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But in the spring of 2006, as he supervised the renovations of the Chapel of the Incarnate Word, Juarez set his eyes upon something that shocked him: a different image of Jesus, one that shared his brown skin and black hair. Shipped in from Italy to be the chapel's centerpiece, the 10-foot-tall statue of Christ was unmistakably Hispanic.

Hoisted last week and expected to be unveiled Sunday at an 11 a.m. Mass marking the completion of the chapel's nearly $5 million renovation project, the city's first Hispanic Jesus has taken its place above the chapel's altar and — even before its official unveiling — in the hearts of the faithful.

"I never thought about what Jesus looked like before this. It's like I'm looking at myself," Juarez exclaimed of the 500-pound likeness. "My wife doesn't even believe it has brown skin. She says, 'Every time we've seen a figure of Jesus, it's always been white.' I told her, 'Just wait until Sunday and you'll see.'"

The new face of Jesus, however, wasn't meant merely for the city's Hispanics to have a Jesus that looks more like them, although it was designed to represent the majority of people served by the ministry of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.

Christ's skin color and race instead are meant to symbolize a deeper issue that few Christians appear to contemplate when they confront representations of Jesus — specifically the impoverished lives of many Hispanics, said Sister Walter Maher, who headed the chapel renovation project.

Maher said the point of the Hispanic Jesus is about questioning an uneven distribution of wealth. Signs of that distribution are all around the world and in San Antonio, she said, so depicting Jesus as a Hispanic wasn't a difficult decision.

"This Christ figure is meant to confront viewers with hard questions about economic injustice in a world where millions lack even basic necessities such as a home, access to a good education, adequate food and health care," Maher said.

"It can confront them with their own blindness to the sufferings and injustices suffered by people of that culture."

The Jesus figure on the cross is modeled by Panamanian-born Dominican Father Wilmo Candoledo. Made of linden wood, the figure is believed to be the first major art figure of a Hispanic Christ in a San Antonio church, the sisters say.

"I don't think I've ever seen a Latino Christ in any of the parishes I've been in," said Father Marty Elsner, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish on the near West Side.

Father Virgilio Elizondo, professor of Hispanic and pastoral theology at the University of Notre Dame, said the absence of Hispanic Christ figures in Catholic churches — even Hispanic parishes in overwhelmingly Hispanic San Antonio — reflects the culture of the Spanish Franciscan missionaries who brought Catholicism to the New World five centuries ago.

Like their Hispanic counterparts, Vietnamese and Filipinos were evangelized into the Catholic faith by missionaries from Europe — Vietnamese by the French, Filipinos by the Spanish.

"The missionaries took the imagery that was their own. It was a very natural thing to do. They'd grown up with it since they were little kids," Elizondo said.

So the colonized people inherited the cultural images of a Caucasian Jesus, Mary and the saints that were popular in those cultures.

Others also have reincarnated Jesus to fit the predominant race of the parish.

The predominantly African American Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on the East Side installed a crucifix with a black Christ when its new sanctuary opened in 2002. It's had a processional crucifix with a black Christ since 1980, parishioner Carol White said.

Holy Redeemer also has black figures in its 14 Stations of the Cross, as well as statues of black saints, such as Peter Claver and Martin de Porres.

White also showed a series of postcard-size pictures of different Gospel stories. One shows Satan tempting Jesus in the desert, and both are black. Another shows the Good Shepherd and a third, the Prodigal Son being greeted by his father. All are in African settings.

"Our faith teaches us that we're all made in the image of God," White said. "These look like us."

On a recent visit to the Incarnate Word Sisters' missions in Zambia, Sister Maher saw representations of the Last Supper and of the Gospel story in which the 12-year-old Jesus sits in the temple discussing the Torah with elders. In both pictures, all the figures are black.

"That's a comparatively new manifestation in Africa, because for the most part, the Christian faith was brought to Africans by white European missionaries, whose artistic depictions of Jesus were European," she said.

Sister Martha Ann Kirk, a member of the Incarnate Word congregation, found an image of Jesus with a compelling message during a 2006 visit to Cambodia. Found in a religious souvenir shop, it had no ethnic features. It just was a small, flat, wooden crucifix with one defining characteristic: The Jesus figure had a stump for the right leg.

"This Christ figure represented the many hundreds of Cambodians who have been maimed by land mines. They're the current victims of wars that have 'ended.' I saw hundreds of them," she said.

Jeffrey Mahan, professor of ministry, media and culture at Denver, Iliff School of Theology, said culturally based images of Jesus are more prevalent than people realize.

"Most Americans have no concept of what the historical Jesus looked like. People read their own cultures onto Jesus, and after several centuries, a Western European Jesus has become 'normal' to us. But the blue-eyed, brown-haired Caucasian Jesus is not what the historical Jesus looked like," Mahan said.

Elizondo said it can be conjectured that Jesus was a Middle Easterner who was often exposed to the sun.

"He was probably dark-skinned, but nobody really knows," Elizondo said. "But that's the beauty of it. That's why people can create mental images of him so that in some way they can see themselves in Jesus and Jesus in themselves."

"As Christianity takes root in new cultures — Asia, Africa and Latin America — artists have begun to re-image the same biblical stories that inspired the European Christians and to re-create it in motifs that are common in these cultures," Elizondo said.

Father Terence Dempsey, curator of St. Louis University's Museum of Contemporary Christian Art in St. Louis, said even early Christian artists were more interested in portraying what Jesus represented to them in their works than in portraying what he actually looked like.

Dempsey described a Jesus image created for a hospital for skin diseases. His face was covered with sores and lesions. "It made sense in terms of how those people understood Jesus," he said. "He was someone who understood their experience."

He said Italian Renaissance artists hated depictions of Jesus by Northern German artists because they didn't fit into the Italians' culture.

"In Italy, you only had to pick up a stone to find ancient sculptures. People were surrounded by Roman and Greek art. The point is, there is no one absolute representation of Jesus."

Meanwhile, back in San Antonio, Sister Maher said she could tell the chapel workers, most of whom were Hispanic, were deeply moved at the sight of a Hispanic Jesus.

Raul Juarez said that while watching six men raise the crucifix on cables, "I could see in their eyes and their faces that it was like something magic had happened to them. I'll never forget that beautiful moment as long as I live."