Servant of God Julia Greeley: Possibly her first sight of the Sacred Heart
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Servant of God Julia Greeley’s heart caught fire when she realized the intensity of Jesus’s love for her and all humanity.
She would spend the rest of her life doing charitable works, sharing her newfound Catholic faith and promoting devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
By the end of her life in 1918, the Missouri native, who had grown up enslaved in part of what is now the Jefferson City diocese and moved west after the Civil War, had come to be known as “Beloved Julia” and “Denver’s Angel of Charity.”
She is under formal consideration for being declared a saint.
Now, at the place of her conversion, a likely link to her first encounter with the Sacred Heart of Jesus has come to light.
“We know Julia Greeley joined the Catholic Church in 1880 at Sacred Heart Church at 28th and Larimer in Denver,” said Capuchin Franciscan Father Blaine Burkey, biographer of Miss Greeley and ardent advocate for her beatification cause.
“Whether she had ever been in a Catholic church before that is something we don’t know for sure,” the priest stated. “Quite possibly, however, that was where she first saw an image of the Sacred Heart, to whom she dedicated her life.”
Earlier this year, Father Eric Zegeer, Sacred Heart Parish’s new administrator, was cleaning out a huge storage room when he discovered the remains of what once was a beautiful painting of the Sacred Heart.
“It was providential,” said Fr. Burkey, “that previous pastors had not found the painting, since the importance of Julia in the parish’s history and the painting’s relation to her would have not yet come to light, and it well might have been discarded.”
The artwork the pastor found was an age-worn canvas on a 9-by-4-and-a-half-foot wooden frame, the lower left side of which was in a charred condition.
Six or seven square feet of the canvas was missing entirely, though none of its precious image.
The image was a prominent fixture of Sacred Heart Church the first time Miss Greeley visited there and throughout most of her time as a parishioner.
“The painting presents a beautiful image of a handsome man carrying a huge wooden cross and pointing to his heart, which is exposed after the manner of other traditional images of the Sacred Heart,” said Fr. Burkey.
Conformed to Jesus’s heart
Miss Greeley, born into an enslaved family near Hannibal before the Civil War, is one of six African American Catholics currently under formal consideration for being declared a saint.
One of the others is Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, the Roman Catholic Church’s first recognizably Black priest in the United States, who was also born in part of what is now the Jefferson City diocese.
Compassionate and deeply spiritual, Miss Greeley was known even in her lifetime as an Angel of Charity.
Her self-effacing kindness, missionary zeal and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus emblazoned her memory onto the minds of people who encountered her in Colorado, where she spent most of her adult life.
She was blind in one eye due to the harsh treatment she had received as a slave. Her body bore the ravages of excessive, menial work.
She never earned much money as a housekeeper, even to a Colorado governor and his family.
But as a Catholic convert and professed member of the Secular Order of St. Francis, she held nothing back in helping people who were worse off than she was.
When she ran out of her own money to give away, she begged for more.
She worked in darkness and secret, in deference to the dignity of the people she was helping.
She died in 1918, to the tears of many.
The Denver archdiocese opened a sainthood cause for her in 2016.
The following year, her earthly remains were moved to a new marble sarcophagus built for her in the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver.
Unquenchable love
The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is celebrated on the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost — June 16 this year.
Church-wide devotion to the Sacred Heart proliferated in the 1600s due in large part to messages given by Jesus in a series of apparitions to a French nun named St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.
“Between 1673 and 1675, she received four visions of Christ’s heart in flames, burning with love for humanity, with instructions to promote a special feast and First Friday devotions,” according to a 2018 Catholic News Service article.
The devotion spread, with numerous parishes and schools now bearing the name of the Sacred Heart, including what was Julia Greeley’s spiritual home.
Fr. Zegeer photographed the massive, tattered image that once adorned Sacred Heart Church in Denver.
He sent the photo to Fr. Burkey, who imported it into a computer program that intensified the faded colors, giving an idea of how magnificent the image once was.
Fr. Zegeer also found a black-and-white photo of the painting in the January 1912 edition of the Sacred Heart Parish magazine, The Monitor.
The magazine also carried a three-page article titled, “The Fire. Sacred Heart Church.”
The article began:
“Sunday, Nov. 26, 1911, was the most eventful date in the thirty-two-years history of the Sacred Heart Church. For on that day, it came very near going down in history as a thing of the past.”
At 3 a.m., one of the Jesuit priests stationed at the parish was awakened by the ringing of the church bells.
Looking toward the church, he saw the building brightly illuminated.
He and the brother sacristan rushed to the church and found it afire.
Within 10 minutes, Fire Chief Terry Owens, Assistant Fire Chief John F. Healy and three companies of brave firefighters arrived and quickly extinguished the fire.
“Damage to the contents of the church was extensive,” Fr. Burkey noted, “but the building itself was saved.”
The furnace, gas pipes, and electric wires were found to be entirely intact.
“It was found later that the fire started in the church’s basement chapel, where it short-circuited wires controlling the ringing of the church bells,” Fr. Burkey recounted.
Had the bells not rung due to the short circuit, fire personnel might not have been notified in time to save the church.
“Morally certain”
Fr. Zegeer, who found the huge Sacred Heart image this year, offered it to the Julia Greeley Guild.
The Guild was founded in 2011 to help share her story, promote her cause and encourage people to call upon her intercession before God’s throne in heaven.
The discovery of the painting provides a tangible link to her life.
“Julia probably never touched it with her hands, but we are morally certain that she touched it very affectionately with her own damaged eyes,” Fr. Burkey stated.
He said there is probably no way the Guild could restore the painting.
“But hopefully, we can somehow preserve it for future veneration,” he said.
This article is adapted from an article in the February 2023 edition of the Lil’ Red Wagon, newsletter of the Julia Greeley Guild (juliagreeley.org).
Information about ordering the latest edition of Fr. Burkey’s book, In Service of the Sacred Heart: The Life and Virtues of Julia Greeley, can be found online at:
juliagreeley.org/index.php/the-book/
Copies of a devotional booklet by Fr. Burkey titled An Hour with Julia Greeley can be ordered online at:
