What a Kardiotissa Is

Before the myrrh, there is the image, and the image already preaches.

The Kardiotissa — the “Tender Heart” — is one form of the oldest and most beloved way of painting the Mother of God, the type the Greeks call Eleousa, the tenderness or “loving kindness.” In it the Christ child presses His cheek against His mother’s, His arm reaching to her neck, while she inclines her head toward Him and turns her free hand outward, away from herself, toward the viewer and toward Him. Every line says two things at once: the warmth of a real mother holding a real child, and the truth that she is not the point. Her hand always directs you past her to her Son.

The name is most associated with the great Cretan iconographer Angelos Akotantos, who worked in the first half of the fifteenth century and whose Virgin Kardiotissa became a prototype copied for five hundred years. So the icon in Pennsylvania stands in a tradition far older than itself, a way of showing Mary that the Church, East and West, has loved since the first millennium.

The Iveron Lineage

The Taylor icon did not begin in isolation. It stands at the end of a chain of myrrh-streaming images, and the chain is part of the story.

The original Iveron icon, the Portaitissa or “Keeper of the Gate,” has hung for a thousand years at the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos, and tradition ascribes its first painting to the Evangelist Luke. In November 1982 a copy of it, received from Athos, began to stream myrrh in the care of Brother José Muñoz-Cortés, a convert to Orthodoxy from Catholicism. That Montreal icon poured out fragrant oil for fifteen years until Brother José was murdered in 1997 and the icon vanished.

In October 2007 a small printed copy of the Montreal icon, kept by Reader Nectarios in Hawaii, began in turn to stream myrrh, and in 2008 it was recognized as miraculous by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and blessed to travel.

In the autumn of 2011 that Hawaiian Iveron icon visited St. George parish in Taylor, Pennsylvania. The pastor, Fr. Mark Leasure, wiped his own parish’s copy of the Kardiotissa with cotton that had been soaked in the myrrh of the visiting icon. Soon after, the Taylor Kardiotissa began to stream myrrh of its own, and by every account it has done so ever since.

What Happened

Word spread without advertising. Weekly Moleben services — the Orthodox prayer of supplication to the Mother of God — began to fill the small church beyond capacity, and the icon started to travel, carried to Orthodox parishes across the country: in Chicago, in Parma, in Carnegie, drawing thousands.

On the evening of 15 November 2017, Archbishop Daniel of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA led a pilgrimage of clergy and faithful to Taylor to pray before it, and the faithful were anointed with its myrrh as the church filled with the scent of it.

The Myrrh, and What It Means

Myrrh is not a random sign. It runs through the whole Gospel.

It was one of the three gifts the wise men laid before the child: “gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). It was carried to His tomb, when Nicodemus came “bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes” to anoint His body (John 19:39). It is the spice of kingship and of burial, of His birth and of His death. So when fragrant myrrh flows from an image of His mother holding Him, the faithful read it the way the Church has always read such things: as a quiet sign pointing to her Son, to His sacrifice, and to the sweetness the Apostle calls being “the good odour of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15).

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
— Matthew 2:11 — the gifts of the Magi at the birth of Christ

A point of care belongs here, and both Catholics and Orthodox would insist on it. The icon does not work miracles. The painted board has no power in itself. Whatever grace is given is given by God, and the honor shown to the image, as the Church defined long ago, passes not to the wood and paint but to the one it represents, and through her to her Son. The image is a window, never the light.

Veneration and Reported Fruits

Since 2011 thousands have come, and the pattern is consistent across the accounts. Pilgrims wait in long, quiet lines to be anointed with the myrrh. Some weep. Some speak of a wave of peace. Some report that the fragrance lingered on them for days. The faithful also speak of healings and answered prayers.

In keeping with the standard of this library, those reports are recorded as what they are: the testimony of the faithful, gathered by word of mouth and by the parishes that have hosted the icon. They have not been subjected to the kind of formal medical or scientific examination that, for example, the cures at Lourdes must pass. We pass them on honestly, neither inflating them into proven miracles nor dismissing them.

How the Church Weighs It

Two questions matter, and they have different answers.

On the veneration of the image itself, the Church is entirely settled, and Catholics and Orthodox agree without reservation. The Second Council of Nicaea, in the year 787, defended the holy images against those who would destroy them, and taught that the veneration shown to an icon is a respectful honor, not the adoration due to God alone, and that this honor passes to the person the image represents. The Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats it directly. So there is nothing strange or suspect to a Catholic in kneeling before an image of the Mother of God. It is the faith of the undivided Church.

On the myrrh itself, the answer is more careful. Phenomena like weeping and myrrh-streaming images are not rare in the Orthodox world, and the Orthodox themselves treat most of them with prudence, recognizing some at a diocesan level and leaving many simply to the devotion of the faithful. The Taylor icon was blessed by its bishop to be venerated and to travel. That is a real ecclesial blessing, but it is not the same as a formal verdict on the cause of the myrrh, and no published scientific study of this icon appears to exist.

The Catholic Church, for its part, has said nothing about this icon. It neither approves nor condemns it. As with every private phenomenon, a Catholic is entirely free to be moved by it or to set it aside, and is required to believe nothing about it. What the Church does ask, always, is that any such sign be measured by whether it leads people to prayer, to repentance, and to Christ. By that measure the fruit reported here — crowds praying the supplication of the Mother of God and leaving in tears and peace — is at least consonant with how Mary has always worked.

The only test that finally matters is the one Mary herself has always passed: it drew them to their knees, and it pointed them to Christ.

Current Status

The Church does not require any Catholic to believe that the myrrh of the Taylor icon is miraculous. It has made no ruling on it. It does not teach that oil from an image heals by itself, and it would measure any reported cure with the same patience it shows everywhere, ruling out the ordinary before it speaks of the extraordinary. What the Church does hold, and has held since the year 787, is that to honor an image of the Mother of God is good and right, and that the honor travels through the image to her, and through her to her Son.

Primary and Authoritative Sources

• The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, report of the 15 November 2017 pilgrimage to the Kardiotissa in Taylor, Pennsylvania — the primary account of this entry.
• The American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese and the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, for the icon’s travels and veneration.
• The Orthodox Hawaiian Iveron Icon Association and OrthoChristian, for the Iveron lineage from Mount Athos through the Montreal and Hawaiian icons.
• The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, for the 2008 recognition of the Hawaiian Iveron icon.
• For the iconographic type: the works of Angelos Akotantos held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (open-access) and the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens.
• For the doctrine of images: the Second Council of Nicaea (787) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.