marian anniversaries     may

May 4

Notre-Dame de Gray, Gray, Haute-Saône, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France

By the 1200s, a cruciform oak tree had become a place of devotion in the Flemish town of Scherpenheuvel (Montaigu in French). In the early 1400s, the shrine became famous after a statue of the Virgin placed on the tree fell down and could not be moved from the spot. But Protestants destroyed the sanctuary in 1568, and in 1604 the tree was cut down. 

In 1613, a poor widow, Jeanne Bonnet, made a pilgrimage to Montaigu at the age of 70. She brought a piece of the sacred oak home to Salins-les-Bains in eastern France, where sculptor Jean Brange carved a statue of the Virgin from it (left), after the Belgian original. 

From 1616 until the French Revolution, this statue presided over a long series of miracles at the Capuchin monastery in the town of Gray, some 50 miles north. In the 1790s revolutionaries expelled the monks and pillaged the monastery. The Rousset family hid the holy image until 1802, when it was installed in Gray's newly reopened parish church of Our Lady of the Assumption. 

In thanksgiving for the end of the 1849 cholera epidemic, Cardinal Mathieu, Archbishop of Besançon, gave the shrine a silver statue covered in gold and jewels (right), which he dedicated on May 4, 1851, at a ceremony attended by 92 priests, throngs of the faithful, artillery salvos, and the ringing of all the bells in town. Afterward, the parish celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Gray with a procession every May 4. 

In 1948, Pope Pius XII designated Gray's church of Notre Dame a basilica minor. In recent years the May procession has been dropped in favor of a celebration on the Feast of the Assumption August 14-15. 

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