marian anniversaries     march

March 28

Virgen del Panecillo, Quito, Ecuador

On July 9, 1892, the bishops of Ecuador consecrated their country to the Most Pure Heart of Mary, and August 5, voting on legislation introduced by its saintliest Senator, Fr. Julio Matovelle, the Ecuadoran Congress agreed to ratify that consecration and build a commemorative statue on Panecillo Hill, a bun-shaped rise overlooking the capital, Quito. As it turned out, the Virgin's statue was a long time off. The government was already encumbered with a 12,000-peso debt for a basilica not yet started, which Senator Matovelle got through Congress in 1884 to commemorate Ecuador's consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1874. The Liberal Revolution of 1895 curtailed clerical power, and the military coup of 1925 ushered in several decades of political and social instability. 

At Father Matovelle's death in 1929, his monuments were still dreams. But his country remembered him, while seeming to forget its commitment to Jesus and Mary. In 1938, the Congress authorized a monument to Matovelle; in 1959, the Archbishop declared him a Servant of God; in 1965, the cause of his beatification was introduced to the Vatican; and in 1966, his home town of Cuenca dedicated a monument to him. Finally, in 1975, Rigoberto Correa, Superior General of the Oblates of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary – founded in Cuenca by Matovelle in 1881 – asked Spanish sculptor Agustín de la Herrán Matorras to design the statue legislated in 1892. 

On March 28, 1976, Pablo Muñoz Vega, Archbishop of Quito, dedicated the 49-yard-high image of Mary on Panecillo, made of some 7,000 pieces of aluminum. Based on Bernardo de Legarda's 1734 Virgin of Quito in the Church of St. Francis there, the sculpture depicts Mary with wings, symbolic of her assumption to heaven and assistance to earth. And like the Virgin of Quito, the Virgin of Panecillo has some of the traditional attributes of the Immaculate Conception: she wears a halo of 12 stars and stands on the globe of earth, the dragon of evil, and the crescent moon – apocalyptic imagery from Book of Revelation ("And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: ... And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil ..." Rev. 12:1,9). With her right hand the Virgin of Panecillo indicates the way to glory, while with her left she keeps the dragon enchained.

The Basilica begun in 1892 was finally consecrated in 1988. In 1994, the Vatican recognized Matovelle's "heroic virtues," bestowing on him the title of "Venerable."

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