Today, August 26, is the feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa. Unless you are Polish or know someone who is, you may be unfamiliar with this title of Our Lady. Many know more about the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Knock, or Our Lady of La Salette than they do about the miraculous shrine to Mary in the small Polish town of Czestochowa. 

This devotion begins with a picture - a painting of Mary and the Christ Child known as the “Black Madonna” due to its being darkened by age. The story goes that the painting was an original of St. Luke’s - the evangelist - that he painted as Mary told him the stories of Jesus’ childhood that would make their way into his gospel.

The painting was brought from Jerusalem through Constantinople to the Princess of Ruthenia. It was later brought to Poland in 1382 by Ladislaus of Opole who had discovered it lost to time in a castle elsewhere. He entrusted this painting to the Monks of St. Paul (of Hungary). 

Since it was entrusted to the Pauline Monks, there has been an extensive record of miracles associated with this image of Our Lord and Our Lady. In an attack on in 1430, the image was damaged and although efforts were made to repair it, there are still slash marks visible on the face of Mary to this day. There was an early monastery and shrine built on Jasna Gora, which is a hill that overlooks the city of Czestochowa, and later building was underway in the 1600s which led to the monastery and defense wall that still stands today. In 1655, there was a Swedish invasion of Poland that caused much turmoil and distress, but the monastery and shrine withstood the attacks. This victory boosted Polish morale and led to the King, Jan Casimir, naming Jasna Gora to be the “Mount of Victory” and even more glorious still, to name Mary as the “Queen of the Polish Crown.” She still holds that title today. 

Many other miracles have been attributed to Our Lady of Czestochowa and she has become an emblem for the Polish people through many years of suffering and hardship from repeated invasions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the great suffering of the invasion of Hitler and the devastating effects of communism in the twentieth century. She is a source of loving consolation for many Polish people. 

In 2016, I was privileged to go to World Youth Day in Krakow and one of the many places my pilgrimage group visited in the lead up to the official events was Jasna Gora. The monastery grounds are huge, sprawling, and rather impressive. The defensive walls built centuries ago still stand proudly, serving as a barrier to those who would dare to approach Our Lord and Our Lady with ire and violence. The flowers and trees are beautiful to behold. You truly do have to climb up a hill and many stairs to reach the basilica in which the beautiful, small, powerful portrait hangs. Although the church looks large from the outside, inside it is almost intimate and cozy. We were privileged to approach the miraculous image with many other pilgrims and behold the painting tradition holds was painted by someone who beheld Our Lady with his own eyes, as he heard from her own lips the stories of what Jesus’s infancy and childhood were like. With what love St. Luke must have painted this image! 

After reverencing the image, we went back out of the main shrine into the narthex where we knelt and prayed the rosary as we waited our turn to have Mass in a side chapel. We were joined in our rosary by faithful from all over the world, everyone praying in their own language or in the universal language of the Church, Latin. At the conclusion of our rosary, one of the priests with our group began singing the Salve Regina in Latin and a chorus of pilgrims joined in - all singing the praises of Mary together! It gives me goosebumps even to remember that beautiful minute of song. 

One of the many things that struck me about the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa was that it was truly a shrine beloved and used by the Polish people. We visited many other churches and shrines during our week in Poland, but Jasna Gora by far was the place in which I witnessed Polish devotion unperturbed by the overwhelming crowds of tourists and pilgrims. Elsewhere, there seemed to only be pilgrims hanging about. At Jasna Gora, I watched many locals come quietly in and out, seemingly unbothered by the crowds, to pay homage to Our Blessed Mother, to pay homage in true devotion to their perpetual Queen. 

If you would like to learn more about the miraculous image of Our Lady and about the shrine of Jasna Gora, you can click this link. 

Our Lady of Czestochowa, pray for us!