Since she was a little girl, the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue at Sacred Heart Hospital has represented faith to Jean Kurtz.
Growing up in a German-American family in a house on Fifth Street in Allentown, the statue was just a part of her life in the neighborhood. As kids, she and her friends would sit by the statue and look at the fish in the fountain below its feet. After her first Communion in 1943, it’s where her family took a picture of her.
Now 90 years old, Kurtz left the neighborhood long ago but she still felt a connection to the statue — which is why it was a shock when she heard in March 2023 that vandals knocked down the century-old statue, breaking off and stealing its arm.
“When I heard it was destroyed, what they did to it, I actually cried. I got tears in my eyes. I can’t believe that people would do that. It’s so ugly to do something like that. I think it’s terrible,” Kurtz said.
Now, after a two-year absence, the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue has returned to St. Luke’s Hospital–Sacred Heart.
While repairs were ongoing, the zinc and copper sculpture was missing from the hospital at 421 W. Chew Street in Allentown. To celebrate its return, St. Luke’s University Health Network rededicated the statue during a ceremony on Friday morning. Among the crowd that gathered to see the recently refurbished statue was Kurtz, who now lives in south Allentown, so she could once again stand before the statue as she did so proudly 82 years prior.
A neighborhood fixture
Sacred Heart Hospital was founded in 1915 by Monsignor Peter Mason and the Missionary Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart to provide care to those in the community during the diphtheria epidemic. The Sacred Heart of Jesus statue, created by a sculptor at the Daprato Statuary Co. in Philadelphia, was dedicated at the hospital’s entrance the same year. According to St. Luke’s, the statue symbolized that “all in need are welcome to receive care” at the hospital.
The piece is a roughly life-size metal cast of Jesus Christ in flowing robes, standing with his arms outstretched, the heel of his right foot slightly lifted and a placid look on his face. At the center of his chest is the Sacred Heart, a revered symbol in Roman Catholicism, that symbolizes his love for humanity through his sacrifice on the cross.
The statue graced the entrance of the hospital until it was removed in the 1970s, when a seven-story inpatient tower was erected. On the verge of financial ruin, Sacred Heart Hospital merged with St. Luke’s in 2017 and in the following years, St. Luke’s invested $42 million into the hospital.
According to St. Luke’s, Frank Ford, who served as Sacred Heart campus president until his retirement in December 2023, was the force that pushed for the statue’s restoration.
Ford grew up in a house on Law Street, just four blocks from Sacred Heart, the city’s Catholic hospital serving the surrounding working-class neighborhood and the German, Irish and Slavic Catholics who lived there. Over time, Catholics from other areas, such as the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, moved to the area.
When Ford assumed the presidency at the hospital, he had a clear view of the statue from his office window. As he worked to revitalize the hospital, he decided that repairing the statue should be a part of those efforts and contracted artist Fernando DeJesus.
Bringing it back
DeJesus is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the media he works in are bronze sculptures and paint. Though he had limited experience doing this kind of restoration as a Catholic, DeJesus said the opportunity to take part in something so meaningful was too good to pass up.
“I wanted to do it. I didn’t do it for the money. I did it because it meant something to me,” DeJesus said.
Because the vandals stole the right arm, he didn’t have the original to work with, so he used the other hand as a guide. Using a technique dating back to ancient Greece called the lost wax process, DeJesus molded the lost limb for reproduction in bronze.
“I started sculpting on site and I got this amazing feeling because everyone who walked by it, even with one arm, they still all made the sign of the cross. They would all stop and pray and when I was working on it, they said thank you. And I just thought it’s pretty amazing — the power of art,” he said.
However, when the time came to weld the new arm onto the old statue, he quickly realized — it wasn’t bronze.
“They call it pop metal. In the late 1800s, about the 1880s to the 1950s, they pretty much just grabbed whatever metal was available and poured it,” DeJesus said.
He said in this case, the statue was made of lead, copper, tin and zinc, something they found out thanks to a metal reader. Zinc statue production stopped in the 1950s but St. Luke’s and DeJesus were able to obtain the metal compound needed to replicate the arm and found a metal worker in Philadelphia capable of forging and reattaching it — one of only two in the country they found willing to do the work.
DeJesus said bringing this sculpture back was challenging, but being part of such a beautiful piece’s history is something he’s really proud of.
“I see strength. I see peace in this particular sculpture. I see that it can draw you into it,” DeJesus said. “That’s what it’s all about. That is art in all its forms.”
