Feast day: April 26
Our Lady of Good Counsel
A title of Mary attached to a venerated fresco at Genazzano near Rome, invoked by those in need of wisdom and right decisions, and dear to popes and the Augustinian order.
The title of Our Lady of Good Counsel honors Mary as the guide and counselor of those who must make difficult decisions, and is attached to a small and venerated image of the Virgin and Child in the town of Genazzano, southeast of Rome, long in the care of the Augustinian order. The devotion celebrates Mary as the Mother of Wise Counsel, who leads her children to her Son, the Wisdom of God.
By the tradition cherished there, in the year 1467 — as the townspeople were laboring to rebuild their old, ruined church of Our Lady — a delicate fresco of the Madonna and Child appeared, as if by a miracle, upon a wall of the unfinished building, and was hailed at once as a sign of Mary's nearness. Pilgrims began to come, and reports of favors and cures spread the fame of the image far beyond the little town.
Over the following centuries the shrine at Genazzano became a center of devotion to Mary under this title, honored by popes who placed themselves and the Church under her counsel. The invocation 'Mother of Good Counsel' was added to the Litany of Loreto, the great list of Mary's titles prayed throughout the Church.
The feast, kept on April 26, expresses a simple and very human need: that in the perplexities and hard choices of life, in matters where the right path is unclear, the faithful may turn to Mary as to a wise and loving mother, asking her to obtain for them the light to know and the courage to do God's will — the gift of good counsel.
By tradition the image appeared at Genazzano in 1467; for centuries since, the faithful have come to ask Mary's counsel before hard choices.
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