4 Marian Feasts of Summer You May Be Missing

One of them is Our Lady of the Snows, today's Feast. Another is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, important to me as a Carmelite Tertiary.

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

Between July and August, the liturgical calendar offers four encounters with the Virgin Mary. Each has its own landscape, its own traditions, and its own theology.

Ask most Catholics which Marian feast falls in summer and they will say the Assumption—and they will be right. But it is not the only one. In July and mid-August, the Church places four distinct celebrations of the Virgin Mary in the calendar, each with its own theological character, its own history, and even its own geography. Four of them pass largely unnoticed for most. They deserve better.

The Visitation (July 2)

Mary, newly pregnant, travels roughly one hundred miles from Nazareth through dangerous hill country to reach her cousin Elizabeth in Ein Karem, on the outskirts of Jerusalem—an uphill trek of nearly 1,400 feet in elevation, through terrain known for bandits. She goes, Luke says, “in haste.” When Elizabeth hears her greeting, the child leaps in her womb and Elizabeth cries out: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Mary’s response is the Magnificat—the great hymn of the poor and the lowly that has been sung at Vespers every evening since Benedict made it the centerpiece of evening prayer in the sixth century.

Ein Karem is still there, now absorbed into the western edge of Jerusalem, its Church of the Visitation built over the traditional site of Elizabeth’s house. Pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in summer can walk the street where this encounter is said to have happened. The Visitation is a feast of recognition—of grace acknowledged in another person before either woman has said a word of theology—and of a young woman who, having received the most extraordinary news in human history, immediately set out to help someone else.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel (July 16)

On the slopes of Mount Carmel in northern Israel, above the port city of Haifa, the Carmelites maintain a monastery and basilica on the site where their order began—hermits living near a chapel dedicated to the Virgin in the 12th and 13th centuries. The feast on July 16 commemorates both that origin and the tradition of the Brown Scapular. But it is in the coastal towns of the Mediterranean that the feast comes most vividly alive.

In Italy, the celebration is above all maritime. Along the coast of Campania—Naples, Sorrento, Ischia, Positano—fishing communities carry the statue of the Madonna to the water’s edge and set it on a boat, which is then escorted by fleets of smaller vessels, flowers thrown onto the sea, fireworks erupting above the harbor. In Rome, the celebration becomes the Festa de’ Noantri—“the feast of us others,” in the Roman dialect of Trastevere—where the statue travels by boat along the Tiber, a tradition dating to 1535 when fishermen are said to have found a Madonna in the river after a storm. In Spain and Latin America, where she is patroness of sailors and the sea, the procession is replicated in dozens of coastal towns from Galicia to Chile. In Brooklyn, the ten-day festival in Williamsburg raises a sixty-five-foot giglio—a tower bearing the Virgin—and carries it through the streets in a tradition brought by immigrants from the south of Italy that has run without interruption for more than a century.

The Dedication of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (August 5)

This is the least-known feast of the four, and one of the most unusual. It commemorates the legendary founding of the great Roman basilica in 358, after Our Lady appeared in a dream to Pope Liberius and a Roman nobleman named John, instructing them to build a church on the Esquiline Hill where snow would fall—in August. The snow fell. The basilica was built, and it stands today as one of the four major basilicas of Rome, its coffered ceiling gilded with what tradition holds was the first gold brought from the Americas, a gift from Ferdinand and Isabella. Inside stands what is venerated as an icon of the Virgin painted by St. Luke himself. The feast is sometimes called Our Lady of the Snows—a strange and beautiful title for a feast celebrated in August’s full heat, a reminder that the miraculous operates on a different calendar than the meteorological. If you find yourself in Rome in early August, when the city empties of its inhabitants and fills with tourists, the basilica on the Esquiline is quieter than usual. It is a good time to go, if you can stand the heat. And if you are there for Mass, you will see the miracle reenacted with white rose petals falling from the dome.

The Assumption (August 15)

In Malta, the Assumption is not a feast day. It is the feast day—the crown of the local liturgical year, the moment toward which the whole summer has been building. On this small archipelago of 316 square kilometers in the middle of the Mediterranean, more than twenty villages celebrate their parish festa on August 15, each one competing in the elaborateness of its decorations, the quality of its band, the height of its fireworks. Streets are draped in colored lights weeks in advance. The facades of churches are illuminated until after midnight. Brass bands march through narrow limestone streets while the statue of the Assumption—the Madonna lifted heavenward, surrounded by gilded angels—is carried on the shoulders of the faithful in a procession that can last hours. In the village of Mosta, whose great domed basilica is one of the largest church domes in the world, the festa draws thousands. In Attard, in Gudja, in Mqabba, the same gesture is repeated: the village gathers, the statue emerges from the church door, and the square erupts.

The Assumption — defined as dogma by Pius XII in 1950 but celebrated since at least the 5th century—proclaims that Mary, at the end of her earthly life, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory. It is the anticipation, in her, of what is promised to all: the resurrection of the body, the redemption of the whole human person. Malta, it seems, has never needed this explained. The island’s two-thousand-year Catholic tradition, rooted in the shipwreck of St. Paul in the year 60, has carried the feast with unbroken intensity from generation to generation. To be in Malta on August 15 is to understand, in a way that no theological treatise fully conveys, what it means for a feast to belong to a people.

Four feasts, ffour encounters, four chances to let summer be something more than a pause in the ordinary calendar. They are spaced here with intention—from the end of spring to the height of harvest—as if the Church knew that the long bright days needed their own accompaniments, and placed them accordingly.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary (August 22) 

This Feast falls on the Octave of the Assumption. Established by Pius XII in 1944 at the height of the Second World War, it carries the theological weight of Fatima behind it — Our Lady's request for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart ran through much of the 20th-century Church’s self-understanding, from the 1917 apparitions through the purported consecration made by John Paul II in 1984. In Portugal, where Fatima stands in the foothills of the Serra de Aire north of Lisbon, the feast draws pilgrims year-round but especially in summer, when the great outdoor shrine fills with crowds from across the world. The theology is simple and demanding: Mary’s heart was so conformed to her Son’s that to honor one is to be drawn inescapably toward the other.