Anna Jarvis famously came up with the idea of marking the second Sunday in May to honor mothers in a special way, eventually culminating in President Woodrow Wilson making Mother’s Day an official national holiday in 1914. Jarvis eventually became disillusioned with the increasingly corporate and secular trajectory of the celebration, and spent her later years actively campaigning against it.
In the wider arc of Church history, the century or so since the American holiday was created is a relative blink of eye. But for millennia before that, Christians were honoring the Blessed Mother as a model for parental devotion under a wide array of local rites and titles. This year the date of May 8 marked both Mother’s Day in the United States (other countries use different days) and one such regional feast, Our Lady of Luján, the Patroness of Argentina. Given both the pope’s devotion to her, and the fact that my wife spent the first decades of her life in Argentina before immigrating to Spain and then eventually to the United States with me, it was a fortuitous overlap for her first Mother’s Day and a special day in our home.
The legend of Luján actually begins in Brazil, where it is believed the familiar statue was first crafted by local artisans in the early decades of the 1600s. When this statue was loaded on a cart and sent to Argentina, the oxen pulling the load eventually refused to move from a spot near the present city of Luján. The local residents were astonished that once the box containing the statue was unloaded, the animals were all too happy to continue on. They determined that the Virgin wanted to remain with them, and so they started to build a shrine to her. By 1763, the statue was moved to its present site, and construction of an enormous basilica took place starting in 1887. Today it is one of the most recognized buildings in all of Latin America.
The statue, decorated with gold, diamonds, pearls and other precious stones is bedecked in a sky blue and white robe, the colors of the Argentine flag. In order to prevent decay, the statue was gilded in local silver in the 19th century. Millions of people visit the shrine each year, sometimes traveling the 42 miles on foot from the country’s largest city of Buenos Aires. Traditional pilgrimages take place both for gauchos, the Latin American version of cowboys, and for young adults.
When the Roman Emperor Theodosius II convoked the Council of Ephesus in present day Turkey in 431 AD, one of the outcomes was the affirmation, against Nestorius, of the title “theotokos” (God-bearer) to describe Mary. In essence, this was and is actually a Christological claim due to the technical theological reality called the “communicatio idiomatum,” where the properties of the Divine Word can be ascribed to the person we call Jesus the Christ, and vice versa. But importantly, this notion of God-bearer was eventually translated from the older Greek formulation into Latin as Mater Dei, and thus comes down to us as “Mother of God.”
This is the reason why Pope Francis once said about the Patroness of Argentina: “[This devotion] is a journey of memory of what the Virgin did there, she wanted to stay there. It is a path of memory, of many years and years of pilgrimages, of searching, of miracles, of daughters and sons walking to see their mother. … A strong memory guarantees a secure future.”
So as many of us mark memories of our childhoods and mothers this May, let us continue to ask the Virgin to accompany us on the journeys of our families into an unforeseen tomorrow, with confidence that she will never abandon us.
Nuestra Señora de Luján, Ruega por Nosotros.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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