Our Lady of Perpetual Help

Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a Byzantine icon painted on wood, probably on the island of Crete in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Mary holds the child Jesus, who has just seen the angels Michael and Gabriel carrying the cross, nails, lance and sponge of his future Passion. Frightened, he has run to his mother so fast that one sandal is falling from his foot, and he clings to her hand. Mary looks not at him but at us.

According to tradition a merchant brought the icon to Rome in the late fifteenth century. From 1499 it was venerated in the church of Saint Matthew on the Esquiline Hill for nearly three hundred years, until the church was destroyed during the French occupation. Rediscovered in the nineteenth century, it was entrusted by Pope Pius IX in 1866 to the Redemptorists, who enshrined it in their church of Saint Alphonsus and spread its devotion worldwide.

The Redemptorists made the icon known in every continent, and Wednesday Perpetual Novena devotions draw huge crowds, especially at the Baclaran shrine in Manila. She is the patroness of Haiti, where the faithful turned to her during a smallpox epidemic in 1882.

Across Latin America, many parishes and families keep her image at home, and mothers pray to her for their children's health. Her feast on June 27 is celebrated with Masses, processions and novenas.