The Virgin of Lourdes in Casablanca

Casablanca, Moroccan Atlantic Metropolis

Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and the economic heart of the country. In it, the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes retains the devotion that the French brought to the Maghreb following the apparitions of 1858. Today, in the same church, sub-Saharan, Filipino and European residents gather together, forming a community that reflects the plural face of the universal Church.

Casablanca, Atlantic metropolis

Casablanca —en árabe, Dar el-Beida, «la casa blanca»— es la ciudad más poblada de Marruecos y uno de los mayores centros urbanos del continente africano. A diferencia de las antiguas ciudades imperiales —Fez, Marrakech, Mequinez, Rabat—, Casablanca no tiene una historia medieval que remonte a los siglos de oro del islam magrebi. Su gran expansión es moderna: empezó a principios del siglo XX, cuando el Protectorado francés la convirtió en el motor económico del país, y no ha dejado de crecer desde entonces.

In 1907, when the French began the works of modernization of the port, Casablanca was still a modest city. In a few decades it became a metropolis: factories, banks, shipping companies, food industry. The French urbanism left a visible mark on the route of the ville nouvelle - the large boulevards, the architecture art déco and art nouveau, the buildings of the 1930s and the 1940s - that lives with the most popular neighborhoods where traditional Moroccan architecture maintains its presence.

At the time of the Protectorate, the European population of Casablanca became very large. French mainly, but also Spanish - many from areas near the Spanish Protectorate of the north -, Italian, Portuguese and Sephardic Jews formed a cosmopolitan community that lived in relative separation from the Moroccan population. This urban duality - the European city and the Moroccan medina - was the structural feature of Casablanca during the first half of the 20th century.

After the independence of 1956, most Europeans emigrated to France, Spain or other destinations. The Jewish community, which had been very large and influential, was drastically reduced with emigration to Israel and France. But the city continued to grow, driven by Moroccan internal migration from rural areas, and became what it is today: a mega-city of several million inhabitants, financial, industrial and port center of the country.

The Christian presence in Casablanca: from the Protectorate to today

The history of the Catholic Church in Casablanca is inseparable from the history of the French Protectorate. When the French administration arrived in 1912, it brought with it its religious institutions: secular priests and missionaries, female religious congregations, Catholic schools, parish churches. The Church in the Protectorate Morocco functioned primarily as the Church of European settlers, although the missionaries also had a vocation of service to the local population that the legal restrictions of Islam severely limited.

Several churches were built in Casablanca during that period. The most outstanding from the architectural point of view is the ancient Cathedral of the Sacred Heart - Sacré-Cœur -, a neo-Gothic building built in the 1930s that today no longer functions as a church but remains one of the most recognizable monuments of the city. After independence, the cathedral was given by the Church to the Moroccan State and has had different uses over the years: school, cultural space, place of exhibitions.

The Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes - Our Lady of Lourdes - is one of the temples that continued to function as an active place of worship. It is a modern church, built in the second half of the 20th century, notable for its large colored windows that illuminate the interior with a light of a unique beauty. Located in one of the main boulevards of the ville nouvelle, it is a visible point of reference in the urban landscape of Casablanca.

After independence, the Catholic community of Casablanca changed its composition. The Europeans who were left were replaced - or strengthened - by new groups: priests and religious of missionary congregations, diplomats and officials of international organizations, and especially - from the last decades - migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Philippines.

The devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes in the Maghreb

Las apariciones de Lourdes, ocurridas entre el 11 de febrero y el 16 de julio de 1858, tuvieron un impacto extraordinario en el catolicismo francés del siglo XIX. Bernadette Soubirous, una joven de catorce años de una familia muy humilde de los Pirineos, afirmó haber visto y hablado con una «dama» que finalmente se identificó con las palabras «Soy la Inmaculada Concepción». La confluencia de ese mensaje con el dogma de la Inmaculada Concepción, definido apenas cuatro años antes por el papa Pío IX, fue interpretada como una confirmación celestial de la doctrina teológica.

The sanctuary of Lourdes grew with an amazing speed. In a few decades it became the largest Marian pilgrimage center in the Western world, attracting millions of people from all countries every year. The devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes was spread through all the French missions and colonies: hospitals, schools, parish churches in Africa, Asia and the Pacific were named Lourdes as a sign of the piety that the French missionaries had with them.

In the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia - devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes was introduced by French settlers and missionaries from the second half of the 19th century. The image of the Virgin of the Grotto, with her white dress and blue belt, became one of the most recognizable in the churches of North Africa. The processions of August 15, which in Lourdes bring together thousands of sick people each year with their candles on, found in Casablanca and in other cities of the Maghreb their modest but sincere reflection.

The devotion to Lourdes also has a dimension that is particularly significant in the Moroccan context: healing. The Virgin of Lourdes is the patron of the sick, who in the message of the apparitions pointed out the source of water with healing virtue and asked that a chapel be built there. In a land where the tradition of visiting the sanctuaries of the saints - the zouias and the morabites - to obtain healing and protection is very rooted, devotion to the Virgin as an intercessor to the disease finds unexpected resonances.

The Church of Lourdes in Casablanca: a plural community

The community that meets today in the Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes in Casablanca is one of the most diverse of Moroccan Catholicism. Along with the resident Europeans - increasingly numerous but always present - the parish welcomes an increasing number of faithful from countries in sub-Saharan Africa where Catholicism is very deeply rooted: Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Guinea.

These African migrants have transformed the liturgical life of Moroccan parishes. His songs - in African languages, with rhythms and harmonies that have no equivalent in the traditional European liturgy - his fervor in prayer, his sense of the ecclesial community as an extended family have brought to the Catholic communities of Morocco a vitality that many describe as an unexpected gift. The sub-Saharan presence in the churches of Casablanca is now one of the most visible signs of the Catholicity of a Church that has no borders.

The Filipino faithful - domestic workers, nurses, hotel workers - are another important group in the Lourdes community. The Philippine Marian devotion, deeply rooted in the culture of that archipelago, finds in Casablanca a channel of expression that allows them to maintain the link with their religious traditions while living away from their country.

The Virgin of Lourdes as the mother of those who emigrate

There is a dimension of devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes that is particularly relevant in the context of Casablanca: its relationship to poverty and vulnerability. Bernadette was a poor girl of a family who lived in a room given for charity in an old dungeon. The apparition chose the smallest, the most ignorant, who had nothing to offer except the availability of his heart. The message of Lourdes is, in that sense, a message preferably addressed to the poor and the marginalized.

Migrants arriving in Casablanca from sub-Saharan Africa - many of them with the intention of continuing towards Europe in northern Morocco - are often in situations of extreme vulnerability: no roles, no regular work, no support networks. For Catholics among them, the parish of Lourdes is sometimes the only place for unconditional reception, the place where you can be yourself without having to be justified.

The Virgin of Lourdes, who in the apparitions requested processions and penance but above all proclaimed God's mercy to sinners and the sick, is in this context a figure of welcome and comfort. That under his advocation people from so many countries and from so many different cultures are gathered in Casablanca is, in itself, a witness to the universality of the Marian message.

Spiritual reflection

Casablanca is a city in permanent movement. Its bustling avenues, its industrial ports, its boiled popular neighborhoods speak of a human energy that does not rest. In the midst of this incessant movement, the Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes is a space of quietness: a place where you can stop the passage, enter into silence and remember that not everything is determined by speed and productivity.

Our Lady of Lourdes, who in the Grotto of the Pyrenees appeared to a sick and poor girl and sent her to announce her presence to the world, remains in Casablanca the mother who welcomes those who arrive empty-handed. Its colored vitrals, which project a fragmented and changing light on the temple floor, are perhaps the most appropriate image of the community that is gathered there: people of many colors, many languages, many stories, united by one faith and one mother.

May she accompany all who have left their land to seek a better life, and may from Casablanca continue to be a sign of hope for those who cross the threshold of their church loaded with the weight of the road.