Holman Hunt - PRB

A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from Persecution by the Druids (1850) -- William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt, co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, could choose some strange and rather obscure themes for his paintings. As I've noted before, the very name of this group of 19th century British artists connotes a loyalty that their contemporaries would have qualms about had they connected the dots, so to speak.

Here, Hunt depicts pagan Druids attacking "Christian" priests in the background, and a converted family protecting one in their rather rickety home, at obvious danger to themselves should the priest whom they shelter be found out.

It does not take a special genius to see the parallel Hunt is drawing: recusant families in Elizabethan England took great pains for the sake of the Mass and their Eucharistic Lord ("I am the living bread ... He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him." - Jn 6). If caught these families and the Catholic priests who came to serve them risked imprisonment, torture, and death.

Today even more than in the Pre-Raphaelites' day, Catholics find themselves in a multicultural milieu (read: an ascending neo-pagan recrudescence) in which the notion of protecting our priests is counter-cultural and politically incorrect in the extreme. I'm not speaking of the so-called priests who bless the moral-free, value-ambiguous, spirit of the age denizens and their right to choose any and every lifestyle they may please. No! I am speaking about protecting our Catholic priests who bring us God's grace through the Sacraments, who are faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, who safeguard the epistemology, ontology, and anthropology of the deposit of faith.

It is a day to protect our priests. William Holman Hunt foresaw the day when it would need doing yet again.