Basilica of Our Lady of La Vang

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1798, when an imperial edict unleashed persecution on Vietnam's Catholics, families fled into the jungle of La Vang in Quảng Trị and gathered each night beneath an old banyan tree to pray the rosary. There, tradition tells, a Lady in Vietnamese dress appeared with the Child in her arms and angels at her side, consoling the frightened refugees and telling them to boil the leaves of the trees as medicine for their sick. A chapel rose on the spot by 1820, churches were destroyed and rebuilt through decades of persecution, and John XXIII raised the shrine to a minor basilica in 1961. The church of 1928 was destroyed in the war in the summer of 1972, its lone bell tower left standing, and beside that scarred tower Vietnam's national Marian shrine now draws its greatest crowds each August, Our Lady of La Vang still consoling her people.