marian anniversaries     march

March 3

Notre Dame des Miracles, Saint-Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France

In the year 649, St. Audomar (Omer) converted Adrowald, a landholder who gave the saint some property on which to build a church and monastery. There was already a shrine on the land – to Minerva. Audomar destroyed Minerva's image and established the Church of Our Lady on the hill where her shrine had been.[1] His relics, and those of St. Erkembode, who served as abbot in the following century, developed a reputation for miracles that drew pilgrims to the church. The town of Saint-Omer grew up around it. In 820, it became a collegiate church, served by its own community of canons rather than monks. After the Norman Vikings laid waste to the area in the late 800s, the town rebuilt behind a protective wall.[2] 

By the 900s, when Saint-Omer became part of Flanders, a statue of the Virgin and Child rested on a column in the town square.[3] In the following two centuries, a series of fires destroyed much of the town, its monastery, and Our Lady's Church. All was rebuilt, but much of the historical record was lost. After the fire of 1191 damaged the Romanesque church of 1052, it was reconstructed over the next centuries in Gothic style.[4] It became a cathedral in 1561, after the town of Saint-Omer became the seat of a new diocese.[5]

By 1219, and probably much earlier, a wooden chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Miracles occupied the place in the square where the column had been. A solemn Fête des Miracles took place there annually on the Sunday before the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24).[6] The earliest documented miracles are from the 1200s. Praying at the shrine in the square, mute pilgrims recovered the power of speech; the blind gained sight; drowned children revived; cripples walked, leaving their crutches in testimony.[7] 

The present gilt oak statue of Our Lady of Miracles appears to date from this period.[8] Seated on a throne, the Virgin holds a scepter in her right hand and with her left supports the Child on her knee. Facing forward, he holds a Gospel book in his left hand and blesses the viewer with his right.[9]

In 1271, work began to replace the wooden chapel of Our Lady of Miracles with a Gothic stone one, completed in 1285.[10] In the following century, miracles continued, not just on behalf of pilgrims at the chapel, but for people who vowed to make the pilgrimage if saved from distress: storm-tossed mariners found port, the flames of a burning barn parted for a man to escape unhurt, a prisoner in an English dungeon saw his chains break and the door open.[11]

In 1638, when Saint-Omer was part of the Spanish Netherlands, the French king sent a force to besiege the town. Their artillery damaged many buildings around the square, but the chapel was spared, and townspeople thanked Our Lady of Miracles when Spanish forces arrived to rout the French. (Forty years later, the French prevailed, and Saint-Omer has been French ever since.) Her stone chapel stood in the square until 1785, when devotees carried Our Lady of Miracles' statue to a new home in the Cathedral. The chapel was demolished then to facilitate military maneuvers in the square.[12] The storm was gathering.

In 1793, the Revolutionary government turned the Cathedral into a barn. Under the decree of May 30, 1795 that restored some churches to worship, Saint-Omer's Cathedral remained closed, but the Church of St. Denis reopened and after three petitions persuaded the Revolutionary Council to let them move the statue of Our Lady of Miracles there from the Cathedral. After the Revolutionary period, the Concordat of 1801 between the Pope and Napoleon set the stage for the return of most French churches to worship. Under the agreement, the diocese of Saint-Omer was dissolved into that of Arras, so when Saint-Omer's Notre-Dame reopened in 1802, it was no longer the seat of a bishop, though it continued to be called the Cathedral.[13]

The parishioners of St. Denis wanted to keep the statue of Our Lady of Miracles. On March 3, 1803, it returned to the Cathedral hidden under a pile of clothes on a stretcher. It has remained there since. On July 18, 1875, the statue received the honor of canonical coronation.[14] In 1879, Pope Leo XIII named the church of Notre Dame de Saint-Omer a Basilica.[15]