In a time when leaders are constantly under scrutiny and their flaws widely published, it is good to open the pages of Sacred Scripture and read of those whom God himself chose to lead others. With utter frankness, the Bible refuses to misrepresent its heroes and heroines as individuals without flaws, failings and even grave sin. Many of those whose accomplishments were great were not perfect people.

One of the greatest paintings displayed in the Louvre is Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana. The artist depicts the first miracle of Jesus at the wedding of Cana in the midst of a sumptuous feast of food and music. Veronese’s vivacious style brilliantly joins the Biblical event and the contemporary. The artist places Christ at the very center of a lavish wedding feast of 16th century Venice, because Christ is at the center of every Christian marriage.

At seven o’clock in the evening on August 18, 1996, Fr. Alejandro Pezet was celebrating Mass in the commercial center of Buenos Aires. After he finished distributing Holy Communion, a woman came up to tell him that she had found a discarded Host on a candleholder at the back of the church. Fr. Alejandro took the defiled Host and placed it in a container of water in the tabernacle.

Perched on Mount Moriah where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem. Centuries later, Herod rebuilt and expanded it. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus lavishes praise on its beauty. “…The building wanted nothing that could astound either mind or eye. For, being covered on all sides with massive plates of gold, the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash that persons straining to look at it were compelled to avert their eyes, as from the solar rays. … all that was not overlaid with gold was of the purest white” (Ant. 15.391-395).

In Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, the hero Ulysses on his way home from the Trojan War has to pass by a lovely island where the Sirens dwell. These beautiful sea-nymphs were known to lure sailors to their death by their sweet music. To avoid hearing their bewitching song, Ulysses orders his sailors to fill their ears with beeswax. With this ruse, his men successfully escape the fatal danger of the Sirens’ seductive song.