Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The Virgin who went up the mountain against cholera

Oran (Algeria) (1849)

Over the city of Oran, on the coast of Algeria, Mount Santa Cruz rises, overlooking the bay. There the Catholics - largely French settlers - venerated a Our Lady of Santa Cruz, Notre- Give me Santa Cruz, a devotion born in the 19th century and much loved to date among the ancient orans scattered throughout the world.

The foundational account is located in 1849when a serious cholera epidemic hit the port city. The existence of this outbreak is attested to in the health chronologies of French Algeria. The population, distressed, resorted to prayer and penance. According to the devotional tradition, the clergy and the authorities proposed a vote: erecting a sanctuary and going up in procession with an image of the Virgin to the hill of Santa Cruz, begging the end of the epidemic.

You have to be careful here. The epidemic of 1849, the existence of the sanctuary on the mountain and its status as a place of pilgrimage loved by the Orans, is historically documented. The exact chronological relationship between the day of the procession and the immediate cessation of cholera comes from subsequent devotional chronicles, not from coetaneous health documents. That is why, in rigour, it is a question of the believing reading of a real fact - the end of an epidemic - rather than of a clinical fact. The exact origin of the image is also not certain: a copy of Lourdes has been spoken of, but that is impossible, since Lourdes is 1858, after the vote.

What is abundant, however, are testimonies of gratitude. Descriptions of votive offerings—plaques, model ships—given for healings and protection at sea have been preserved. And many residents of Oran remember their families walking up to the sanctuary, rosaries in hand, to ask for protection in times of war and illness. There is no record of a specific message or promise related to the Rosary in 1849; but the Rosary was always the prayer with which those people ascended to meet their Lady.