In 1630 a terracotta image of the Immaculate Conception, brought from Brazil for a chapel far inland, was being carried by ox-cart across the pampas. At a place beside the Luján river the cart would not go on until the image was taken down, and the settlers took this as a sign that Our Lady wished to stay. A chapel was built, then a shrine, and finally the neo-Gothic basilica that now stands at Luján, the goal of a pilgrimage on foot from Buenos Aires that draws enormous crowds each year. Her feast is kept on 8 May.

That the image is of the Immaculate Conception matters: what the pilgrims walk toward is the mystery of a human being wholly preserved by grace, the first fruit of the redemption they are asking for themselves. The pilgrimage itself, made across an entire night on foot, is the kind of popular piety the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy commends when it is joined to the sacraments and leads back to Sunday Mass.

May 8

Argentina

The image is small, of fired clay, showing the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with hands joined and eyes lowered, standing on a crescent moon. It is vested in a mantle of blue and white, the colours of Argentina, and crowned.

• Nuestra Señora de Luján
• Virgen de Luján

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