Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The oldest Marian tradition of all belongs to Zaragoza: on January 2 of the year 40, while the apostle James prayed in discouragement on the bank of the Ebro, Mary, still living in Jerusalem, came to him in mortal flesh, standing on a pillar of jasper, and asked that a chapel be built there. The pillar has never left; on this feast of Our Lady of the Pillar, patroness of the Hispanic peoples, all Spain turns toward it. The column now stands in the Holy Chapel of a vast baroque basilica begun in 1681, its towers and painted domes, some frescoed by the young Goya, mirrored in the river; upon it rests a small fifteenth-century statue of the Virgin, dressed each day in a different mantle except on the 2nd, 12th, and 20th of the month, when the bare pillar is shown. Generations have kissed the worn jasper through an opening in its casing, and during the war in 1936 two bombs crashed through the roof and failed to explode; they hang in the basilica still, one more story in twenty centuries of a promise kept.