The Rosary of the Sick, linked here, was recorded at this Shrine. My wife, Diane, and I made a short pilgrimage to the Shrine for Christmas Mass, staying over nearby in Harvard Square.

Mary the Finder of Grace.

“The Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help informally known as The Mission Church is a Roman Catholic basilica in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The Redemptorists priests of the Baltimore Province have ministered to the parish since the church was first opened in 1870. The shrine is dedicated to Our Mother of Perpetual Succour.

In May 1869, the Catholic priest, Father James Augustine Healy from the Church of Saint James in Boston invited the Redemptorist Order to give a parish mission. Pleased with the success of the mission, Father Healy recommended to the Bishop that the religious order should establish a mission-house in Boston.^[5] That year Archbishop John J. Williams invited the Redemptorists to Boston. In September 1869 the Redemptorists acquired a site in Roxbury, then known as the Boston Highlands, on Parker Hill. Parker Hill was named for wealthy Boston merchant, John Parker, who occupied the summit of the hill during the eighteenth century. The five acre estate was known as Brinley Place, and included a grand house, Datchet House built in 1723 by prominent English officer Colonel Francis Brinley in memory of his ancestral home.^[6] Colonel Brinley died in 1765. Wealthy merchant Robert Pierpont purchased the house in 1773. Pierpont enlarged and enriched the house to such a degree that it became known as “Pierpont’s Castle”.

The Redemptorists built a modest wooden church on the location in 1870. This was to serve as a “mission house”, a home base for priests traveling to distant parts of Massachusetts, Canada, and elsewhere.^[7] The church was dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The first Catholic Mass was offered on 29 January 1871. The original structure was located on the site where the rectory now stands.^[8]

A replica icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was installed over the main altar of the original church on 28 May 1871. Not long after, cures were reported, attributed to the intercession of Our Lady. In November 1874, the weekly practice of bestowing a blessing on the sick was formally established. When the new church was built, the picture was relocated to the new Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. As reputed cures continued, crutches, braces, and other devices were left as votives at the shrine. In 1900 Fr. Frawley began a quarterly publication, The Little Messenger of Mary, which included among other features, accounts of favors received at the shrine. This was later superseded by the Annals of the Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.”.^[9]

An account of the sick flocking to the shrine was published in the New York Herald in March 1901, under the headline “A Lourdes in the Land of Puritans”.^[10] Accounts of activities at the shrine were also covered by the Boston American General News of March 28, 1909 under the caption “Heaps of Crutches Left at Altar by Afflicted”, and by the Boston Globe of December 10, 1910, and again in a Globe article of August 3, 1919. During World War I, the Roxbury shrine became popular with family members praying for the safe return of soldiers.^[9] Between 1878 and 1884 over 300 cures were documented…

The basilica is located on Tremont Street, almost at the center of Mission Hill, a 0.75-square-mile (1.9 km²)^[12] Boston neighborhood of approximately 18,000 people. The church is considered the symbol of the neighborhood, to which it gives its name. It continues to serve descendants of Irish immigrant families who still remain in the neighborhood, in addition to newly arrived immigrants from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Haiti.”— Wikipedia

https://youtube.com/@BostonsBasilica?si=KD95eL79DjtBOba6

Photos / SH