OLPS statue begins long journey home to Ursuline

   Standing at 4 1/2 feet, the statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succor suggests a typical young mother in action.
   Mary, her sandaled toes peeking out from under a beige gown, totes her wavy-haired son, who surveys the outside world from a half-seated, half-standing perch on his mother’s shoulder. Although happily ensconced inside Mary’s strong arms, little Jesus seems torn between staying put and wriggling down his mother’s side.
   “I love to watch the Christ child, with his arm on his mother’s shoulder and his hand on her breast, comfortable and secure within the mother’s grasp,” said Ursuline Prioress Sister Carla Dolce, as the chipped plaster statue was hauled out of St. Alphonsus Church July 16 for its short truck ride to the studio of a volunteer restorative artist.
   “The mother is not doting,” Sister Carla observed of the statue. “She is an individual and he is an individual. They are truly distinct, beautiful people who reflect the love of God.”

Ursuline bound

   The work of sacred art, which cloaks the Blessed Mother in an eye-catching teal-green mantle, was donated to the Ursuline Sisters by the Friends of St. Alphonsus, whose landmark Constance Street church had been the statue’s home since the early 1990s. The gift was a no-brainer: New Orleans’ Ursuline Sisters are almost certainly the statue’s original owners, given their role in conferring upon the Blessed Mother her intercessory title as a provider of “prompt succor” – or “quick help.”
   “When I saw the statue, I instantly felt an emotional relationship with it,” said Sister Carla, an Ursuline Sister since 1954 and director of the National Votive Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor on the campus of Ursuline Academy in New Orleans. “It really (portrays) motherly care,” Sister Carla said. “In motherly care you have a sense and an assurance that the mother will help.”

From 1824 convent

   Local Ursuline historians believe the piece’s original place of honor was somewhere inside the sisters’ convent and boarding school at Dauphine Street and the river, opened in 1824. When construction of the Industrial Canal forced transfer of the site to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1910, the sisters built their current hub on State Street, completing their move in 1912. Although the statue is of unknown national origin, a stamp on its base hints at its most recent restoration – “1902” – and places it squarely within the Ursulines’ 86-year tenure in the Lower Ninth Ward.
   “Nearly every room and classroom at that old convent had a statue of the Blessed Mother,” said Mary Lee Harris, who oversees the Ursuline Sisters’ archives and museum on the academy’s second floor. “They didn’t all look alike and they weren’t all the same size, but there was one in just about every room.”
Anne Rice a former owner
   Harris said that when the old buildings were dismantled in 1910, the sisters likely gave pieces of furniture and religious art to those who expressed an interest or as an alternative means of compensating vendors and workmen.
   At some point in its more than century-long life, the statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succor came into the possession of New Orleans-born author Anne Rice, who donated the plaster piece and additional works of religious art to the Friends of St. Alphonsus in the early 1990s. Up until last month, the statue had graced a side aisle of the church, said Friends president Armand Bertin, recalling Sister Carla’s response upon learning the Friends’ board had voted to return the statue to the Ursulines.
   “She was ecstatic!” Bertin said. “She wanted to put it on her shoulder and take it out of the church that day!”

The world in his hand

   Despite some scattered bumps and bruises, including a large area of chipped paint on Mary’s forehead, the statue is in relatively good shape and the figure of the Christ child strikingly unmarred.
   Artistic renderings of Our Lady of Prompt Succor sport several telling features: The Blessed Mother is always in motion, while the Christ child is usually portrayed with his right elbow resting on Mary’s shoulder and his left hand holding a cross-topped orb – representing Christ’s tender care for humankind. Although Our Lady of Prompt Succor and her baby often wear crowns, the crowns are never part of the statue itself, but rather outside accessories that can be rotated on and off the statue’s heads.

Thanking Our Lady

   The most locally famous rendering of Our Lady of Prompt Succor sits above the altar of the eponymous State Street shrine. Carved out of wood in France in 1810 and completely covered in 24-carat gold leaf, it is the oldest Our Lady of Prompt Succor statue in the United States, commissioned after a group of French Ursulines, led by Mother St. Michel Gensoul, received miraculously quick permission from Pope Pius VII to cross the Atlantic to join the New Orleans community of Ursuline Sisters. Mother Gensoul, who prayed for the pope’s consent while holding a tiny statue of Mary, promised to honor the Blessed Mother with a larger statue if her prayers were answered, with the dazzling result on view at the shrine.
   Our Lady of Prompt Succor’s intercession was credited again in 1815, when the sisters prayed that the outmanned American troops would prevail against the British in the Battle of New Orleans. In thanksgiving for this miraculous victory, the Ursulines and the archbishop of New Orleans honor Our Lady of Prompt Succor, Louisiana’s patroness, with an annual Mass on Jan. 8. The Mass of thanksgiving, requested by President Andrew Jackson, has been celebrated without fail since the pivotal event, and observes its 200th anniversary in 2015.
   “We have people coming (to the shrine) who are hopeless. They pray and they really find hope,” Sister Carla said. “We see people who are disconsolate and they find comfort; we see people who are in terrible shape – they have so many challenges and problems in life – and they either find some solution or miracle.”

   Sister Carla said the newly acquired statue, once restored, likely will be placed in a well-traveled school hallway so students at the all-girls academy can be reminded of Mary, “the caring mother,” and of the strong female role model provided by St. Angela Merici, the Ursulines’ forward-thinking 15th-century foundress, who maintained that all women should be empowered through education. From the moment they arrived in New Orleans in 1727, the Ursuline Sisters taught young girls from all walks of life, including orphans, slaves, free women of color and the French upper classes, Sister Carla said.
   “And all of those women learned to read – the men would make an “X” on their marriage license, while (their Ursuline-educated wives) would sign their names,” Sister Carla said. “Is that not fantastic?”
   For more information, visit www.shrineofourladyofprompt succor.com.
   Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.