Most people plan a pilgrimage, such as to Lourdes or Fatima, in advance. Sometimes though, a pilgrimage can be more spontaneous.
This Summer, we had a family holiday in Malta. Shortly before leaving, my wife mentioned to a friend that we were staying at Mellieħa. “Oh” said the friend ,“are you making a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Mellieħa?” As we had not previously heard of Our Lady of Mellieħa, as a place of pilgrimage, that had not been our intention. However having now heard of this, we were intrigued to discover more.
On the transit coach from the airport to our hotel in Mellieħa, my wife asked the guide about this. Although he had been on the island for 10 years, he had not heard of this. Surely someone at our hotel would know but when we asked the receptionist, she too was unaware of it.
It was therefore to our great surprise that we discovered the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mellieħa only a couple of hundred yards from our hotel. Christian devotion here goes back to the dawn of Christianity in 60 A.D. As described in the Acts of the Apostles, the boat taking St Paul as prisoner to Rome was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta. Tradition has it that St Paul, with his companion St. Luke, initially sheltered in a cave at Mellieħa. It was here that St. Luke is said to have painted a fresco depicting the Virgin Mary on the cave’s rock face. This would have been one of the earliest depictions of Mary, by one who had met her.
The original fresco has long since gone but above the altar in the Sanctuary is an icon of Our Lady, believed to date from the eleventh century. The fascinating question is the extent to which this icon might replicate and resemble that original fresco and how far therefore, we can glimpse how Mary herself looked. My wife observed the Mary depicted looked more Middle Eastern than the more European image often shown. It is a miracle that we still have this icon. In 1614, the church was sacked during an Ottoman attack and the fresco was damaged but fortunately it was the lower half.
The lay-out of the site is a bit confusing. Across the road from the Sanctuary, down 78 steps, one finds the Grotto . Although this is a place of prayer and looks as if it might be the cave where St Luke painted his fresco , it dates from the seventeen century and is not that cave. That cave has now become the Sanctuary chapel where the icon is.
High above the Sanctuary is the main church. On the Sunday we attended mass, local people were in the bigger main church where the mass was in Maltese.
We felt blessed to attend a mass in English in the Sanctuary – the icon of Our Lady above the altar at one end of the church, the doors wide open at the other end of the Sanctuary -looking out over the sea – Stella Maris.
August 2025 Jonathan Holder