Basilica of Notre-Dame des Victoires

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Louis XIII founded this church in 1629 to thank Our Lady for his victories, but its true story began on December 3, 1836, when Father Charles Desgenettes, ready to resign from a dying parish, heard during Mass an inner call to consecrate it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Five hundred men came to the first meeting, Pope Gregory XVI approved the Archconfraternity two years later, and by 1870 it counted twenty-two million members worldwide, while the walls slowly filled with more than thirty-seven thousand marble ex-votos, each one recording a prayer that was heard. Mozart had played here, Lully rests here, and Cardinal Newman came to give thanks for his conversion; but on today's feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, remember the pilgrim of November 4, 1887: fourteen-year-old Thérèse Martin, kneeling before the crowned statue of Our Lady of Victories to thank the Virgin whose smile had healed her as a child, on her way to Rome to beg entry to Carmel. Her chapel now stands in the basilica she loved.