Faces of holiness

For the next generation of priests who walk to Mass every day at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, sainthood now has a face — 14 of them, in fact — lining the hallway to the Chapel of St. Joseph.

The portraits, part of a new series called “Eucharistic Witnesses,” are the work of St. Louis artist Lisa Ober, who spent 18 months bringing 13 saints and one venerable to life on canvas — men and women, ancient and modern, who were chosen to show seminarians and visitors that holiness is attainable. The collection was revealed at a blessing and dedication earlier this month at the seminary.

Ober, who attends the Crossing Church in Chesterfield, said that the project deepened her appreciation for the Church as a patron of beauty in the arts. It also strengthened her faith and helped her see that the work could have “eternal value” by helping others see the saints as real and relatable human beings.

“When you’re painting the saints … you start thinking about their lives, meditating on their contributions, how they lived, what it must have been like at their time, and I really do think that’s what I’m thinking about when I sit there,” she said.

”When you’re presenting yourself in the hallways (to) students who are going to enter the priesthood, hopefully they can see the saints as a relatable inspiration,” Ober said. “That they can see themselves — not as saints or martyrs — but, hey these people were just like I am, look at the difference they made.”

Filling the hallowed halls

The idea for the series came about on the heels of the National Eucharistic Revival, which took place from 2022-25. Father Shane Deman, Kenrick-Glennon’s vice-rector for formation (who has since returned to his home Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, to serve as a parish priest), had commissioned artwork in previous assignments, and he saw the dual hallway leading to the Chapel of St. Joseph as a space to draw seminarians and guests into the sacred as they approached the chapel doors.

Working with president-rector Father Paul Hoesing, director of worship Father Donald Anstoetter and academic dean Dr. Edward Hogan, the idea came to fruition as 14 portraits — one for each space between the hallway’s windows — of saints whose lives bore witness to the Eucharist.

“All saints are eucharistic,” said Alyssa Norberg, Kenrick-Glennon’s assistant for formation and mission, who helped coordinate the project. The 14 individuals were chosen with specific criteria in mind. The seminary wanted saints spanning different eras of Church history, vocations and genders — men and women whose stories had a eucharistic theme and could speak directly to men in seminary formation.

Some of their choices had more local or personal connections to the seminary. Venerable Augustus Tolton, the first widely recognized Black priest ordained for the United States, was born into slavery in Missouri, and it was important that his story was represented at the seminary, Norberg said.

St. José Sánchez del Río, a Mexican teenager martyred during the Cristero War, was also chosen to reflect the majority of seminarians in formation who are in their late teens and 20s. Norberg said St. Jose’s heroic witness at a young age serves as a reminder of the sacrificial nature of the priesthood.

Portraits in the making

Once the 14 were chosen, the seminary team wrote detailed descriptions of each one for Ober to work from. The descriptions included who they were but also how they should look: their affect, what their expression should communicate, their clothing and their posture. Norberg said their portrayal was kept simple, so the saint’s humanity would be noticed before anything else.

“We wanted the viewer standing before them to be taken by their face,” Norberg said, “and to feel as if they’re equals in front of one another and that the life that they’re looking at is relatable” and that holiness is attainable.

The task was relatively easy to achieve among latter-day saints with existing photographs. But it was harder for the early Church figures that had limited existing imagery. For those, the detailed descriptions provided by the seminary were run through an artificial intelligence image generator, producing roughly a hundred variations of each saint’s face with a range of micro expressions.

From those results, the team pulled specific features — skin tone, facial structure and hair texture — to use as raw material. Ober then painted the actual portrait by hand and working from the assembled visual reference the way she’d normally work from a photograph.

Seminary staff also lent their hands to the project — quite literally. Father Deman posed his hands for the portrait of St. Thomas Aquinas, shown clutching a book. Norberg modeled her hands for St. Clare of Assisi, whose portrait shows her holding a monstrance matching the one used in St. Joseph Chapel.

Realism reflected

Norberg described the series as a reflection of something the seminary takes seriously in the formation of its priests — that holiness isn’t only measured in visible accomplishments, but in an interior life shaped after Christ.

“The work happening in the building is not just that the men learn to celebrate Mass,” she said. “It’s that in their humanity — the stuff of their family of origin, their emotions, how their emotions affect how they perceive the world — all of that is integrated, so that they can share the Gospel with clarity, with reverence and be configured to Christ.

“That’s the testimony of the lives of the saints,” Norberg said. “It wasn’t only the good works. They had an interior reality that was conformed to the person of Jesus Christ. That’s what we wanted to communicate with the paintings — not only that it’s possible, but — men, you can do this too.”

The realism of the style was meant to reflect “the good work that the seminarians are doing every day here, and the work of faculty and staff and the parish communities that support these men,” she said.