Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

«El niño ahogado de Altötting»

Baviera (Alemania) (1489)

In the centre of Altötting, in the Alta Bavaria, the Gnadenkapelle, the Chapel of Grace, is raised, a small octagonal chapel that is the national Marian shrine of Bavaria. There we venerate Our Lady of Altötting, an image of wood darkened by the time and smoke of the candles, known as the Black Virgin of Altötting.

The foundational account, firmly rooted in the tradition of the sanctuary, is located in 1489. A boy about three years old fell into a nearby stream and drowned; according to the story, he would have been under water about half an hour. His mother, desperate, took him dead to the Chapel of Grace, put him before the image of the Virgin and begged for his intercession. The child came to life suddenly, without sequels. Soon after, another tradition tells the case of a six-year-old boy crushed by the wheels of a hay car, also returned to life after his parents' appeal. These two wonders launched the great pilgrimage to Altötting.

It is appropriate to distinguish the documented from the tradition. The concrete details - the minutes under water, the exact words - belong to the pious account, without a contemporary notarial act accessible; they are based on a continuous tradition since the end of the 15th century. It is significant, indeed, that Pope Benedict XVI, when visiting the sanctuary, referred to the drowned three-year-old child and the child who was run over as the origin of Altötting's fame, which shows that the story is part of the recognized memory of the place.

Lo bien atestiguado es el desarrollo del santuario como gran centro de peregrinación desde finales del siglo XV, la abundancia de exvotos en la Gnadenkapelle y las visitas de Papas, incluida la de Benedicto XVI en 2006, que depositó su anillo episcopal en la corona de la Virgen. El Rosario forma parte habitual de las peregrinaciones, especialmente en mayo, aunque no consta un milagro específico «del Rosario» ligado a esta imagen.