Shrine of Our Lady of Europe

The Shrine of Our Lady of Europe stands at Europa Point, the windswept southernmost tip of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and the coast of Africa lies in plain view across the Strait. It is both a Roman Catholic parish church and the national shrine of Gibraltar, dedicated to Our Lady of Europe, the territory's Catholic patroness, and it belongs to the European Marian Network linking twenty great Marian sanctuaries across the continent — one for each decade of the Rosary. Few churches anywhere can claim a history so turbulent: in seven centuries this small building has been a mosque, a Spanish shrine saluted by passing ships, a pirate target, a battlefield refuge, an army storehouse, a garrison library, and at last a restored sanctuary honoured by two popes.

The story begins in the early fourteenth century, during Gibraltar's Moorish period, when a small mosque was built at Europa Point. During the first Spanish occupation of the Rock (1309–1333) the mosque was converted into a Christian shrine, then reverted with the territory itself. The decisive moment came on 20 August 1462 — the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux — when Spanish forces recaptured Gibraltar from the Moors. The little mosque at Europa Point was converted once more into a chapel, this time dedicated to Our Lady as Patroness of Europe, the Ermita de la Virgen de Europa. The choice of title was deliberate and extraordinary: from this place of prayer at the very southernmost point of the continent, the whole of Europe was to be consecrated to God through Mary. A large chapel was built at right angles to the old mosque's east wall, and in the fifteenth century a statue of the Virgin and Child was installed — a small wooden figure barely two feet high, polychromed in royal red, blue and gold, showing the crowned Virgin seated with the Christ Child on her lap and holding a sceptre with three flowers signifying Love, Truth and Justice.

For more than two centuries the shrine flourished. Ships passing through the Strait dipped their colours in salute as they rounded Europa Point, and mariners came ashore with gifts, providing a constant supply of oil so that a lamp burned perpetually before the image — and another in the tower above the chapel, which thereby became Gibraltar's first lighthouse. The shrine's fame attracted both treasure and trouble. In 1545 Hali Hamat, a lieutenant of the corsair Barbarossa, attacked and looted Gibraltar; the shrine was sacked and stripped of its valuables, though the statue itself was left unharmed. Philip II afterwards protected the site with new walls, and illustrious gifts followed: a silver lamp given in 1568 by Giovanni Andrea Doria, son of the great Genoese admiral, and two massive silver lamps presented by Don John of Austria in thanksgiving for his victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571.

The shrine's darkest hour came in August 1704, when an Anglo-Dutch fleet captured Gibraltar on behalf of the Archduke Charles, pretender to the Spanish crown. As the bombardment began, most of the town's women and children were evacuated to the shrine under the care of priests. Troops under Captain Edward Whitaker, landing at Rosia Bay, seized the building and looted it comprehensively — twelve silver lamps, candlesticks, lecterns, crowns, gems and consecrated vessels — and, when nothing remained to steal, broke the heads from the venerated statue of the Virgin and the Christ Child and hurled the pieces among the rocks below. Being wooden, the fragments floated out into the Bay of Gibraltar, where a fisherman recovered them and brought them to Juan Romero de Figueroa, the priest of St Mary the Crowned, who had remained at his post when most of the population fled the Rock. He carried the broken statue to Algeciras for safekeeping, where it was housed in a chapel eventually renamed for Our Lady of Europe. The shrine itself, like every Catholic place of worship in Gibraltar except St Mary the Crowned, was taken over for military use; it was further battered during the Great Siege of 1779–83 and afterwards demolished and rebuilt on the same site as a military building.

The long road back began in the 1860s, when John Baptist Scandella, Vicar Apostolic of Gibraltar, petitioned for the statue's return from Algeciras. It came home in 1864, and since the old shrine remained in army hands, it was placed in a new chapel on Engineer Road, furnished with a marble altar donated by Pope Pius IX. During the Second World War the statue sheltered in the cathedral, and afterwards at St Joseph's, the parish church nearest Europa Point. The shrine building itself meanwhile served as an oil and packing-case store and, from 1928, as the garrison library. Slated for demolition by 1959 as the military presence shrank, it was saved through the persistence of Bishop John Healy and ceded to the diocese on 17 October 1961. Restoration began in 1962, and on 28 September of that year Mass was celebrated at the shrine for the first time in 258 years. On 7 October 1967 the ancient statue was carried in public procession from St Joseph's back to Europa Point, where it remains today.

Honours followed. In 1979 Pope John Paul II formally approved the title of Our Lady of Europe as Patroness of Gibraltar, and the sanctuary was rebuilt in 1997 with the statue carefully restored. In May 2009, marking the 700th anniversary of the devotion, Pope Benedict XVI conferred on the shrine the Golden Rose — one of the rarest distinctions the papacy can bestow, shared by only a handful of sanctuaries worldwide. The little church at the gates of the Mediterranean thus stands again as it was intended in 1462: a lamp of prayer at the southernmost edge of Europe.