Our Lady of Oujda

Our Lady of Oujda

Mother of those who walk away from home - East Morocco

In the eastern end of Morocco, where the Angad plain opens towards the borders of Algeria, Oujda rises: city of road crossings, intertwined memories and people in transit. There, where the desert roars the Rif mountains, the Virgin Mary is invoked by those who have no safe home, by those who travel with the heart divided between the country they left and the one they dream of reaching. Our Lady of Oujda is, above all, the Mother of the walkers.

Oujda, border city: human history and geography

Oujda was founded in 994 by Ziri ibn Atiyya, head of the Bereber tribe of the Maghrawa, in a site of exceptional strategic value: the natural passage between the plain of the Moroccan Angad and the lands of the central Maghreb, today Algeria. For centuries, the city was the scene of rivalries and alliances between dynasties - almohades, merinis, zayanidas - and later between the Moroccan Jerian Empire and the Ottoman Empire that controlled Algiers and Oran.

Geography imposes its character: Oujda looks to both sides of a border that the 20th century drew with the firmness of the colonial straight lines, starting with human realities that were moving with greater freedom. The Angad plain, fertile in wheat and olive trees, has always been a land of encounter and passage. The Rif mountains to the north, the eastern desert to the south: Oujda lives on the edge between two worlds.

In the 19th century, the city was subjected to tension between the territorial claims of France - which advanced from Algeria - and the Sultan of Morocco. The Treaty of Lalla Marnia (1845) provisionally established the border, but the region continued to be disputed. The battle of Isly (1844), in the vicinity, marked the defeat of the Moroccan army to the French troops of Marshal Bugeaud, and the memory of that time of humiliation and resistance is part of Oujda's collective memory.

The history of Oujda is, in a way, the history of the whole border: of those who cross it looking for work, of families divided by a line, of cultures that are mixed in the market and in coffee. This secular opening to the other is the human soil in which the Marian devotion of African migrants has found, in the twenty-first century, a place to take root.

The Christian presence during the French Protectorate (1912-1956)

With the establishment of the French Protectorate on Morocco in 1912, the organized Christian presence also arrived in Oujda. The city, because of its border position with French Algeria, was from the very beginning a knot of military and administrative communications. French civil and military officials, accompanied by their families, formed the first stable Catholic community in the modern city.

A church and assistance equipment - a school, a nursing - were built that mainly attended to the European community established in the new neighborhood, drawn according to colonial urban canons: wide streets, French facade buildings, a central square. The old neighborhood, the medina, remained the space of Arab and Berber life, with its mosques and its zocos. This urban duality - so characteristic of the cities of the Maghreb under the Protectorate - also marked the nature of the Christian presence: visible in the modern neighborhood, discrete from traditional life.

The missionaries who worked in Oujda - mostly Franciscan and White Fathers - soon understood that their vocation in Moroccan land was not that of a mission of mass conversion, but that of discreet service, school, hospital, accompaniment. That spirituality of "presence" - of being without imposing, of serving without mastering - is the one that the Second Vatican Council would make explicit decades later as a paradigm of the mission on land of Muslim majority.

With Morocco's independence in 1956 and the progressive withdrawal of the European community, the Christian presence in Oujda was considerably reduced. The churches and buildings of the Protectorate remained in the hands of the small community that remained - diplomats, teachers, co-workers - and of the dioceses, which kept them as signs of a continuous spiritual presence, though transformed.

SubSaharan migrants: faith on the way

Since the 1990s, and with increasing intensity in the twenty-first century, Oujda has become a point of call on migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa to the autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, and from there to the European continent. Young people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Guinea or Mali are concentrated around the city, waiting for the time to try the passage.

Among these migrants, mostly of Christian confession - Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans - devotion to the Virgin Mary is a central element of spiritual life. Far from their communities of origin, without documentation, often in a situation of extreme vulnerability, these young men and women carry their faith as the only good that no one can take from them. The rosary, the Marian songs in lingala, Yoruba or pidgin, the prayers in the improvised camps in the forests of the Beni Znassen: all this is an expression of a living and rooted Marian devotion.

The spiritual geography of these migrants is deeply Marian: before trying to pass, we pray to the Virgin. When the obstacle is overcome, the Virgin is given thanks. When a partner dies in the attempt - drowned in the sea, wounded in the fence - the Virgin is entrusted. Mary becomes the traveling companion, who accompanies in the darkness of the forest and in the uncertainty of waiting.

It is no coincidence that this intense Marian devotion of African migrants finds a particularly significant soil in Oujda. The city that for centuries was a land of passage, which knows in its own history the pain of borders and the mestización of cultures, now welcomes travelers whose faith is the purest expression of what it means to trust when everything else fails.

The Virgin as the mother of those who are far from home

The advocation of Our Lady of Oujda is born precisely from this pastoral reality: the Virgin is invoked here, above all, as the Mother of those who are far from her home. In Marian tradition, Mary is the one who has known exile - the one who fled to Egypt with the Child Jesus and Joseph - and the one who knows what it is to have to leave the land of her own to save a life. This evangelical experience resonates with a unique force in contemporary Oujda.

The theology of Mary's universal motherhood - "Woman, there you have your son," "There you have your mother" (Jn 19: 26-27) - takes on an immediate pastoral meaning in this context. The Virgin that Jesus gives to John from the Cross is the Mother of all who have lost their ties, of all who walk alone. The migrants of Oujda invoke it as such: not as an abstract figure, but as a concrete maternal presence in suffering.

This maternal dimension of Marian devotion in Oujda is not sentimentalism: it is theology lived. The homeless find the house in Mary. Those who have no mother - or left her on the other side of the Sahara - find in her the tenderness that the road cannot give. Marian prayer is, for many migrants, the only time they feel safe, welcome, appointed.

The Church in Morocco has been able to recognize this spiritual gift that African migrants bring with them. Far from being only "recipients" of the pastoral, these men and women are carriers of a living and demanding faith that renews the life of the little Moroccan Church. His songs, his rosarian devotion, his way of living the Eucharist with the whole body: all this is a gift for a Church that would otherwise risk aging in discretion.

The present Catholic community and its pastoral community in Oujda

The Catholic community of Oujda is today one of the smallest and most diverse in Morocco. It depends on the Diocese of Tangier, which covers the north and east of the country. The pastoral work in Oujda is aimed primarily at two groups: European expatriates - in small numbers - and, on an increasing and priority basis, sub-Saharan migrants.

The local Church, following the guidance of the North African Regional Episcopal Conference (CERNA) and the spirit of Pope Francis's visit to Morocco in 2019, has made the reception of the migrant one of its pastoral identity signs. The Dominican Eucharist, the catechesis in African languages, the legal and social accompaniment, the assistance to those who have been injured or sick: all this is part of a comprehensive pastoral that sees in the face of the migrant the face of Christ.

The missionaries and volunteers working in Oujda are aware of the delicacy of their position. Morocco is a Muslim-majority State where the Church's activity is limited to assistance to the already baptized faithful; proselytism is prohibited by law. Within this framework, the Church in Oujda lives her mission with serenity: not as an institution that aspires to grow in number, but as yeast that works in silence, as salt that tastes without imposing itself.

Devotion to Our Lady in this context is also an act of trust: to entrust Mary with the fate of this small and vulnerable community, to ask her intercession so that every migrant can find the way, so that every separate family can reunite, so that peace can be possible also in this border city of the Maghreb.

Spiritual reflection

In the Gospel of Luke, the Magnificat of Mary - "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord" (Lk 1: 46-55) - is the song of a woman who has experienced in herself the logic of the Kingdom: the little ones are great, the hungry are satisfied, the powerful are brought down. This anthem, born in the meeting of two pregnant women in the mountains of Judea, resonates with a surprising present in the camps around Oujda.

The migrants who invoke the Virgin in the Gurugu forest do not know it in theological terms, but live the Magnificat: they are the little ones who expect to be great, the hungry who trust to be satisfied. Mary, who also knew the way of exile, accompanies them not as a figure of the past, but as a living presence in today's suffering.

The universal Church has learned in recent decades that the periphery - geographical, social, existential - is the place where the Gospel becomes clearer. In this sense, Oujda is a privileged periphery: where human misery is most visible, where the most elementary faith is affirmed against all hope, there the Virgin is more present. Our Lady of Oujda is, in short, the Virgin of the way: she who accompanies those who have no other protection than her.

"Our Lady of Oujda, pray for us."