It usually only blooms for three days, thus symbolising the three years of Christ’s teaching or the three days and three nights he spent in the tomb after the crucifixion. The round fruit of the Passiflora that appears after the flower has fallen is, of course, a symbol of the world saved by Christ.
Among the hundreds of flowers that have been given symbolic meaning by Christianity since ancient times, there is one that is completely unique. Not only because, compared to the others, the number of attributes of Christianity associated with it is downright staggering, but also because in its case, and unlike most plants, there is very precise historical documentation to establish precisely when, where and how it became one of the greatest religious symbols. This flower is the passiflora (from the Latin passio = suffering), also known as the passion flower, “Flower of the Lord’s Passion” or the “Lord’s Martyr”.
In 1610, the Augustinian friar Emmanuel de Villegas returned to Europe from a mission in Mexico, which was then called the Kingdom of New Spain. Like many other missionaries, de Villegas brought with him a herbarium of carefully dried exotic plants from Latin America. And among them were passion flowers and their colourful nature drawings. The Augustinian showed them in Rome to the Italian Joannite Giacomo Bosio, who was a very prominent figure at the time as the representative of the Knights Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to the Holy See and the author of ponderous books on the history of that order, now known as the Order of Malta.
At the sight of the dried flowers, and especially the drawings depicting them in all their splendour, Bosio was dazzled. For the Creator, in His boundless love, had given to all of nature and every divine creation the miraculous symbol of the Passion – the painful suffering of Jesus Christ – in the form of this single flower.
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Translated by jz
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