This is how this Greek Catholic priest brings the Last Supper to life in a Spanish parish

The priest and iconographer Ioan Gotia, religious of the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, is the author of the neo-Byzantine style pictorial decoration with which a parish in the Diocese of Alcalá de Henares celebrates its 25th anniversary.

The church dedicated to Santo Tomás de Villanueva was consecrated eight years ago, but the parish community has completed a quarter of a century, so the parish priest, David Calahorra, encouraged the project to “beautify the temple with paintings with iconography that would at the same time beauty and also evangelization”, according to the diocese.

For this they chose Father Gotia, of Romanian origin, who lived his vocation for painting and religious art since he was a child: “Thanks to the environment they created in our house, this sensitivity for art was awakened in me. Once I was welcomed into the community of the Disciples, I was given this mission after the novitiate to help transmit the Gospel through the image. An image that always accompanies and is at the service of the liturgy,” he details.

Based in Spain, Father Gotia carries out his pastoral work as a bi-ritual priest, which allows him to celebrate the liturgy in both the Latin rite and the Byzantine rite. To his taste for the traditional iconography of the Orthodox church he has added the influence of the Spanish Romanesque: “It is a very direct art that, with a very simplified language, speaks directly to the heart, it does not get lost in details. I think he can question better and that is why I am walking in this type of art,” he says.

For the decoration of the temple of the Complutense diocese, in conversation with the parish priest it was decided to portray a Last Supper “as a moment of the institution of the Eucharist that opens us to the liturgy of heaven.”

It is the only parish in the diocese that has taken this motif as the axis of its iconographic decoration. Thus, you can contemplate Christ with the 12 apostles, on whom the Holy Spirit has been represented in the form of a dove.

Above them, the Lamb spoken of in the Apocalypse accompanied by two angels alongside whom the children Justo and Pastor, patrons of the Diocese of Alcalá, are represented. Next to him, Saint Thomas of Villanueva holds the parish in his hands.

In the arch that precedes the dome, Father Gotia has painted “the presentation of the Child Jesus in the temple, which prepares this path to approach the presbytery. “The Virgin Mary presents the Child as a sacrifice, like the Lamb,” explains the religious, who has spent weeks on a scaffold with a safety harness.

The entire development of the decoration of the temple was preceded by a request from the artist: that the parish community pray for his work since it is “a painting for a place of prayer.”