In October 1935, Mussolini ordered the Italian army to invade Ethiopia. Around the world there was dismay at the Pope’s failure to condemn the attack. A powerful contemporary engraving expressed the divided loyalty felt by many British Catholics. The son of its creator remembers a remarkable artist and devoted mother

None of Máire Littledale’s other works resembles her extraordinary wood engraving Christe Eleison (“Christ have mercy on us”). Like almost all of the 30 or so of her wood engravings that have survived, it was produced during the three years when she was a student at the Slade. It is dated 1936; so far as I know, there are no other images that depict Christ as an African produced before then in any medium by an artist of British, or other European, descent.

Máire never went to Africa. She told her children that the face in the engraving was that of a man, seemingly weighed down by troubles, whom she had observed while travelling in an Underground train in London. In 1962, in the early days of the American civil rights movement, Máire gave the original wood block to the then Bishop of Pittsburgh, John Wright, later to become Cardinal Wright, the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy and the highest-ranking American in the Roman Curia.
While working as Wright’s priest-secretary, the future Cardinal Donald Wuerl saw the image and later, as a bishop himself, gave a copy to an African American priest. He, and others of African descent who received a copy, were moved by it. Máire, her family and ­others have also made copies and distributed them privately to friends. This is the first time it has been reproduced in a book or newspaper.