I was delighted to hear from an old friend, Henry Wingate, who wanted to tell me about his latest project, a painting of Our Lady of La Vang, commissioned by Holy Rosary Church, in Houston, Texas.
I will admit that I didn’t know anything about this apparition and what follows comes from the Wikipedia entry, which I am trusting is accurate.
“Our Lady of La Vang is a Marian apparition associated with the Vietnamese Catholics. The event is traditionally dated to 1798, during a period of severe persecution under the Nguyen Dynasty, when a group of Catholic faithful had fled into the jungle of La Vang in Quảng Trị Province in central Vietnam.
Suffering from illness and living in constant fear of discovery, they gathered to pray the rosary together.
According to the account handed down, a woman appeared to them, dressed in the traditional Vietnamese áo dài and holding the Child Jesus, accompanied by angels. She consoled the refugees, instructed them to gather and boil the leaves of local plants as a remedy for their illnesses, and promised that prayers offered there would be answered.
The apparition has not received formal Vatican approval, and it remains a pious tradition rather than a defined private revelation. Nonetheless, the site became a place of pilgrimage, and a church was eventually built there, destroyed during the Vietnam War, and later rebuilt. Our Lady of La Vang was declared patroness of Vietnam by the Vietnamese bishops, and the feast is kept on 15 August.
For Vietnamese Catholics, both in Vietnam and in diaspora communities around the world, the apparition carries particular weight as a sign of consolation given during persecution - a pattern familiar from other Marian appearances in the tradition.”
See more of Henry’s work at henrywingate.com.
