, the membrane surrounding the heart. The blood and water that the Gospel of John describes is precisely what such a wound produces.
Put plainly, the heart at the center of this feast is not a metaphor. It is an organ that stopped beating on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, pierced for love of us.
Six centuries later the devotion took clearer shape. Between 1673 and 1675, in the French town of Paray-le-Monial, Christ appeared to a Visitation nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque, showed her his heart, and said, "Behold this Heart which has so loved men." That single sentence is the core of the whole feast.
The Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus on Friday, June 12. This year it carries a weight it has never carried before. On June 11, during their assembly in Orlando, the bishops of the United States will consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the first consecration of its kind in the country's history, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The God who orders the cosmos is the same God who let his heart be opened with a spear. That is the claim of this feast, and it is worth sitting with.
Image: stained glass, All Saints Catholic Church, St. Peters, Missouri. Photo by Nheyob via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA http://4.0.