Thousands continue century-old tradition at Marian pilgrimage 

Archbishop J. Michael Miller looked out on the thousands of men, women, and children who in a few minutes would be winding their way up the hill to Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in Mission in 30 degree heat. He offered them the example of Mary, who made “the first Eucharistic procession in history” journeying to the hill country of Judah to visit Elizabeth.

The Gospel reading for the Mass he was celebrating recounted the Visitation and presented Mary as “a woman on the move,” the Archbishop said. “She set out and went with haste” to help her cousin and “carried with her the living Son of God made flesh in her womb.”

The crowd preparing for the Aug. 17 procession were “following a venerable tradition,” he said. “For over a century, these grounds have known not only a joyful outpouring of prayer to Mary but also great suffering because of the residential school once located here.”

The Archbishop offered his gratitude to First Nations for their “ongoing commitment to this pilgrimage” from its origins and for their “deep love of the Mother of Jesus. She has never ceased to accompany you in your joys and sorrows down through the years.”

The pilgrimage is an answer to “the Lord’s call to honour the Blessed Virgin Mary as Patroness of our Archdiocese and to set her example before us as the perfect disciple of her Son.”

Quoting both Mother Teresa and astronaut Neil Armstrong, the Archbishop appealed for the faithful to respond with Mary’s “haste” to the urgent needs of others.

Mother Teresa once acknowledged that the good done by she and her Missionaries of Charity “is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.”

The Archbishop connected her words with Armstrong’s famous quote from the moon, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

“By landing on the moon, humanity had crossed a historic threshold,” he said. “With Mary’s Assumption into heaven, however, we celebrate an infinitely greater conquest. Our Lady has crossed the threshold of heaven. She was assumed there not only in spirit but with her body as well, with her whole self. This step of the lowly handmaid of the Lord was a huge leap forward for humanity.”

As Mass ended, the people began making their way up the hill, following a Knights of Columbus honour guard who led the monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament and a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes.

At the grotto, the Archbishop recited the Rosary and led Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Pilgrimages to the grotto have been taking place since the founding of the Archdiocese of Vancouver. Bishop Louis Joseph d’Herbomez, OMI, who was bishop of the Vicariate Apostolic of British Columbia from 1864–1890, enjoyed meditating along the Fraser River at a spot that reminded him of the grotto of Our Lady in Lourdes, France. 

His dying wish was that a grotto be built after his death. Completed in 1892, the grotto, which was the largest Marian shrine in B.C., came to be known as the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. It was so striking and prominent that the community surrounding St. Mary’s Mission, where the grotto was located, became known as Mission.

Priests and parishioners of St. Joseph’s in Mission, along with Indigenous peoples, had made pilgrimages to the grotto site every August until the 1960s, when the building fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1965. It was rebuilt by the Knights of Columbus and the Mission Heritage Association and reopened in 1997.

To this day, the pilgrimage is the largest annual event in the Archdiocese.

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