Religion: Marian Congress

On the S. S. Conte di Savoia, ploughing across the Atlantic toward New York last fortnight, small John Kennedy, 5½, one day met a nice old priest. He admired the priest’s pretty hat, his shiny jewelry. Could he play with them? The kindly-faced priest smiled assent. Small John Kennedy donned the red cloth biretta of a cardinal, jingled a golden cross on a massive chain, slipped a cameo ring on his big finger. Then John’s father, New York’s Representative Martin J. Kennedy, devout Roman Catholic, protested such impious play. But Alexis Henry Cardinal Lepicier said: “Why not? Nothing is more blessed than that which is touched by a child.”

Cardinal Lepicier stopped briefly in New York, then entrained for Portland, Ore. to preside last week over notable Catholic doings. Thrice before had this French-born prelate visited North America as Superior General of the Order of Servants of Mary (Servite Fathers). Raised to the purple in 1927, Cardinal Lepicier was shortly made head of the Congregation of the Religious—the Vatican’s ministry in charge of all Catholic nuns and brothers. In this capacity and as a devout Servite he went to Portland last week to assist in the first Marian Congress ever held in the U. S.

Because in Florence 701 years ago this week seven noblemen claimed, individually and unknown to one another, to have received ineffable visions and instructions from the Virgin, the Servites attribute the founding of their order to Mary herself. Dedicated to preaching and meditating on the nature of Christ’s Mother, the Servites were established in the U. S. in 1870. Ten years ago in Portland the local fathers set about building a sacred grotto and grove to their patroness. Selecting a site atop a sheet cliff outside the city, they filled it with statuary, including colored tableau groups representing Mary’s Seven Sorrows.* They ran an elevator 150 ft. up the cliff so that tourists might pay to view the landscape and an 8½-ft. bronze statue of the Virgin. The whole thing the Servites called the Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother.

A Marian Congress resembles a Eucharistic Congress save that Mary rather than her Son is the central figure. The Portland Congress opened last week with a service in honor of Cardinal Lepicier in the Cathedral of St. Mary. To the Sanctuary went 25,000 people, for masses, processions, hymns, Marian sermons, disputations on Mariological topics. For all who wished a souvenir there were small yellow-bound copies of Cardinal Lepicier’s work, Behold Thy Mother!

*1) The prophecy of Simeon; 2) the flight into Egypt; 3) the search for Jesus in the Temple; 4) the meeting with Him on His way to Calvary; 5) the Crucifixion; 6) the reception of His body; 7) the closing of His tomb.