L’AQUILA – On July 2nd, the feast of the Madonna delle Grazie is celebrated in various cities in Italy and in many municipalities in Abruzzo. It is one of the many celebrations of Mary that populate the liturgical calendar of the Church, even if this anniversary is particularly linked to local customs and the history of individual sanctuaries, with variable dates.
But why was this date chosen, among all of them? The choice of July 2 is based on the story in the Gospel of Luke, according to which Mary, going to visit her cousin Elizabeth, stayed with her for three months and eight days. The early church already set the June 24th the birth of John the Baptist, while on the eighth day the circumcision and the imposition of the name took place.
July 2nd falls exactly eight days after the birth of John the Baptist. Now the feast of the Visitation spread in the West already around the twelfth century with the title of Our Lady of Graces. For example, in a sermon Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said of Mary that “every reason for hope, grace and salvation comes to us from her, who is close to God, filled with every delight“, Why “Mary will always find grace with God: and it is only grace that we need.“, she who “she always gets what she asks for and never goes unsatisfied“. Devotion to Our Lady of Grace spread particularly thanks to Saint Bonaventure and the Franciscans.
In 1389, Urban VI set the date of the feast on July 2, asking the Virgin to intercede for the end of the Western Schism, and the following year Boniface IX extended it to the entire Church, and his decision was confirmed in 1441 by the Council of Basel, Florence and Ferrara. With the calendar reform of 1969, the Visitation was set on May 31, that is, at the end of May, the Marian month par excellence, but at a popular level the feast of Our Lady of Grace is still celebrated in many places on July 2.
In Abruzzo It is a big celebration in Teramo, Pianella, Tocco da Casauria, Chieti (Tricalle), Vasto, Taranta Peligna, Guardiagrele and Palena, just to name a few of the main towns. In some cases it is a so-called Tree Madonnathat is, linked to vegetation, rain and pastoral life. This is the case of Taranta Peligna, which celebrates a miraculous apparition of the Virgin on a tree to a group of shepherds, which had the effect of stopping a torrential rain that was threatening men and flocks.
A The Eagle great is the devotion for the effigy of the Our Lady of Rojoa hamlet 7 km from the city, but which in the past was a municipality in itself. In Poggio di Roio on a hill stands the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Croce: in December 1578, in fact, a shepherd named Felice Calcagno, a native of the land of Lucoliwhile he was wintering in Puglia in a forest called Ruo, he lost the flock entrusted to him. Fearing punishment from his masters, he fervently begged the Madonna, who appeared to the pious boy in the form of a beautiful Lady with baby Jesus in her arms, surrounded by a dazzling light, and showed him the place where his sheep had taken refuge. After the apparition, the boy found in place of the beautiful Lady a life-size statue made of cedar wood, with the same shapes and features that the shepherd claimed to have seen in the vision. The miraculous statue was loaded onto a mule in the spring, when he was returning to the mountains of Abruzzo, but near the cross of the Castle of Roio the animal bent its knees and did not want to know anything about continuing. The statue was then carried on the shoulders to Lucoli, but the following morning it was discovered that the simulacrum had miraculously returned to Roio, in the same place where the mule had bowed. Thus the inhabitants of Roio, full of enthusiasm, quickly built a church in honor of the Madonna, the current Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Croce. Numerous were the graces granted by the Madonna, such as in 1656, when she stopped a terrible plague or in 1779, when the statue was carried in procession to implore rain, after a drought that had lasted months. On October 15, 1944, in a crowded Piazza Duomo, after a solemn popular vote, the then Archbishop of L’Aquila Carlo Confalonieri solemnly placed on the heads of the child and the Mother two crowns forged with gold offered by the people, blessed a few days earlier by Pius XII. August 28, 2022 Pope francesco He was the third Pope to venerate the Madonna of Roio, after Saint John Paul II who visited the Sanctuary on 30 August 1980 and Benedict XVI, who venerated her in the Guardia di Finanza non-commissioned officers’ school in Coppito on 28 April 2009, the day after the violent earthquake of 6 April.
Campotostoin the province of L’Aquila, celebrates Santa Maria Apparente as its patron saint, to whom a church is dedicated at 1390 m above sea level, near the large artificial lake. The name Related perhaps derives from a distortion of the Marian antiphon “Hail, Holy Parent“. But here too there is the story of a vision: the building was built by will of the Madonna herself, who appeared there on 2 July 1604 to Rosa Angelica Palombi, a young girl who had been mute since birth. The girl, returning to the village, to everyone’s amazement began to speak and told her uncle, the parish priest of Campotosto, what the Virgin had told her: to build a church by drawing its outlines with snow. Soon the place became a destination for pilgrimages due to the numerous miracles that continually occurred. A simple and small seventeenth-century devotional church, the interior has a single nave and on the left wall there is a painting with the apparition of the Virgin to the young girl from the seventeenth century. Using a small staircase on the left of the Sanctuary, you go down into the crypt, which can only be visited on the occasion of the feast of 2 July, where you can glimpse the miracle of the mutarella and the engraving of the magic square of the the mole. The crypt is also called Grotta della Nunziata, to remember that the exact title of the patronage was that of Blessed Virgin of the Visitation. After the earthquake of 2016 the church is still unusable due to the seismic events that have hit the country in recent years, but the procession for the feast of the Madonna “thank you skiing” is still a strong signal of not abandoning the territory.
A Scanno the feast of the Madonna delle Grazie has been moved to the first Sunday in July. The eighteenth-century church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, originally dedicated to the SS. Names of Jesus and Mary, is an octagonal building, unique in Scanno and quite rare in Abruzzo. It owes its name to the Confraternity of the same name, present in the town since the sixteenth century, but which on 7 July 1912 moved its headquarters here from the ancient and no longer adequate church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, near the Porta della Croce. For the occasion, the canvas of the Circumcision was removed from the high altar, to create the niche in which the statue of the Madonna delle Grazie is still located today, which this year will also be carried in procession through the beautiful streets of the town on Sunday 7 July.
