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 Health in India, on September 8, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) demonstrated in a letter addressed to Bishop Sagayaraj Thamburaj of Thanjavur that God’s action is to provide in the shrine.
“Throughout the centuries, Mary continued to act in this place,” wrote the Cardinal Prefect of the DDF, Víctor Manuel Fernández. “The millions of pilgrims here through religion and the many religious culminations produced in this sanctuary 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 city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India.
The first account of the appearance 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 for the child in his arms.
“It was an expression of the generosity of someone who is able 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 proximity with those who love us resonate in this place,” we read in the letter of August 1.
The DDF also particularly collects the account of the Portuguese merchant sailors who landed safely at Vailankanni after a severe typhoon at sea on September 8, 1650. On that day, which was also the Nativity of Mary supper, 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, St. John XXIII increased 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 Sanctuary of Our Lady of Health.
In the letter addressed to the bishop of Thanjavur, Fernández Pope Francis “extends his fatherly blessings to all pilgrims” as dinner at the sanctuary approaches on September 8.
“The Holy Father is very concerned about the popular piety of the pilgrim faithful, 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 hope to the center of his Mother. ,” Fernández wrote.