Hundreds of people gathered in St Michael’s parish in the inner west suburb of Belfield on 15 February for the dedication of a new grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes. Inside the church there was standing room only, with scores of people following from outside.
Bishop Tony Percy, who presided at the Mass and also confirmed three young people, led a kilometre-long procession afterwards through the narrow back streets. The dark sky was threatening and the organisers’ prayers were going up that rain would not come down.
The new image of the Blessed Virgin, surrounded by a sea of flowers, was carried on a wooden processional litter by four strapping men. The staves rested on their shoulders – although this didn’t stop one of them, without missing a beat, from deftly extracting a phone from his pocket and snapping a selfie of Our Lady.
The procession wound its way down streets lined with huge paperbark gums, past curious neighbours taking photos, huge and immaculate utes with rosary decals on the rear windows, 150HP motor boats parked in the street, and more utes.
The crowd walking behind the statue – of all ages and backgrounds – prayed the Rosary and sang Marian hymns.
When they arrived back at the parish, the designer and builder of the grotto, John Phillip Mouawad, lifted Our Lady off the litter and placed it in a niche in the monumental new grotto.
Bishop Percy gave a brief homily before blessing the site.
“When our Lady appeared to Bernadette, the villagers asked her, ‘who was this woman?’ And she said, ‘I have no idea. The one thing I know for sure, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
“Now that is a very important point for us,” Bishop Percy continued. “We all need beauty in our life. So I hope that when you come here, you will find the exterior beauty of Our Lady, but also her interior beauty, which is really just a reflection of the beauty of God.”
The old grotto, in the carpark between the parish primary school and the church, burned down in 2024. It had been a favourite pilgrimage spot for locals, who used to leave bundles of rosaries, prayer intentions, flowers real and plastic, and burning candles. In an unfortunate instance of being set ablaze with devotion, the pious paraphernalia caught fire one day and ruined the statue and the grotto enclosing it.
Comparing new and old would be a bit like comparing St Peter’s Basilica to its venerable, ancient, pious and crumbling predecessor in Rome.
“The new grotto, built with significant community effort, cost over $200,000, mostly donated,” parish priest Fr Andrew Benton told The Catholic Weekly. “It’s sort of providential in a way, because we’ve built something much greater and safer.”
The Australian-themed grotto has a wrought-iron railing to help keep the fires of devotion from being rekindled. Its concrete arch has sandstone rock cladding. In the centre is a sandstone altar where Mass can be celebrated. The altar is topped with marble and on the front is a large mosaic of the Lamb of God. To the right are Our Lady and Bernadette.
To the left is a solid marble statue of a muscular St Michael the Archangel, patron of the parish, vanquishing Satan – a motif which also featured on many T-shirts in the congregation.
“This one is a cracker,” said Bishop Percy as he also blessed this statue. He reminded his hearers that it was Pope Leo XIII who promoted devotion to St Michael to protect the Catholic Church in a time of change. And his successor, he said, Pope Leo XIV, will confront the challenge of modern times by holding fast to traditional teachings.
Mouawad said that the new grotto had been built with generous donations of money, materials, and time over about a year and a half. At the end of the ceremony, which had unfolded with military precision, Fr Benton turned to thank the numerous people who had helped create the grotto and organise the procession and the barbie afterwards
No one heard a word of what he said. At that very moment the sky finally opened and rain fell in torrents. It had waited long enough. The dedication of Belfield’s splendid new grotto was over.
