OUR LADY OF LIGHT

Day 280: February 16

Our Lady of Light of Ugento, Lecca, Salento, Puglia, Italy



This sanctuary stands on an ancient Marian chapel, destroyed during the Saracen raids in 1537. It is here that a blind priest, Don Didaco di Vittorio di Afragola, on pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Leuca in 1563, stopped to seek shelter during a storm. Here, praying to Mary Most Holy, he regained his sight, first of all seeing a Byzantine fresco of the Madonna, discovered by chance by his dog who brought out a part of it with its paws.

The slab is certainly from the Byzantine period and there are good reasons to think that it was buried to protect it from iconoclasts. The Bishop of the time, Monsignor Antonio Minturno, had the image, that is still venerated, in the church preserved, calling it Our Lady of Light. The current building was rebuilt in 1576 by Bishop Desiderio Mezzapica.

The façade, bordered by two powerful corner pilasters, is decorated with an entrance portal in Lecce stone from 1588 and a central rose window. The interior has a single nave with a barrel vault with lunettes in correspondence with the niches of the side altars. On the interior walls there are numerous frescoes dating back to the beginning and end of the seventeenth century, some of fine workmanship, including the representation of Our Lady of Constantinople. On the main altar stands the ancient Byzantine fresco of Our Lady of Light.

Of the thirty-eight frescoes that adorned the sanctuary of Our Lady of Light in Ugento, only nineteen have survived to date (excluding the icon of the Madonna on the altar).

On the day of the celebrations, a long procession, accompanied by the sound of a band, moves from the Sanctuary to the Cathedral of Ugento where the celebration of Mass takes place and then accompanies the simulacrum of the Madonna back to the Sanctuary escorted by a torchlight procession in memory of the great miracle.


St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"Wherever Jesus is, there we find you. You are with Jesus in Bethlehem; you are with Jesus in Nazareth; you are with Jesus in the Cenacle; you are with Jesus on Calvary; you are with Jesus at the Right Hand of the Father."

(Justin Russolillo, Spirit of Prayer, trans. Louis Caputo, Vocationist Fathers, Newark, 1996, p. 157)

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