The Mystery of the Black Madonna
A symbol that has inspired both devotion and derision
Christianity’s glory days are long gone now. But the narratives it has woven for the past two thousand years still have a strong pulse in Western culture. Our thinking easily polarizes. If we’re not careful, we tend to label everything about the world and our selves as either good or bad. Especially colors.
To the mainstream Western Christian mind, light equals good and dark equals bad. God is in heaven, surrounded by light. The Devil is underground, engulfed in darkness. After your time on Earth ends, you will belong to either one or the other for all of eternity.
So when faced with the Black Madonna phenomenon, white Christians tend to not quite know what to do.
“In 1944, Leonard W. Moss, entering the church at Lucera in Southern Italy, came across his first Black Virgin and asked the priest, ‘Father, why is the Madonna black?’ The response was, ‘My son, she is black because she is black.’ […]
The priest’s answer to Moss may seem a charming example of holy simplicity, but there was no mistaking the open hostility, when, on 28…
