Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The Virgin who wept on the rock of Šiluva

Šiluva (Lithuania) (1608)

In the centre of Lithuania, in the small population of SiluvaIt is one of the oldest approved Marian apparitions in Europe. The context was painful: the area, once Catholic, had embraced Calvinism in the 16th century; the ancient church was destroyed and its solar became a field of cultivation and grass.

Tradition - collected in writing in 1651, about forty years later, and assumed by the official cult - says that in the summer of 1608 Some shepherds, of Calvinist environment, looked after sheep near a great rock, where the church had been. They suddenly heard a strong cry and saw on the stone a jeven mujer hermosísima With a child in his arms, dressed in blue and white, surrounded by light, crying so abundantly that his tears fell on the rock. In a second vision, before more people and a Calvinist minister, he answered the question of why he was crying.

From here we enter into better documented facts. An old blind man recalled that as a young man he had helped the parish priest bury the documents and treasures of the old church when the Reformation came; taken to the field, according to tradition he regained his sight and pointed out the place. The parish documents appeared when they were dug, and thanks to them, 1622The Catholics won the lawsuit and recovered the church's property. The cure of the blind is counted in devotional sources, but there is no contemporary medical record.

This is well documented: the Pope Pío VI issued a decree on 17 August 1775 authenticating the Marian cult of Šiluva, so it is among the first canonically approved apparitions in Europe, before Lourdes and Fatima. The feast is celebrated on September 8, Nativity of the Virgin, with great pilgrimages of more than 150,000 faithful. The documented message revolves around fidelity to faith and the Eucharist; there is no explicit mandate on the Rosary as in Fatima, although today the Rosary is one of the central prayers of its pilgrimages.