The First Apparition
After the death of Jesus, his apostles sought to spread the message of the good news all over the world. According to church tradition, the apostle Thomas made it all the way to India, and Saint James (the brother of John) is said to have traveled to Saragossa, Spain.
Around A.D. 40 James had become deeply discouraged. He felt that his mission was not progressing in the way that he'd hoped. One day he was preaching beside the Ebro River when the Virgin Mary, flanked by angels, appeared to him and gave him a statue of herself and a six-foot-tall pillar made of jasper wood. Her gift came with directions as to how the statue and pillar were to be used.
factum
The word
According to James, the Virgin Mary told him, “This place is to be my house, and this image and column shall be the title and altar of the temple you shall build.” Shortly after the visitation, James began work on a small chapel in honor of the Virgin Mary.
Like many ancient holy sites, this chapel has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times throughout the centuries. After almost 2,000 years, the pillar and the statue are still venerated at the Basilica-Cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza, Aragon,Spain. Throughout the centuries, this statue and pillar have had multiple healings attributed to them, and they can be visited to this day, although they are not always kept on display.
symbolism
The miracle of James's vision of Mary occupies a special place in the national memory of Spain, and is linked to the discovery of the Americas. The Spanish Feast of El Pilar is commemorated on October 12. It was on this day in 1492 that Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, after traversing the ocean on his ship, the
While this visitation must have brought James joy and comfort, it probably also brought him dread, as it was through this apparition that the Virgin Mary informed him that God had requested that he return to Jerusalem so that he could become the first martyr for Christ.
Four years later, James was martyred in Jerusalem. His own death is part of a larger trend that continues in our own day — visionaries sometimes suffer terribly for sharing what they've experienced. Some child visionaries have been beaten by their parents, others have been interrogated by church and civil authorities, and still others, like James, discovered through a vision that they would die unjustly.
As you will see as you explore the other apparitions, the Virgin Mary is often reported to leave behind tangible reminders of her visits. Although skeptics might say that these “reminders” could have easily come from other sources, all that we have now (especially in the case of the most ancient apparitions) are the stories that communities tell about how these objects — pillars, statues, and churches — came to them. These stories are valuable, both for what they convey about the communities that guard these reminders as well as for what they convey about beliefs surrounding the Virgin Mary.
