IHS Meaning: What the Letters on the Altar and the Host Stand For
Three letters you have seen your whole life on altars, priests' vestments and the Communion host. They are not an acronym. They are a name.
What IHS means
IHS is the name of Jesus, shortened. In Greek His name is written ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, Iēsous. The first three letters are iota, eta and sigma: I, H, S. The Greek eta happens to look exactly like a capital H, so when Latin scribes copied the abbreviation they wrote IHS. That is the whole secret. It is a monogram of the Holy Name, the same way you might sign a letter with your initials, and it has been used that way since the early Church.
Is it IHS, JHS or IHC?
All three show up. IHC uses the old rounded form of the Greek sigma, which looks like a C. JHS appears once Latin started writing the I at the start of names as a J. Same letters, same name, different centuries.
The meanings people added later
Because IHS looks like an acronym, Christians spent a few hundred years giving it one. Iesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus, Savior of Men, is the most popular. In Hoc Signo, from Constantine's vision, "in this sign you will conquer," is another. In English you will even hear "I Have Suffered." None of these are where the letters came from, but none of them are wrong to pray with either. They are devotion layered on top of a name.
St. Bernardine and the Holy Name
In the 1400s a Franciscan preacher, St. Bernardine of Siena, traveled Italy with a wooden tablet painted with IHS in gold inside a blazing sun. He held it up at the end of his sermons and told crowds to venerate the Name and take down the party crests that kept their cities feuding. Towns put the IHS sun on their gates and public buildings. A lot of the IHS you see carved over church doors in Europe goes back to him.
Why the Jesuits put it on everything
When St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus in the 1500s, he took IHS as its seal. The Jesuit version adds a cross rising out of the H and three nails underneath, all inside a sunburst, and that emblem went everywhere the Jesuits went, which was everywhere. Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, kept it at the top of his coat of arms.
Why it is on the host and the altar
Look at the next Communion host you see up close. A lot of them are stamped with IHS, often with a cross. Same on altars, tabernacles, chalices and vestments. It is a label of ownership. This is His Body, His altar, His house. Saint Paul says "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow" (Philippians 2:10), and the Church has spent two thousand years putting that Name on the things that matter most.
The feast of the Holy Name
In nomine Iesu omne genu flectat
At the name of Jesus every knee should bow. Philippians 2:10
The Church keeps the Memorial of the Most Holy Name of Jesus on January 3. If you want to go deeper on Christian symbols, the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, is the other one you will see on every altar, and it is the one on our Lamb dad caps. The flared cross on The Standard comes from the same instinct: mark what belongs to Him.
"That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth."Philippians 2:10