He’s Lending His Face to Jesus

Lose the flattop, forget the freckles, and they say Sammy Juliano, 11, is the perfect model for a young Jesus.

“Sammy exudes life,” says Father Arthur A. Holquin, pastor of the Holy Family Cathedral in Orange. “He’s well loved, kind, a good student. . . .”

Then again, Holquin is speaking both as the man who commissioned the $4,000 sculpture of Jesus for the cathedral and as Sammy’s godfather.

The need for a Jesus statue arose last year after the cathedral did some interior remodeling.

Wooden figures of Mary and Joseph, which had stood separately in the sanctuary for years, were brought together in a side chapel.

And parishioners instantly noticed that a key member of the Holy Family was missing.

“They told me, ‘Father, we need a Jesus,’ ” Holquin says.

It’s the same thought Jorg Hummel, a master sculptor from Germany, had when he visited the cathedral this summer: “I saw the figures and thought, ‘Where’s the child?’ ”

Hummel, 57, offered to create a young Jesus to complete the family. The artist is perfect for the job, Holquin says.

Trained as a sculptor since age 14, Hummel studied the same classic German style seen in the cathedral’s life-sized Mary and Joseph statues, carved in the late 1950s.

He often worked for the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, carving statues of many biblical figures. And he now lives in Placentia, having married an American tourist who had visited his workshop in the Black Forest town of Hausach.

Holquin also loved Hummel’s proposal to depict Jesus at age 12, the last time he is mentioned in the Gospels until age 30, when his public ministry begins.

The artist has sculpted a small prototype, which matches the style of the existing figures of Mary and Joseph. The prototype has the boy Jesus’ arms extended.

“He’s saying, ‘Come, follow me,’ ” said Hummel, who looks like a German version of Gepetto: a burly man with scarred, calloused hands and a deep but gentle, heavily accented voice.

The artist needed only one thing for the final version: a boy who would be the model for the face of Jesus.

“I had a great face in mind,” Sammy’s godfather says.

Sammy, a sixth-grader from Orange, seems unfazed by his sudden celebrity. “It’s OK,” said the smiling altar boy, the captain of his soccer team who cites PE as his favorite subject before looking at his mother and quickly adding social studies.

The basswood sculpture should be ready by Christmas. Dan and Becky Juliano say the Jesus figure with their son’s face will take some getting used to.

“It’s going to be very touching, and an honor,” said Dan Juliano, who also served as Holquin’s altar boy. “It also will be very funny for the same reason: that our little boy and his likeness will be used for the face of Christ.”