Once upon a time, French settlers arrived in Canada and founded a town called Trois Rivieres. A Church was built and as more settlers came, the Church was rebuilt to accommodate a growing population. In that Church, an anonymous donor gifted a large statue of Mary to celebrate the occasion that the Catholic Church just passed a doctrine teaching that Mary is the most Immaculate conception.
This statue of Mary is Our Lady of the Rosary, one where she is standing barefoot on top of a snake, where God fulfills the promise of defeating satan.
Over time, the Catholic faith decreases and diminishes. On Ascension day of 1867, a priest by the name Father Desilets found in his congregation only a pig in a chapel chewing a Rosary. Father Desilets started preaching about what he saw and soon, Church attendance increased.
The effect to which the congregation exploded led to an even larger church to be built. To build this larger church, one would need to transport stone over a river, and the river needed to freeze but the winter was mild. Father Desilets prayed for Mary’s intercession without ceasing and a snowstorm allowed for a bridge to form in order to transport materials to the construction site. In thanksgiving, Father Desilets assigns an altar to Our Lady of the Rosary.
One day, 3 men by the names Pierre Lacroix, Father Desilets, and Father Frederic visited Our Lady’s chapel and saw the statue of Our Lady of the Cape open her eyes. The men were astonished at what they saw. They saw her emotions, sad and looking towards Trois Rivieres beyond the visionaries, as if something was wrong. The three men agreed that they saw the same thing and they swore an oath saying that what they saw was true.
This miraculous apparition led to many pilgrims nationwide visiting Our Lady of the Cape’s shrine. And in 1904, the statue of Our Lady of the Cape was crowned Queen of Canada by Pope Pius X. Today, in the Secularized culture that is today’s Canada, many make pilgrimages to Our Lady of the Cape to seek her prayers and inspiration, to lay down one’s burdens and to gain strength to be a sign of contradiction in a culture so hostile to Catholicism.
