Marian worship and images of belonging

This essay answers the question of how Dutch pilgrims traveling to Lourdes relate to various images of Mary. It corrects several assumptions about the importance of the famous site and the expectation of healing. By focusing on pilgrims who are marginalized because of old age, poor health, or lack of mobility, it adds to the understanding of intersecting social inequalities that affect pilgrims’ interpretations of Marian imagery. With an ethnographic approach, the study focuses on a group of elderly Dutch pilgrims traveling to Lourdes from the southern Netherlands. The iconographic elicitation method used in this study reveals how and why these pilgrims select from and respond to different Marian images and what personal meanings they attach to them. The article shows that, for this group, Mary was an ally and a witness to family history who helped them transcend the temporal divides of past and present, the dead and the living. Mary gave them a sense of place-belongingness in a rapidly changing and globalizing world. The conclusion suggests that the findings of this study have implications for historical interpretation of pilgrims’ motives and the function of a central shrine.