Veronica is the patron saint of photographers and laundry workers, but in my humble opinion, she would be just as suited to be the patron of one of the key tasks of toddler parenting: wiping faces. For a parent, it’s a task that’s replete with cleaning peanut butter off chins, holding tissues to noses, and caressing tear-stained cheeks.
Veronica does her face-wiping at the sixth Station of the Cross. After Jesus fell the first time on his journey to Calvary, met his mother, and was assisted by Simon of Cyrene, Veronica steps out of the crowd of bystanders to gently wipe the blood and sweat from his face. As far as we know, no words are exchanged between them, but Jesus leaves the image of his face on the veil she uses for the task. It’s the one thing for which she’s remembered; Veronica’s life is reduced to a single moment.
My Protestant friends remind me Veronica isn’t known in Christianity’s wider realm; her story’s not told in scripture, and not a shred of data confirms her existence elsewhere. But within the Catholic imagination, she looms large. Her prominence—and for just one thing—highlights the importance of her solitary task.
In that sliver of time, Veronica doesn’t fix anything. She doesn’t prevent or postpone Jesus’ crucifixion, or even lighten Jesus’ load, as Simon does before her. She simply extends an act of tender care. It’s care that isn’t a means to an end but merely is what it is: kindness shown in a moment of suffering.
Veronica’s act calls to mind what we today refer to as palliative care, the medical approach focused on improving quality of life and relieving pain as opposed to providing curative treatment. Palliative care is its own discipline, because for doctors who are trained to heal, not “fixing” is counterintuitive. It takes a kind of spiritual fortitude and humility to direct energy to making the present moment more bearable, rather than to saving the day in the end.
While the term palliative is most often used in medical settings, it can apply broadly. In the realm of family life, this sort of care includes kissing ouchies and applying Band-Aids to scrapes that hardly need them. It’s checking on a sibling who lost their job and spending time with a friend going through a divorce. It’s sitting with an aging parent as they battle the side effects of chemotherapy, and it’s inviting a widowed aunt to family dinners.
Palliative care, in medicine and in the ordinariness of daily life, provides comfort where there is no cure. It acknowledges the suffering of the other and tries to lessen the pain without actually being able to change the thing that causes the pain. None of this is easy. All of it is powerful.
For the person suffering, it’s the difference between being alone and being held by someone who cares. In a reflection on the Stations of the Cross, Joan Chittister writes that Veronica is a witness “to the power of witness.”
The experience can be transformative for the person who does the caring. The priest and psychologist Henri Nouwen writes extensively about his experience caring for his friend Adam, a man with developmental disabilities, within the L’Arche Daybreak community. As Nouwen describes his care for Adam’s physical needs—feeding, dressing, transporting—the reader sees clearly that this relationship benefits the caregiver as much as the person receiving care. Nouwen describes how his friendship with Adam altered not only his faith and understanding of love and community but also his sense of what it means to be human.
There is a tendency to glamorize from a distance the act of caregiving, be it Nouwen’s, Veronica’s, or anyone else’s, in a way that feels disingenuous at best and harmful at worst. Maybe Veronica was having a beautiful, mystical moment when she pulled away from the shouting mob and stood face-to-face with the suffering Jesus. But maybe it was just hot, sweaty, overstimulating, and scary.
Most of the face-wiping I do is aggravating and cumbersome. I’m much more likely to snap at my children to hold still than to feel any sort of profound connection with them or spiritual transcendence. Palliative care is easy to romanticize but hard to endure.
In her most recent memoir, All the Way to the River (Riverhead Books), Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on the brutal experience of walking alongside her best friend and partner as she died from pancreatic and liver cancer. “I wish I could tell the people that you died peacefully,” she writes, “and my God, how we all tried to help you die peacefully— but the truth is that you died exactly the way you lived: defiantly, violently, bravely, furiously.”
I wonder if this was true for Jesus in the hours and minutes leading up to his death—the feeling of utter aloneness, the inability to be comforted, the chagrin and despair at the lot set before him. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he prays for an alternative: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” When the cup doesn’t pass, even as he accepts his cross, he laments, wondering why God has seemingly forsaken him.
And Veronica was there, in the crowded, noisy, risky, dusty, sickening mess of it. Now, more than 2,000 years later, she invites each of us into a radical ethic of care. She calls us not to fix the troubles of our loved ones but to be present with them in their moments of suffering, to offer gentleness, to be steadfast, and to allow ourselves to be changed in the process.
We don’t know how Veronica was changed by her encounter with Jesus, but we know he left the image of his face on her cloth. While I am initially more drawn to the power of the natural in this story (the act of wiping) than to the miraculous (the appearance of Jesus’ face on the veil), I love Chittister’s interpretation of the event. “The meaning is obvious,” she says. “Every time we make life physically better for someone else, the face of Jesus becomes clearer and clearer in us. We become more of what we are meant to be.”
We become more of what we are meant to be—more merciful, more open, more porous, more humane, more alive—when we extend ourselves through acts of care. Our actions might positively affect what’s to come, but there is no guarantee. We act, therefore, to ameliorate present pain, rather than to pursue uncertain future outcomes. This was Veronica’s task. And it’s ours, too.
This article also appears in the February 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 2, page 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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