Marian shrines

Between May and October 1917, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged ten, nine and seven, said that a Lady brighter than the sun appeared to them at the Cova da Iria on the 13th of each month; in August it was on the 19th, at Valinhos, because the children had been detained. In 1916 they had already reported three apparitions of an angel.

On 13 October 1917 a crowd of tens of thousands gathered, and many said they saw the sun move in the sky. That day the Lady said: I am the Lady of the Rosary.

Francisco and Jacinta died young, in the influenza epidemic of 1919 and 1920, and were canonised by Pope Francis on 13 May 2017. Lúcia became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005.

Between 11 February and 16 July 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, a poor girl of fourteen, saw a young Lady dressed in white eighteen times in the grotto of Massabielle, beside the river Gave.

On 25 February, following the Lady's words, Bernadette dug in the ground and a spring appeared; it still flows today. On 25 March the Lady said who she was, in the local dialect: I am the Immaculate Conception. The Church had proclaimed this dogma four years earlier, and Bernadette did not understand the words.

Bernadette became a Sister of Charity at Nevers, where she died in 1879. She was canonised in 1933.

In December 1531, ten years after the conquest of Mexico, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an Indigenous convert, said that a Lady appeared to him on the hill of Tepeyac. She spoke to him in his own language, Nahuatl, and asked for a church to be built there.

The bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, asked for a sign. On 12 December the Lady sent Juan Diego to gather roses on the hill in winter; when he opened his cloak (tilma) before the bishop, the roses fell and her image was on the cloth. That image is still kept in the basilica.

The devotion spread quickly among the Indigenous peoples and the Spanish. Our Lady of Guadalupe is patroness of Mexico and of the Americas.

In October 1717 three fishermen, Domingos Garcia, João Alves and Filipe Pedroso, were casting their nets in the Paraíba do Sul river with little success. First they pulled up the body of a small clay image of Our Lady of the Conception, then its head; after that, the nets filled with fish.

The image, darkened by its years in the water, was kept in the fishermen's homes and then in a chapel. The devotion grew, and in 1930 Pius XI proclaimed Our Lady Aparecida patroness of Brazil.

Mount Carmel, above the bay of Haifa, is where the prophet Elijah defended faith in the one God (1 Kings 18). Around the year 1200, Christian hermits settled there, near the spring of Elijah, and built a small chapel in honour of Mary.

From them came the Carmelite Order, which took Mary as its patroness and model: Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Its rule was given by Saint Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, in the early 13th century. Later Carmel gave the Church saints such as Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross and Thérèse of Lisieux.

The Discalced Carmelites keep the Stella Maris Monastery on the mountain. Its church, rebuilt in the 19th century, stands over a cave associated with Elijah.

On 24 and 25 June 1981, six young people of the parish of Medjugorje, then in Yugoslavia, said that Our Lady appeared to them on the hill of Podbrdo, and that she presented herself as the Queen of Peace.

Some of them say the apparitions continue, and messages attributed to her are published regularly. Millions of pilgrims have gone there, and many speak of conversion, confession and vocations.

On 18 October 1914, in a small chapel at Schoenstatt, in Vallendar near Koblenz, the Pallottine priest Joseph Kentenich and a group of young students made a covenant of love with Mary: they would offer her their efforts and prayers, and asked her to make the chapel a place of grace.

From there the Schoenstatt Movement was born. Father Kentenich was held in the Dachau concentration camp from 1942 to 1945, and died in 1968; his cause of beatification is open.

Mary is honoured there as the Mother Thrice Admirable, Queen and Victress of Schoenstatt. Copies of the original shrine exist in many countries, including Portugal and Brazil, where the Pilgrim Mother campaign, begun by João Pozzobon, takes her image from house to house.

Between 1961 and 1965 four girls of San Sebastián de Garabandal, Conchita González, Mari Loli Mazón, Jacinta González and Mari Cruz González, said that Saint Michael the Archangel and then Our Lady, as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, appeared to them, often in ecstasies watched by many people.

Some of the girls later expressed doubts about what they had seen. The village still receives pilgrims from many countries.