Church of Our Lady Victorious

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Prague's Lesser Town stands the city's first Baroque church, built in 1611-1613 and given after the Battle of White Mountain to the Discalced Carmelites, who renamed it Our Lady Victorious. Its true treasure is small enough to hold: the Infant Jesus of Prague, a sixteenth-century Spanish wax statue of the Child with a globe in one hand and the other raised in blessing, brought to Bohemia as a bride's gift and donated to the friars in 1628 by Princess Polyxena of Lobkowicz. When Saxon troops sacked the monastery in 1631 the statue was thrown aside with broken arms, until Father Cyril found and restored it in 1637, and Prague came to credit the little King with protecting the city itself. Solemnly crowned in 1655, the Infant keeps a wardrobe of dozens of embroidered robes changed with the liturgical seasons, and pilgrims from the Philippines to Latin America fill the church daily to greet an image copied and loved across the world.