A Chicago iconographer had just one week to create an icon of Our Lady of Good Counsel for Pope Leo XIV. The finished work made its way to the Vatican, where the Holy Father received it during a private audience and plans to keep it close and use in his personal prayer.
Joseph Malham is a Chicago-based iconographer who was commissioned to do the piece by Michael Airdo, an attorney from Chicago who had a planned trip to visit the pope and wanted to give him a special gift. Given the Holy Father’s Augustinian roots, Airdo decided to give him an image of Our Lady of Good Counsel, which holds a special place in the Augustinian tradition.
The devotion is rooted in a centuries-old image of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child venerated at the Basilica Sanctuary of Our Mother of Good Counsel in Genazzano, Italy, entrusted to the Augustinians. The order has promoted devotion to Mary under this title for centuries.
After Pope Leo was elected, he traveled to Genazzano — which is about 40 miles southeast of Rome — to pray before the image located in the basilica.
Airdo sent Malham an email inquiring if the icon could be completed, but there was a catch — he only had one week to do it.
“I said, ‘It can be done,’” Malham told “EWTN News Nightly” anchor Veronica Dudo on Oct. 21. “I’m single so who cares if I don’t sleep and don’t eat for a week. The question is, can I do it? And I did it.”
He added: “A week later, when Michael [Airdo] was in Rome, he sent me a photo of the Holy Father holding the icon presented to him in a personal, private audience in his library.”
Airdo shared with Malham that Pope Leo was moved when he saw the image and said he would be keeping it on a shelf in his bedroom.
The letter Pope Leo XIV sent to Chicago-based iconographer Joseph Malham. | Credit: Courtesy of Joseph Malham
Malham also wrote the Holy Father a letter because he “felt very connected with him.”
“I wrote him and I said how difficult it is — please keep me in your prayers — because it is difficult, it’s a long journey being a self-published artist and an iconographer,” he shared. “But I said, so is being any vocation. So was being married and being a priest and in religious life and being the successor of St. Peter. We’re all together. Itʼs the communion of saints. And I felt that kind of closed the distance and bonded us together.”
In the popeʼs response, he mentioned praying for Malham and his vocation and asked the iconographer to keep him in his prayers as well.
As for how this experience has made him feel, Malham said: “It’s almost too overwhelming to know that the successor of St. Peter not only has my icon, but is going to personally journey with it in his prayer life and he’s going to keep it close to him.”
“No words suffice. I could rest in the silence of the beauty of that moment and that connectivity is the sacred connection.”
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