Our Lady of Luján, patroness of Argentina

“In all things I sought rest, and in the heritage of the Lord I shall dwell” (Sir 24:11), “In all of them I sought rest, and in the heritage of the Lord I shall dwell”I. The Wisdom that Chooses Its Dwelling: The Oracle of SirachChapter 24 of Ecclesiasticus presents the personified Wisdom describing its divine origin and its journey to find its definitive dwelling among the chosen people. “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and as a cloud I covered the earth. I dwelt in the heights, and my throne is upon a pillar of clouds. I alone have circled the heavens, and I have penetrated into the abyss of the depths. Over the waves of the sea, over every land, and over all peoples, I have exercised dominion. In all of them I sought rest, and in the heritage of the Lord I shall dwell” (Sir 24:3-7, 11). This divine Wisdom oracle portrays a journey of seeking, choosing, and settling. Wisdom does not dwell by force: it chooses the place where it wishes to reside. This theological category of Mary’s choice as the dwelling place of Wisdom found a particularly eloquent illustration in the Marian history of Hispanic America in Luján, in the southern extreme of the continent, where the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, in the 17th century, stopped halfway through her journey and indicated to her children, with the irrefutable language of signs, that this was the place she had chosen to dwell.II. Luján, 1630: The Image that Stopped the Journey and Chose Its PlaceIn the year 1630, in the vast Argentine plain known as the Pampa, a Portuguese farmer named António Farias de Sá had commissioned two images of the Virgin Mary from Brazil: one of the Immaculate Conception and another of Mary holding the Child, to present to his new chapel in Sumampa, present-day northern Argentina. The images arrived at the port of Buenos Aires and began their long journey by ox-cart towards their destination. When the caravan reached the property of the colonist Don Rosendo Trigueros de Oria, near the Luján River, the oxen abruptly stopped and refused to proceed. The Angolan slave Manuel Costa, who was tending to the cargo, and the rest of the caravan tried every means to get the animals to move, to no avail. They unloaded the first box, which contained the image of the Immaculate Conception, and the oxen immediately set off without difficulty. When they later attempted to retrieve the image to continue their journey, the oxen stopped again. Thus, through the very language of the events, it was established that this image wanted to stay in Luján. It was kept in a small rural chapel and, around it, one of the largest Marian shrines in the American continent grew during almost four centuries. The Church proclaimed Our Lady of Luján the Patroness of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Pope Leo XIII authorized her canonical coronation in 1887.Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, later Pope Francis, made an annual pilgrimage to Luján during his entire episcopate in Buenos Aires and returned to the sanctuary on a spiritual pilgrimage throughout his pontificate.III. The Visit: Mary on the Road to Serve The Gospel of Luke, which accompanies this celebration, presents the episode of the Visit, in which Mary, newly incarnate Christ in her womb, sets out in haste to serve Elizabeth, who is pregnant in old age. “In those days Mary got up and went quickly to a town in the region of Judah, to a house belonging to Zechariah” (Lk 1:39-40). The Visit is the most luminous manifestation of Mary’s spiritual maternal style: she does not wait for her children to come to her; she goes to where they are. This Marian dialectic between staying and going, between the stability of the dwelling and the movement of the visit, finds in Luján a paradigmatic expression. Mary chose to stay in Luján so that the Argentines, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, and all the peoples of South America would have a place to find her. But at the same time, the Mother who resides in Luján continues to visit her children throughout the continent, through pilgrimages, images, and local festivals that renew, in each city of South America, the presence of one who chose her place but never abandoned the paths where her children are found.IV. Luján and Mariology of Mary’s Geographical Choice The theology that the Luján sanctuary proposes to universal Mariology is that of place as a spiritual category. The history of apparitions and Marian shrines has repeatedly confirmed that Mary chooses her places of manifestation with criteria that are not those of the world. She does not choose political or ecclesiastical power centers; she chooses rural peripheries, places of passage, poor lands. Luján was, in 1630, a lost farm in the vastness of the Argentine pampa, far from everything. And it was precisely there that the Immaculate stopped and indicated that she would stay. The Second Vatican Council stated that Mary “holds in the Church, after Christ, the most exalted and at the same time the closest place among us” (Lumen Gentium, 54). The category of the closest place is decisive: Mary is never distant, she is always near, but not just anywhere, she is in the places she chose for herself. Luján, for Hispanic-American South America, is precisely this closest place. Pope Francis, during his episcopate and pontificate, repeatedly emphasized that without the Mother there is no Argentine faith, without Luján there is no Catholic identity of South America. The image that remained there four centuries ago, small, dark, without great adornments, is the humble but irrefutable sign that the Wisdom that traveled the circuit of heaven found in the heritage of the peoples of South America a place to dwell.