Our Lady of Montserrat (adapted from Seven Days With Mary]:

The surprisingly early history of Mary was demonstrated in places like France, where the Virgin appeared to an infirm woman at a place called Le Puy, and her intercession was seen at numerous sites in Italy, where she continued to quash and replace pagan idols. Christian churches were erected where once demons had been worshiped and Christ continued to employ His mother as a vessel for His wonders, His deliverance.

There were few messages in these early days. When Mary spoke, it was just a few terse sentences. She was quiet. She was sublime. When she spoke it was with very few words, and usually those words were a request to build a church. Truly she was the Mother of the Church in both a spiritual and actual fashion. Hundreds of shrines, churches, and basilicas were built at her behest as she worked to bring Europe out of the horrible grip of idolatry. She was the woman in Genesis who crushes the head of the serpent.

This might come as a shock to those who believe that devotion to Mary is a recent fad. It assuredly is not. It is at the foundation of traditional Christianity. For twenty centuries she has healed. She has helped the impoverished.

And she has worked to save souls. That has always been her main mission. It is not philosophy. It is not politics. The Virgin knows that our earthly life is a fleeting one, and as a good mother, as the kindest mother, as the dearest of all mothers, she comes gently but with force to guide us onto a path that brings us closer to eternal happiness.

In the early days she often did this through miraculous images, including the ones claimed to have been carved or painted by Luke. According to legend, Luke painted Mary while she was staying in the home of John, using the top of a table that had been built by Jesus in His father’s workshop. As he painted, according to this account, Mary related details of the life of Jesus, details that were later recorded in Luke’s Gospel. The painting was supposedly discovered by St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, in the fourth century, and eventually found its way through Ukraine to Poland, where it was damaged through the ages and eventually repainted on new canvas but backed with the original wooden boards. Historians have never been able to verify such ancient facts, but there are those who believe the portrait is behind the famous image of Czestochowa.

There were many such images, and they were an important way for Heaven to communicate with humans. Just as we photograph loved ones, so did Heaven want us to have remembrances of Jesus and His mother. There have always been special graces with such images because they invoke a heavenly blessing. Those who confuse such images with idolatry do so because they confuse heavenly images with those of demonic creatures. That’s a shame, because holy images have been an important vehicle of Christian evangelization for two millennia. At the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great used one such image to ward off a plague!

There is intercession with Mary’s images and one of the most vivid examples is the one we focus upon today. It is known as Montserrat. Pope Leo XIV prayed before it last week.

It too is an ancient image—the original may likewise have dated to the earliest centuries—and it is called Montserrat after a towering mountain by that name. Far up the incredible highland, which looks like massive sawed-off stone, is a monastery and church containing a slender statue of Mary in a sitting position, darkened by the smoke of candles and holding the globe in one hand as Jesus sits on her lap.

It is a most mysterious image, the Virgin’s face elongated, her head crowned with a diadem and wearing a tunic and golden mantle. It’s located in an alcove high above the church behind the main altar, accessible to the pilgrim by a narrow stairway that takes one onto a step allowing the actual touching of the relic.

The image is known as the “Little Dark Lady of Montserrat” and also La Jerosolimitana, or “Native of Jerusalem,” for peasants in the region repeat the legend that this statue represents one of those carved by Luke and brought to Spain in the first century.

Once more there’s no way of knowing the exact origin but what we know is that Montserrat is one of the world’s holiest and most august sanctuaries. As long ago as April 22, 718, there was word of a statue in the area of Barcelona that like so many others had to be hidden from Arab invaders. The hiding place had been a cave where the image remained hidden for two centuries. There were already holy men high up the mountain, hermitages that in the words of one writer were “built on impossible ledges and on incredibly high places, situated like eagles’ eyries,” transforming the peaks—the enormous blocks and crags—into altars of perpetual adoration. There was no holier place outside of Jerusalem and by 888 a hermitage called “Santa Maria” was in existence, overlooking the vast expanses of emerging Europe below.

The image of Our Blessed Mother remained hidden until 890, when some local boys spotted a strange light coming from the eastern part of the mountain. It was near the cave. They described the light as like that of many candles, descending from Heaven, and as they approached, these boys, like James before them, heard the sound of music and canticles. It was a Saturday, and the boys quickly informed the local priest in the village of Monistrol. The priest didn’t believe them at first and wanted to see for himself. When he ventured up Montserrat he was stunned to see the lights and hear the inexplicable music. The boys were right! There was a miracle on that mountain! The priest informed the Bishop of Manresa, who also headed for the site, followed by a procession of villagers.

“The canticles, the lights, and the fragrant aroma that rose from this mysterious place affected the people so much that the bishop, filled with the deepest devotion, ordered that the cave be entered, and there they found the image which had been a fount of miracles and an object of universal veneration,” wrote Jose Maria de Sagarra in a book about Montserrat. “The bishop wanted to take such a wonderful treasure to his cathedral at Manresa, but when those who were carrying the Virgin reached this place where today the monastery rises, they found that they could not move a single step backwards or forwards, and this new miracle was interpreted as a sign that the Virgin desired her sanctuary to be erected on that very spot, as was done.”

I was shocked upon visiting Montserrat not only at its awesome, majestic height, 4,055 feet, not only at the beauty of the monastery’s incredible gold-gilded basilica, not only at the fantasy setting, but also at the tangible graces that exude from the wood statue, which is about three feet tall.

This miraculous image, believed to be a replacement of the original, is Romanesque in style and is said to date to the 12th century. It has that dark Byzantine look to the face and the aura surrounding it leaves the pilgrims in reverential awe.

The Virgin, at the heights of a mountain; the Virgin in a high place just as Christ went to Mount Tabor—a high place—to communicate with Heaven.

The Virgin, holding the world.

It’s not clear why mountains have spiritual significance, but since Moses this has proven to be the case and there is no better example of a holy mountain outside of Israel than Montserrat. A drive to the monastery is several harrowing and spectacular miles around the mountain and is located more than midway up at 2,846 feet.

Some say it is among the best candidates for former sanctuaries of the Holy Grail.

Among visitors through the ages have been Jaime I, known as El Conquistador; Fernando I; St. Vincent Ferrer; and St. Ignatius Loyola, who divested his clothes and gave them to a poor man after a pilgrimage to Montserrat, writing his famous spiritual exercises in a cave in nearby Manresa.

Few doubt the influence the Black Virgin had on Ignatius, who embarked on his new mission to found an order, the Jesuits, after spending a night in prayer before the image.

King Louis IV prayed here, and one of Montserrat’s hermits accompanied Christopher Columbus, who dedicated one of the first churches in the New World to the Virgin of Montserrat, where an inland today bears the name.

So too did Montserrat produce an abbot named Giuliano della Rovere, who became the pope who hired Michelangelo.

As an emperor named Carlos V said, “a certain divinity which I cannot explain” flows from the sanctuary of Montserrat all over the mountain.

Prominent in the history is the account of a hermit who fell into temptation, murdered the daughter of a famous count, and as a result was transformed by God into the shaggy body of a beast until he was forgiven.

Whatever the merits of such legends, they point up the mercy and forgiveness of God. They point out His heights. They point out His mystery. I cannot more highly recommend a sanctuary than Montserrat. I was truly surprised by the strength of its effect. I was impressed by the atmosphere of holiness way up that unique mountain and what it teaches us about praying in solitude.

And so we meditate.

O Virgin Mary, you who have sent us your images so that we can feel the atmosphere of Heaven, so that we can taste a bit of paradise, so that we can better pray in church, please also send forth this atmosphere in our homes and lives. Let us have in our daily living the kind of grace that emanates from Montserrat, that we may always see with spiritual eyes and always keep our eyes high above the clouds.

Yes, O Sweet Virgin of Montserrat, grant by the power of your Son that we may have the same expansive view, the spiritual sight, afforded at the heights of Montserrat, and that we may feel the power and expediency and consolation that is felt by those who touch your image in the basilica.

Let us feel that now. Let us touch the image. Let us transcend all storms of life as you transcend at Montserrat. Guide us on the mission assigned to us by Jesus and be with us on our journeys as you guided pilgrims of the past, as you guided St. Ignatius, as you guided kings and popes and bishops. Come O holy Virgin in a new and special way and guard us against the temptations of this world, the lust that always threatens to overtake us, the materialism that runs rampant around us.

Guard us, holy Virgin, against the deceits of this world.

And when we do sin, let us find the mercy of God and our way back to full grace, as did that legendary hermit.

Let us always find our way back to faith.

Let us always have you as a special and ancient friend.

O Holy Spirit, shed Your Light that we may see our hidden sins and faults and may ever appreciate Your intercession. Let us forsake all wrongful passion and lust and greed and anger and negativity, let us know when we are in error, let us never believe we are beyond temptation but rather be prepared for all the lures of this ensnaring and illusory world.