June 27 is the feast day of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. She is known for miracles and answers to prayer. The tradition of the devotion to the Mary is associated with a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child. The image was copied in a mosaic in the Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel in the Basilica.
History of the Devotion
The tradition of Our Mother of Perpetual Help is traced back to 1495. A wine merchant had stolen from a Cretan monastery after a few years of its creation. Then it was brought to the church of St. Matthew in Rome. For 300 years, it resided at the church and even survived the church’s destruction by Napoleon’s army in 1798.
88 years later, Pope Pius IX gave the icon to the Redemptorist congregation at the Church of Saint Alphonsus, where it remains today.
The Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel in the Basilica
The Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel features a mosaic reproduction of the Mother of Perpetual Help icon. Mary comforts the Child Jesus as he turns in fear from the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, who brandish the instruments of the passion. Surrounding the icon are Botticino reredos depicting saints including Alphonsus Liguori and Luke the Evangelist.
Prayer to Our Mother of Perpetual Help
O Mother of Perpetual Help, grant that I may ever invoke your most powerful name, which is the safeguard of the living and the salvation of the dying.
O Purest Mary, O Sweetest Mary, let thy name henceforth be ever on my lips.
Delay not, O Blessed Lady, to help me whenever I call on you, for, in all my needs, in all my temptations I shall never cease to call on you, ever repeating thy sacred name, Mary, Mary.
O what consolation, what sweetness, what confidence, what emotion fill my soul when I pronounce your sacred name, or even only think of you.
I thank God for having given you, for my good, so sweet, so powerful, so lovely a name.
But I will not be content with merely pronouncing your name: let my love for you prompt me ever to hail you, Mother of Perpetual Help. Amen.