Cartago, Costa Rica – Faith in the Virgin of the Angels and her miracles is the force that each August motivates about a million Costa Ricans to make a pilgrimage from all over this country to her chapel to give thanks and ask for her intercession on their behalf.
The massive and stately procession of the Virgin of the Angels, the patroness of Costa Rica, is the event that draws this country’s largest crowd.
The pilgrimage to the Basilica de los Angeles in Cartago, 23 kilometers (15 miles) east of San Jose, normally begins shortly before Aug. 2, the day in 1635 when, according to belief, the Virgin Mary appeared to a young Indian woman or girl, Juana Pereira.
The story goes that Pereira found an 18-centimeter (7-inch) jade sculpture – an image of a brown-skinned mother with a baby boy in her arms – sitting on a stone beside a country path and took it home at least five times, but each time the statuette vanished and reappeared above the same stone where she originally had found it and so a church was built upon the site.
Although the day of the Virgin – who is known as the Black Madonna, or “La Negrita” – is Aug. 2, thousands of the faithful began their long journey much earlier, with many making the trek on foot from the farthest corners of the country, a task that takes at least several days and, in some cases, weeks.
The goal of the pilgrims is to visit the Virgin and take a little of the blessed water that flows from the stone where she appeared, which many believe has healing properties.
Many of the pilgrims walk to the site, but others come on horseback, and thousands actually enter the church moving forward on their knees.
Gloria Mena arrived supported by an orthopedic device to “thank the little Virgin for the miracle” she believed she had bestowed upon her. Mena told EFE that several months ago she suffered four fractures in her spine and the doctors told her she would never walk again.
She said that thanks to the Virgin, she got out of the bed where she was confined and came here to give thanks, adding that she was sure that she would make a full recovery.
The church is filled with the gifts brought by the worshippers to thank the Virgin for her help in all manner of circumstances.
In glass cases are displayed graduation ribbons, trophies, clothing and thousands of metal figurines representing different parts of the body brought here by people who say they were healed of assorted maladies and injuries.
So great is the devotion engendered in Costa Rica by the small stone figure that each year the church receives hundreds of articles of clothing – 800 this year, for instance – sewn by hand by worshippers, from which one outfit is selected to be placed on the Virgin’s image for the procession.
