Were women at the Last Supper?

Were women at the Last Supper?

Were women at the Last Supper? Mary is in the bottom left corner of the Fra Angelico painting that illustrates Margaret Hebblethwaite’s feature in this week’s issue, “Always at the table”.  She’s a rare presence. The images of Jesus’ last passover meal on the night before he died that dominate our imagination all show him breaking bread with just the twelve apostles for company. Leonardo da Vinci’s mural in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan is the best known. We all have our personal favourites. Dieric Bouts’ Last Supper is depicted in a bourgeois interior, with the floor set with a variegated pattern of glazed tiles and Rogier van Weyden one of the servants on hand. In Stanley Spencer’s folksy version, Christ sits before the wall of the grain bin in a Cookham malt-house, John rests against him at the moment of the breaking of the bread, and the other apostles stretch out their recently-scrubbed feet from under the table. 

As Margaret writes, the assumption of women’s absence from the Last Supper has become so deeply embedded in our Christian psyche that most of us accept it without question. But while the Scriptures are clear that the Twelve Apostles were present at the meal, they also repeatedly say Jesus was at the passover meal with his “disciples”, a wider group. When asked who would betray him, Jesus didn’t say, “It was one of you”; he said, “It was one of the Twelve” (Mark 14:20): that suggests there were more people present. 

Our front cover shows a detail from Irish artist Nora Kelly’s portrayal, showing all the men wearing prayer shawls, eating with their right hands and reclining around a low table on cushions and rugs. (The painting currently hangs in the sitting room of one of the leading lights in the We Are Church Ireland movement, Colm Holmes. He’d love it to be seen more widely if anyone could offer a suitable space for public viewing: Stanley Spencer’s Last Supper hung in the parish church in Cookham for a while. Just saying.) Its depiction of the devastating moment when Jesus is about to reveal that he will be betrayed by “one of the Twelve” is rendered even more dramatic by the inclusion of a wider group of Jesus’ first followers, not only men and women gazing at him in amazement and at each other in suspicion, but also toddlers nestling on knees and unruly children being shushed. (Kelly’s painting also includes, in a shadowy corner, a couple dining alone, and it’s hard to resist the thought they might be about to complain to management about the commotion at the next table.)

“We choose life, despite being surrounded by death” writes George Antone, a 43-year-old Caritas aid worker who with his wife Nisreen and their three children took shelter in the compound of the only Catholic church in Gaza a few days after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. Extracts from his reports and interviews over the six months since tell a story of increasing fear, desperation and resolve. Yet the Antones are determined to stay put. “If we go,” he asks, “who will show Jesus to the people of Gaza?” This weekend will mark Purim, a Jewish feast which commemorates Persian efforts to annihilate the Jews. Antisemitic attacks on British Jews are skyrocketing. “But in general, we’re fine. We’re not walking to synagogue fearing for our safety,” Jennifer Lipman writes in her column. “And we’re doing a lot better than those trapped in Gaza in horrifying conditions.” Echoing the voice of George Antone, Jennifer writes: “I desperately don’t want to live in an us-versus-them world. You support Jews, or you support Palestinians. The voices seeking to do both seem ever fainter.”

How did one of Augustus Pugin’s most gorgeous pieces and a personal treasure end up behind stacking chairs in a side chapel at Southwark Anglican cathedral? I reckon our former deputy editor Elena Curti has solved a puzzle that has vexed Pugin scholars for decades. In the sixth of our series on the sacraments, Bishop of Trondheim Erik Varden presents Confirmation as an unfailing compass by which we can coordinate everything else in our lives. And in our leader this week we examine the evidence that suggests that democracy and the rule of law are under attack globally, partly through the manipulations of its enemies, such as Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. When democracy is under threat, civil society – which includes the Christian Churches and other religious bodies – is under threat, and they should come together to defend it. 

For parishes or religious communities seeking a way forward in these unsettled times, Damian Howard SJ recommends First Belong to God, in which Austen Ivereigh takes us on a retreat in the company of Pope Francis. “It is hard to think of another writer capable of forging the synthesis we see here of a coherent Ignatian retreat process, with both a deep understanding of the spiritual approach of a remarkable, if idiosyncratic, Argentinian Jesuit and of the magisterial teaching of a constantly evolving papacy.” On 27 March, Austen will be in conversation with Amanda Davison-Young about First Belong to God in the next gathering of the Tablet Book Club: book here. Elsewhere on the Books pages, James Le Fanu sympathises with Abigail Shrier pinning some of the blame for the rise in mental health problems in young people on what she calls “bad therapy”; Chris Nancollas deftly rounds up three new memoirs; Morag MacInnes enjoys Adelle Waldman’s “ambitious, focused and funny” latest novel; and Melanie McDonagh weighs a friendly new biography of Keir Starmer, who is likely to be Britain’s first outright atheist Prime Minister “and a vegetarian to boot”, but is nonetheless “a decent man”. 

In Arts, Lucy Lethbridge looks ahead to the new Easter series of Pilgrimage, and asks why its formula has proved so enduring; Isabelle Grey is intrigued by a film that weaves together IRA violence with discussions of paintings by Rubens and Vermeer; Benjamin Poore sees James MacMillan, “the most significant Catholic composer since Olivier Messiaen”, conduct the premiere of his latest large choral-orchestral work, Fiat lux; and Mark Lawson relishes Harry Clarke, a solo show starring Billy Crudup in which he plays 19 characters.

In a new blog, Ed Kessler, founder president of the Woolf Institute, and Bishop Paul McAleenan, lead bishop for migrants and refugees, who both serve on the Commission on the Integration of Refugees convened in 2022 by the Woolf Institute, outline the key proposals that have come out of the most thorough exploration of the UK asylum system in a generation. The commissioners, who include the Anglican bishop Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, the rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger and the Muslim community leader Jehangir Malik, have found that while many refugees are escaping religious persecution, it is religious communities who play the major role in integrating refugees, highlighting that religion is both part of the problem and must also be part of the solution.

There are seven pages of news stories from our correspondents in Britain, Ireland and across the world as usual, and updates and new stories are added to our website every day. In a survey exploring why Catholics no longer go to Church commissioned by the diocese of Brentwood, 54 per cent said that they “did not feel welcome or as if they belonged” and 47 per cent said that they had left the Church over its teaching on homosexuality, reports Bess Twiston Davies. The exclusion of women and the lack of connection with their parish priest were also among reasons cited: 80 per cent of baptised Catholics “no longer see their face, hear their voice or recognise their story”, said Liam Hayes, director of the Centre for Ecclesial Ethics at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge and one of the authors of the report. Dr Hayes writes in Letters that Austen Ivereigh’s  conversation with Tomáš Halík in the 2 March issue points to where the way forward for the Church might lie. Other correspondents are sharply divided on the helpfulness of Pope Francis’ recent call for the Ukrainians to have the “courage to negotiate”. Did the Pope get it wrong? In his View from Rome this week, Paddy Agnew takes a measured look at Francis’ remarks. “What seems certain” he concludes, “is that Ukraine-Rome relations, always a delicate area, have suffered a severe blow.”  

The “ecumenical winter” in Germany has been attributed to the reluctance of Protestant Churches to be too closely linked with Catholic leaders compromised by sexual abuse scandals, Tom Heneghan writes. Embarrassment at recent reports of widespread abuse in Protestant denominations has fostered a change in perspective. The Catholic and Protestant Churches last week published a joint report that – while admitting that a shared Eucharist remains a distant prospect – demonstrates a renewed commitment to working together for unity. 

In our podcast series “The Wise and the Wherefores” Ruth Gledhill asks Franciscan priest and writer Alban McCoy about truth. What is truth? Does it still matter? Is it even out there? Two events are being live-streamed from Stonyhurst College in Lancashire in Holy Week. On the morning of Good Friday Timothy Radcliffe OP will talk on the Holy Spirit as the protagonist of the Synod; on the following morning Nicholas King SJ will speak on synodality and the Silence of Holy Saturday. Next month the Pastoral Review team is putting together a webinar on “The Duties of Christians in an Election Year” and we have three webinars on how Catholicism has influenced music, literature and art, beginning with Patrick van der Vorst on 10 April discussing how artists and the Church have interacted through the ages. Full details of timings, speakers and tickets for all these events and webinars are available here. Fr Patrick is a priest of the Westminster diocese and a former Sotheby’s auctioneer. Through Lent he has been using images to help us deepen our understanding of the last words that Jesus spoke. In the magazine this week he reflects on the sixth of the Seven Last Words, “It is finished”, and invites us to see if we can find all 23 of the scenes from the Passion of Christ in Hans Memling’s relatively small painting. “Children are fascinated by what is a sort of treasure hunt.” 

Jonathan Tulloch takes us back seven hundred years to a narrow, secret path on the wooded slopes above Boar’s Gill once used by Robert the Bruce to sneak up on the English. And Adrian Chiles describes sitting at his dying father’s bedside and pulling up a photo of a West Brom player from the 1950s. Everyone tells me the place to read Adrian at his best is in his back page Tablet column: somehow he can write about football and the big things without any crashing of the gears. 

I hope you enjoy this week’s Tablet. If you are not a subscriber but would like to give it a trial, you can try five issues for £5 and get a free copy of a book by Pope Benedict XVI or by Timothy Radcliffe by visiting checkout.thetablet.co.uk/MTABBL24 or calling 01858 438736 quoting promotional code MTABBL24.

Brendan Walsh
Editor of The Tablet