RANGOON: 15th February 2005 -- Since Salesian Charles Bo was installed as Archbishop of Rangoon, what was once a  relatively simple local feastday of Our Lady of Lourdes has now become a national event, involving not only the wider Catholic population, but Buddhists and Hindus as well.

    The setting is the picturesquely named town of Nyau Lay Bin or Small Banyan Trees, some 100 or more kilometres North of Rangoon (Yangon), up-river along the Irrawaddy.  Marian celebrations have always been held there in February, but the archbishop now has widened its embrace to make it a centre of Marian pilgrimage - so on this occasion, 13th February, the Apostolic Delegate to Mynamar, Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio, normally resident in Bangkok, came for the event, along with 11 Bishops, 150 priests and an estimated 50,000 faithful plus 10,000 of other religions.

    The Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes at Small Banyon Trees is not just a one day event.  It incorporates a Novena and a Triduum.  Mid-way through the Triduum a procession is held through the town, lasting some one and a half hours and culminating at a midnight Mass at the Marian Grotto.

    'Bigger than Christmas?' you murmur!  Well, yes, in many ways this feast has caught the Burmese imagination in important ways, many of them possibly only known to the Blessed Virgin herself, but the event clearly has the devotional marks that distinguish large national shrines: witness of a Eucharistic-centred event, the bringing together of Catholic and non-Christian alike, the outstanding exercise of practical charity as homes (not all of them Catholic obviously) open up to welcome -and feed and water - visitors, in a place that for the rest of the year is little more than banyon trees, rice paddies and a few thousand locals mainly intent on daily survival.