March 19: OUR LADY OF THE CAPE

Father Luke Desilets was sent to the little town of Cape-de-la-Madeleine on the St. Lawrence River in the province of Quebec.  His new parish was rich in history but poor in faith.  His church, built in 1714, was a century-and-a-half-old and it had replaced the original chapel built in 1659.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the people of the district had become extremely lax. 

On the vigil of the Feast of the Ascension in 1867, Father Desilets went into his church and found, before the statue of the Virgin, a small pig with a rosary between its teeth.  “There,” the priest said, “men drop their beads, and the swine pick them up!”  He knelt before the statue and promised to spend the rest of his life spreading devotion to the Rosary. He re-established enrolment in the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary originally erected at Cap-de-la-Madeleine in 1694. Immediately afterward there was a remarkable rebirth of piety among his people.

In time there was need for a larger church at the Cape.  The men of the parish crossed the river, quarried and prepared the stones for the new edifice.  The parish could not afford a barge to bring the stones across the river, and the river was so wide and swift at the point that it did not freeze every year.  Beginning in November 1878, the parishioners recited the Rosary every Sunday after High Mass in petition for freezing weather.  The beginning of March they became discouraged, but the pastor himself continued to pray

On the evening of March 14, a warm wind began breaking up the ice farther down the river.  It came floating in huge chunks.  Ice accumulated behind the cape.  By March 16, it formed a mass reaching almost from shore to shore.  All that night in the bitter cold more than 60 men worked to reinforce the causeway.  The work was dangerous because the current was swift and much of the ice was soft.  Far into the morning a dim light shone from one of the rectory windows.  “There is nothing to fear,” the men said to each other.  “The Curé is reciting his beads.  His Aves are holding us up.”  From then on, the causeway of ice was called the Bridge of Rosaries.

After High Mass on March 18th, the vigil of St. Joseph, the men began carrying the stones. For eight days they brought them over the Bridge of Rosaries on their sledges; pools swirled a few feet from the path across the ice, but there were no accidents.  On the eighth day the weather turned warmer; the stones had been hauled.  Father Desilets ordered the work to stop; by the ninth day the passage was swept away.  The new church was built, and the ancient chapel dedicated to the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, on June 22, 1888.  Following the dedication, in the evening, Father Desilets, Blessed Frederic Janssoone, and Pierre Lacroix went to pray in the church where that day the statue of the Our Lady of the Cape had been moved from the side to the main altar; now the Rosary Confraternity altar.  As they knelt, the priests saw the downcast eyes of the statue open wide and look westward towards Three Rivers and the rest of North America!

Father Desilets died a couple of months later, his work was accomplished.  The miraculous statue called Our Lady of the Cape, was crowned in 1904 by authority of Pope Pius X.  In 1909 the Bishops of Canada proclaimed the chapel to be a National Shrine to the Blessed Virgin.  In 1947, the pilgrim statue of Our Lady of the Cape, an exact replica of the miraculous statue, was processed to the historic Marian Congress held in the Nation's Capital. In 1954, the miraculous statue was canonically crowned a second time on the authorization of Venerable Pope Pius XII. Many souls continue to enrol in the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary at Cap-de-la-Madeleine! 

From the Woman in Orbit - A Timeless Marian Treasure Compiled By Sr. Manetta Lamberty, S.C.C.

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