A country honours Our Lady of Mount Carmel

I recently discovered that there has been a great reverence in Chile for Our Lady of Mount Carmel - whose feast day is today - since she was believed to have helped the people in the war of independence from Spain in the early 19th century. A church was built in her honour but it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1906. In 1942 a Marian congress held in Santiago agreed to build a great sanctuary in Maipú, on the grounds of the old Chapel of Victory to honor Our Lady of Mount Carmel. During the long years of the construction of the current church, some Catholic groups opposed it because they saw it as a luxury, proposing to give the money invested in it to the poor. The work was delayed due to lack of resources but finally on October 24, 1974 the Votive Temple of Maipú was solemnly inaugurated. Initially, the project was conceived to transform the site into a large mausoleum where the remains of the Heroes of the Homeland and the most notable Chileans would rest, but the church opposed this initiative and preferred to transform it into a shrine, dedicated exclusively to Catholic worship and the spiritual care of pilgrims. The image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel venerated in the church is a wooden sculpture brought to Chile in 1785. On April 3, 1987, the image was crowned as Queen and Patroness of Chile by Pope St John Paul II during his apostolic visit to Chile.