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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

Our Lady of Arcachon

Miraculous image venerated at Arcachon, France

Click to enlarge

Arcachon, OUR LADY OF, a miraculous image venerated at Arcachon, France, and to all appearances the work of the thirteenth century. Carved from a block of alabaster about twenty inches in height, it represents Our Lady clad in Oriental drapery, holding the Divine Infant on her right arm. Blessed Thomas Illyricus of Osimo (b. about the middle of the fifteenth century) a Franciscan who had retired to the forest solitude of Arcachon, is said to have found this statue on the seashore, much battered by the waves. He immediately constructed a wooden chapel, replaced, a century later, by a spacious stone sanctuary, but this, in turn, was so menaced by the drifting sands of the dunes as to necessitate the erection of a new church (1723) on a neighboring hill overlooking the Bay of Arcachon. The statue survived both revolutions and was granted the honor of a coronation by a brief of Pius IX, July 15, 1870. Devotion to Our Lady of Arcachon has spread far and wide, and there are continual pilgrimages to her shrine. Up to 1842 the church was surrounded only by a few fishermen’s huts, but with the erection of villas and the discovery of the salubrious climate people began to flock thither, and it is now the center of a flourishing city.

F. M. RUDGE


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