In many countries with predominantly Roman Catholic populations the Virgin Mary is revered as the national patron saint. The better-known ones are Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico, Nossa Senhora da Conceçao da Aparecida in Brazil, and Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre in Cuba. In these three cases there are physical vestiges of some miraculous event associated with the Virgin Mary (..statues, mantles...) which now sit at the altar of Sanctuaries built at or near where the even took place.
Lourdes and Fatima are equally-revered in Portugal and France, respectively, though not anointed as the Patron Saint of those countries....they had become too secular by the time the Virgin Mary made her actual apparitions.... repeatedly so...though only to very young (..impressionable?...) young children living in remote and poor parts of their countries.
There is a very strong Marist tradition among Roman Catholics which is somewhat shared with the Orthodox versions of the faith in the Middle East (Maronite Christian Curch in Lebanon) but not so much by their Protestant/ Evagelical religious cousins in found in Northern Europe and North America. Careful reading of the "miraculous" events reveals that the religiuos phenomena are "wothy of belief" but not "articles of faith" for adherents of the the Roman Catholic Church. However, it is an article of faith that the Virgin Mary ascended, in body, into heaven upon her temporal death.
The Marist tradition seems to have come to popular prominence towards the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th...when the populations of so many of the quickly-modernizing countries of Europe and the Americas where set adrift by the push and pull of demoraphic surges, increases in wealth that were poorly dsitributed, and eye-opening education spreading beyond the few....and were looking for some eternal-seeming psychological anchor.
Cuba was part of all of this....
December 2016
Link to Photo Album:
Cuba - El Cobre
No comments:
Post a Comment