The devotion was carried to the Philippines from the Spanish shrine of Nuestra Señora de la Peña de Francia in the mountains near Salamanca. At Naga in Camarines Sur a Spanish priest, Miguel Robles de Covarrubias, had an image made and enshrined in 1710 in thanksgiving for recovery from illness, and the devotion spread through the whole Bicol peninsula. The feast is kept on the third Saturday of September — a movable day, so no fixed date is given here — after a nine-day novena, and concludes with the fluvial procession that returns the image to her shrine by river.

Peñafrancia is a textbook case of what the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy has in mind when it asks that popular devotion be ordered to the liturgy: the novena prepares for the Mass, and the procession is an act of public faith rather than a spectacle. Bicolanos call her simply Ina, Mother, which is the whole theology of the devotion — the Church's confidence that Mary's motherhood is exercised for real people in a real place.

Philippines (Naga, Bicol)

The image is a dark-complexioned standing Virgin holding the Child, vested in a wide embroidered cape and crowned. During the fluvial procession she is carried on a decorated barge accompanied by hundreds of small boats, with the traditional cry Viva la Virgen taken up along the banks.

• Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia
• Ina
• Our Lady of Penafrancia

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• hail-mary

• salve-regina

• litany-of-the-blessed-virgin-mary

• memorare