Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The Virgin who stopped smallpox

Port-au-Prince (Haiti) (1883)

In the working-class neighborhood of Bel Air, in Port-au-Prince, stands the National Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Byzantine-style icon depicting the Mother holding the Child Jesus before the instruments of the Passion. It was the Redemptorist Fathers, who consider her the patroness of their Congregation, who brought this devotion to their missions in Haiti and built her shrine there.

Tradition tells that in 1883 a severe smallpox epidemic ravaged the country. The people, in anguish, prayed a novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, asking for an end to the contagion. And after that novena, the epidemic ceased, in a way that the faithful considered miraculous. In gratitude, it was decided to proclaim her patron saint of Haiti. Since then, she has been invoked especially during major national crises, as was seen again during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is important to distinguish carefully between documented and devotional accounts. It is verified that the Redemptorists consider this Virgin their patroness, that they spread her cult and established the Bel Air shrine, and that she is recognized as the patroness of Haiti in liturgical practice, with a national feast day on June 27. In 1993, the centenary of the "miracle" and the patronage was celebrated with great solemnity. However, the detailed account of the novena of 1883 and the "miraculous" cessation of smallpox belongs to a devotional tradition repeated through popular preaching: we have no medical or governmental documents confirming the events before and after, nor is the exact date of the official proclamation recorded. Some sources even mention 1882, although the most detailed records place it at 1883.

No individual votive offerings with names and dates are found in formal sources; what is preserved is the collective experience of a people who turn to her in times of calamity. Regarding the Rosary, there is no evidence of a specific historical link between the Haitian patron saint and a Rosary confraternity; there is, however, a spiritual affinity between the iconography of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Sorrowful Mother, and the spirituality of the Rosary, but as a general theological principle and not as a historical phenomenon specific to Haiti.