Faith Can Influence Culture Through Devotion
By Abbot James Albers, O.S.B.
How devotion to Our Lady of Bavaria shapes the monastic culture of the Kansas Monks.
This article was originally published in our December 2024 Kansas Monks newsletter. Read the whole newsletter at www.kansasmonks.org/newsletter/december2024
The European culture has been grounded in the Catholic faith for centuries. While this identity is sadly waning, the faithful still hold to many traditions that drive the day-to-day of the culture. An example of this is the solemnity we celebrate this month of the Immaculate Conception. While Advent has already begun, in Italy this liturgical feast of the gift given to Mary is another intentional turn for the faithful toward the Incarnation of the Son of God. Not only is it a holy day of obligation—as well as a national holiday when no schools are in session—it is also a celebration that encourages gatherings of communities marked with elaborate processions.
The American culture—a vast gathering of nationalities and varied heritage—while Christian at its roots, has not retained many of these expressions of faith in the culture on the national level. For example, few know that the Immaculate Conception of Mary is the patronal feast of the United States.
A particular cultural celebration that has been lost to the vastness of the American culture, a very particular devotion within the Bavarian heritage from which sprung St. Benedict Abbey, is the Feast of Our Lady of Bavaria, celebrated in Germany on May 14. Our Lady of Bavaria, or Our Lady of Altötting is commemorated in a shrine in Altötting, which was constructed around the year 700.
The shrine, known as Herz Bayerns—“Heart of Bavaria”—is a place to which more than a million pilgrims flock every year to seek the intercession of Mary, Our Lady of Bavaria. Around 1330, the statue of Mary was placed in the chapel, with pilgrimages beginning in 1489 after a particular miracle occurred of a drowned boy being resuscitated. For the pilgrims, they seek Mary’s maternal intercession, confiding in her their joys and pains, difficulties and sufferings.
One of the five “Sanctuaries of Europe”—together with Lourdes, Fatima, Czestochowa, and Loreto—it was also a place of pilgrimage for the late Pope Benedict XIV, who grew up less than ten miles from the shrine. Throughout the shrine are mementos of request and offerings of thanksgiving for miracles prayed for and miracles received.
A statue of Our Lady of Bavaria is usually of carved wood painted and gilded—though, the famous statue of this devotion in the Marienplatz in Munich is gilded all in gold. In Mary’s left hand, she holds a scepter and stands on a crescent moon signifying her reign as Queen of Heaven. The Child Jesus rests on her right arm holding a “celestial sphere” representing the omnipotence of God and the cosmic reality of the Divine taking on human flesh.
Saint John Paul II made a pilgrimage to the shrine in 1980, and Pope Benedict XIV made a pilgrimage to Altötting during his pastoral visit to Germany in September 2006. After time in prayer at the statue of Our Lady of Bavaria, Pope Benedict placed on the scepter of Mary his pastoral ring given by his two siblings in 1977 on the occasion of his episcopal ordination in Munich. Pope Benedict XIV offered the following thoughts there in 2006:
“Mary leaves everything to the Lord’s judgment. At Nazareth she gave over her will, immersing it in the will of God: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ And this continues to be her fundamental attitude. This is how she teaches us to pray: not by seeking to assert before God our own will and our own desires, however important they may be, however reasonable they might appear to us, but rather to bring them before him and to let him decide what he intends to do. From Mary we learn graciousness and readiness to help, but we also learn humility and generosity in accepting God’s will, in the confident conviction that, whatever it may be, it will be our, and my own, true good.”
Since the year 2000, with the gift of a statue of Our Lady of Bavaria—Our Lady of Altötting—the monks of St. Benedict’s Abbey have had the opportunity to reconnect with this heritage of its founders. In particular, to ask for the intercession of Our Lady of Bavaria, that the monastic community possess the humility and graciousness to serve the Lord.
Our Lady of Bavaria, intercede for us to your Son!
