Our Lady in North America

The most amazing anecdotes in the US and Canada

Long before modern nations existed, the Virgin Mary had already laid her feet - through the devotion of those who loved her - on the coasts and meadows of North America. Spanish missionaries, French settlers, native peoples and immigrant communities all over the world built a rich, surprising and deeply human Marian history. These are some of the most amazing anecdotes.

The river that was frozen in spring: Capt. de-la-Madeleine (Quebec, 1879)

In the winter of 1879, the small community of Cap-de-la-Madeleine, in Quebec, wanted to build a new church dedicated to the Virgin of the Rosary. The problem was that the necessary stones were on the other side of the San Lorenzo River, and the river had been thawed too soon that year: it was not possible to safely cross it. Father Luc Désilets, the parish priest, proposed to his parishioners a ninth of rosaries asking the Virgin to refreeze the river.

On March 16, when the ninth was finished, the San Lorenzo River - which had been unfrozen for weeks - was again covered with a solid ice layer. The locals crossed for several days, carrying the stones over the sled. When the last block was on the other side, the ice disappeared again, as if its only purpose had been that. Eighty witnesses signed a statement from the prodigy.

Nine years later, on June 22, 1888, Father Désilets and two other men carried the old altar from the old church to the new one. They stopped the procession to pray before the statue of the Virgin. The three saw how the eyes of the image - until then entangled - opened and stood, looking directly up for a time that none could measure. The original statue remains in the basilica, which John Paul II visited in 1984.

Katéri Tekakwitha: el lirio de los Mohawk (Nueva York, 1656-1680)

Kateri - or Katéri - Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in Ossernenon, near what is today Auriesville, New York. His mother was a Christian of the Algonquin nation; his father, a Mohawk boss. A smallpox epidemic killed her parents and her brother when she was four years old; she survived, but she left her face marked and her view very weakened. Her name mohawk means "she who makes way between all things."

At the age of twenty, Kateri listened to the Jesuit missionaries and asked for baptism, taking the name Catherine. His conversion cost him the rejection of his clan: they denied him food, they threw insults at him, they threatened him. At the age of twenty-one he fled on foot, four hundred kilometres to the mission of Sault- Saint- Louis, near Montréal, where he was able to live his faith freely.

There, Katéri prayed the rosary with extraordinary fervor, even carving a cross in the snow to kneel before it in winter. He died on April 17, 1680, at the age of twenty-three. eyewitnesses said that, at the time of his death, the smallpox marks disappeared from his face and became radiant. It was canonized by Pope Francis on October 21, 2012, the first indigenous saint of North America.

The oldest shrine in the United States: Our Lady of Milk (St. Augustine, Florida, 1565)

When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded San Agustín, Florida, in 1565 - the oldest city in the United States - he brought devotion to Our Lady of Milk and the Good Party, venerated in Spain since the Middle Ages. Along with the soldiers and settlers came Franciscan missionaries who built by the River Name of God a small hermitage dedicated to this advocation.

The image that was venerated there represented the Virgin by breastfeeding the Child Jesus, an ancient and delicate symbol of divine motherhood. That hermitage became the oldest place of Christian worship in the entire American nation. Over the centuries it was destroyed and rebuilt several times, but devotion was never interrupted.

Today, the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of Milk and the Good Party is still standing in Saint Augustine. Thousands of women who wish to become pregnant or who are waiting for an uncomplicated birth go there to pray, continuing a tradition that has almost five centuries of history on American soil.

The Rosary of César Chávez: The Virgin of Guadalupe in the Marches (California, 1965-1970)

When in September 1965 the Mexican-American agricultural workers of the San Joaquín Valley - California - began their big strike against the vineyards, they carried a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was not an improvised gesture: for those men and women, the Guadalupana was her mother, her patron and her strength.

César Chávez, the leader of the United Farm Workers union, was a man of deep prayer. During his fasting - which he used as a non-violent weapon of moral pressure - he spent hours praying the rosary. In its 25-day fast in 1968, daily mass and rosary were the center of each day. Robert F. Kennedy, who visited him at the end of that fast, broke bread with him in a kind of popular eucharist before a multitude of thousands of people.

When Chávez died in 1993, his funeral processed 40 kilometres under the California sun. At the front, again, the Virgin of Guadalupe. More than fifty thousand people followed the coffin. It was beatified by the diocese of Fresno in diocesan process, which began in 2013.

Father Lacombe and Creates them from Alberta (Canada, 1865)

Oblate priest Albert Lacombe (1827-1916) spent more than half a century as a missionary among the native peoples of the Canadian meadows: Creates them, Blackfoot, Assiniboine. He learned his tongues, walked thousands of miles on horse or in dog sled, and taught them the rosary adapting it to their oral culture.

In 1865, during a battle between the rival Clans Cree and Blackfoot, Father Lacombe stood among the fighters flying his cross and rosary, screaming for a ceasefire. A bullet slapped him in the head and fell stunned to the ground. When he got up, covered in blood, the warriors stopped. None of them wanted to be the man who killed the "black father." The battle is over. Later, Father Lacombe explained that at that time he only felt that the Virgin covered him as a mantle.

The Marian devotion that he sowed among the native peoples of Alberta survived generations. Even today, in the Hobbema (Maskwacîs) reserve, a Marian pilgrimage is held in August that unites native Catholics from all over the region.

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