By Kristina Millare
The Vatican has approved devotion to the shrine of Our Lady of Good Health in Vailankanni, India, the site of the 16th-century apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
A month before the supper of Our Lady of Good Health in India, on September 8, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) indicated in a letter addressed to Bishop Sagayaraj Thamburaj of Thanjavur that God’s action is present in the shrine.
“Over the centuries, Mary continued to act in this place,” wrote the Cardinal Prefect of the DDF, Victor Manuel Fernandez. “The millions of pilgrims here through religion and the many religious culminations produced in this shrine make us recognize the constant action of the Holy Spirit in this place.
According to a Thanjavur tourism website, around 20 million Indian and foreign pilgrims stop at the shrine each year, adding 3 million to the 11-day festival held from August 29 to September 8 in honor of Our Lady of Good Health.
Devotion to Our Lady of Good Health began in the late 16th century after three other oral accounts of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Vailankanni, a town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India.
The first account of the apparition of the Virgin Mary identified through the DDF is that of a young local shepherd who, upon seeing the beautiful woman, gave the milk he was carrying with him to the child he was holding.
“It was an expression of the generosity of those who are willing to give anything to others, in their own poverty. You don’t have to have a lot to be generous. May this call to share, to assistance, to closeness with those who want it to resonate in this place,” reads the letter of August 1.
The DDF also collects in particular the account of Portuguese merchant seamen who landed safely at Vailankanni after a severe typhoon at sea on 8 September 1650. On that day, which was also the supper for the Nativity of Mary, the sailors undertook to build a church. in gratitude to Our Lady of Good Health.
More than three hundred years after the original church structure, Saint John XXIII elevated the Marian shrine to the rank of basilica on November 3, 1962.
In 2002, Pope John Paul II celebrated the World Day of the Sick at the Shrine of Our Lady of Health.
In the letter to the Bishop of Thanjavur, Fernández Pope Francis “extends his fatherly blessing to all pilgrims” on the eve of the dinner at the shrine on September 8.
“The Holy Father is very concerned about the popular piety of the faithful pilgrims, because they reflect the good face of the Church on the move, which seeks Jesus in the arms of Mary and entrusts its pain and its hope to the center of its Mother. ” Fernandez wrote.