Our Lady of Arcachon

Our Lady of Arcachon is a three-dimensional religious image venerated at Arcachon in southwestern France and credited with working miracles. To all appearances a work of the thirteenth century, it is carved from a block of alabaster about twenty inches in height and represents Mary, the mother of Jesus, clad in Oriental drapery and holding the Divine Infant on her right arm.

Blessed Thomas Illyricus of Osimo (born about the middle of the fifteenth century), a Franciscan monk who had retired to the forest solitude of Arcachon, is said to have found this statue, much battered by the waves, on the seashore. He immediately constructed a wooden chapel which was replaced, a century later, by a spacious stone sanctuary. This, in turn, was so menaced by the drifting sands of the dunes as to necessitate the erection in 1723 of a new church on a neighbouring hill overlooking the Bay of Arcachon. The statue survived both revolutions and was granted the honour of a coronation, by a brief of Pope Pius IX, on 15 July 1870.

Devotion to Our Lady of Arcachon spread far and wide, and the shrine became a centre of pilgrimage. Before 1842 the church had been surrounded only by a few fishermen's huts, but with the erection of villas and the discovery of the salubrious climate of the area people began to flock to the spot, which is now the centre of a flourishing town.

References

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed (1913). "Our Lady of Arcachon". Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.