Walk with Mary throughout the Year

Day 118: September 5 Virgen de Regla, Chipiona, Cádiz, Andalucía, Spain The story goes that St. Augustine of Hippo in North Africa (d. 420) revered this Black Madonna statue or even carved it; that Augustinian hermits brought it to southern Spain; that it was hidden from the Moors in a well under a fig tree, and found with the help of an apparition of the Virgin by a priest from León in the 1300's, near the Castle of Regla (Rule). The wooden statue is 2 feet high. The Virgin is seated on a throne with a headless Child standing on her left knee. Since the 1600's the image has been sumptuously vested and displayed with a doll-like white Child between her hands, outside the robes. Some art historians date the statue to around 1200, others to 1300. The shrine dates to the 1300's. In subsequent centuries, devotion to Our Lady of Rule sailed from this town at the mouth of the Guadalquivir on Spain’s southern coast around the world to places as distant as Cuba and the Philippines....

Day 117: September 4 Mother of Consolation, Augustinian Order It is said that St. Augustine’s mother, St Monica, recently widowed and concerned for her wayward son, begged the Blessed Virgin for help. Mary appeared and, taking off her black belt, gave it to Monica with the promise of consolation and protection to anyone who wore it. The Augustinian Order adopted such a belt as part of its habit. In 1436, in Bologna, a lay Confraternity of Our Lady of Consolation was started, whose members also wear the black belt. This devotion is now headquartered at the Church of St Augustine in Rome. In its Chapel of St Monica hangs Giovanni Gottardi’s 1765 painting of the Madonna della Cintura (Our Lady of the Belt), shown giving the cord to both Augustine and Monica. At first, the Augustinian Order celebrated the feast of the Madonna of Consolation on the Sunday after the feast of St Augustine (August 28). In 1914, the Holy See moved it to the Saturday after the feast of St Augustine. Now Augustin...

Day 116: September 3 Madonna dei Monti, Rome, Italy In April 1579 some workers tearing down a barn wall heard a voice asking them not to hurt the child; astonished, they worked carefully, and uncovered a beautiful fresco of the Madonna and Child, a relic of the time when the place had been a convent of Poor Clares. As news of the discovery spread through Rome, many people came to admire the image. In 1580, a blind woman named Anastasia regained her sight while praying before it. The miracle convinced Pope Gregory XIII to authorize construction of a new church there. Designed by Giacomo della Porta, this became the church of Madonna dei Monti, in the central district that occupies three of Rome’s seven hills. Installed on the high altar in a magnificent setting, the image was crowned September 3, 1632. A replica processes through the streets every year on April 26. St Justin Russolillo Writes... "On behalf of the whole Church, humanity and all creation, we come and sing to the glor...

Day 115: September 2 Our Lady of the Mountain (Madonna della Montagna), Polsi di San Luca, Reggio Calabria, Calabria, Italy The story goes that in 1144, a boy found his calf kneeling before an unusual iron cross, apparently just unearthed. The Madonna appeared, asking for the young herder to spread the news and for a church to be built on the spot, half a mile high in the mountains. In 1560, a chest was found floating in the sea to Bagnara. Taken ashore, it was found to contain a stone statue of the Madonna. When the chest was placed in a cart, the oxen suddenly took off for the mountain pass, and nothing more was heard of the statue until it turned up in the heart of Aspromonte, at the place where a calf had found a cross and the Madonna had requested a church. The sanctuary there became a place of pilgrimage. Every year, people from all over Calabria and Sicily would make the 24-hour trek, enlivened by tarantellas and ballads, along the rugged path to Polsi, where they would greet th...