Mary in the “Country of the Eagles”
Our Lady of Good Counsel: the painting found in the thirteenth century Augustinian church at Genazzano, near Rome, Italy.
The Holy Father has chosen to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary in Albania, and sent Slovenian Cardinal Franc Rode to the Marian shrine of Shkodër on April 26, for the 500th anniversary of the miracle of Our Lady of Good Counsel.
Cardinal Rode, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, bore a letter from the pope for this commemoration. Tradition has it that in 1467 a fresco of Our Lady of Good Counsel was miraculously detached from the basilica of Shkodër, when Albania was besieged by the Ottomans, and transported by the angels to Genazzano, on the Italian coast of the Adriatic. The image was found on the walls of a very old parish church dedicated to Our Lady of Good Counsel and was venerated under that title from then on by all of Christendom.
But the miracle continues in Albania: after suffering under the worst Communist regime on the planet under the dictator Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985, and boasted of realizing the “first atheist state in the world”, the Church is slowly but surely rising from her ashes, in a land where the majority of the population is Muslim.
After being freed from the oppression of the dictatorship, the Church is now faced with new problems, caused no longer by Marxism, but by a far too sudden change that introduced all the evils of the liberal West: corruption, consumerism, drugs, prostitution, unemployment, etc.
A young priest of the diocese of Tirana gives a good summary of the situation: “Man was emptied on the inside by Communism. Since the fall of Communism we have been trying to fill him back up. But it is difficult.” No doubt Our Lady of Good Counsel can work another miracle there.
Source: I.Media – FSSPX.News 4/28/17
