Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The lamp that went out: the Good Success of Quito"

Quito (Ecuador) (1594-1635)

In the heart of Quito's historic center, within the Royal Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, the Conceptionist nuns have safeguarded a beloved image since the 17th century: Our Lady of Good Success. The title evokes the mystery of the Presentation of the Child in the Temple, celebrated on February 2nd, and at the same time a profound hope: the ultimate "good success," the restoration of the Church after difficult times.

The devotion is intertwined with the figure of Mother Mariana de Jesús Torres y Berriochoa, a Spanish nun who, according to pious tradition, was one of the seven founders of the monastery in 1577. Devotional biographies relate that she received apparitions of the Virgin between 1594 and 1634, and that the first, in the early morning of February 2, 1594, occurred while she was praying in the choir for the difficulties of her community.

Here it is important to make a distinction with both care and honesty. What is historically established is the existence of the monastery since 1577, the nun, and the image, as well as the antiquity of the local devotion. However, the exact number of apparitions, the dialogues, the scene of the extinguished lamp, and the prophecies concerning the 19th and 20th centuries belong to the realm of devotional tradition, transmitted in later hagiographic writings; they are not found in critically edited contemporary documents. Also part of pious tradition is the beautiful account that the face of the unfinished statue appeared "miraculously completed" before its blessing, attributed to angelic hands.

Regarding the Rosary, these sources do not record an explicit and repeated request to Our Lady of Good Success in the manner of Lourdes or Fatima. What can be said is that the message emphasizes prayer, penance, and reparation, and that the Rosary is now deeply integrated into devotion to this Marian title, as is natural in Marian piety.