Water trickles from a spout into a small pool under a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, with the phrase “I Am The Immaculate Conception” surrounding her head in a halo. Potted flowers and greenery frame the sculpture on stone steps of the lush grotto, set into a Euclid hillside. Cicadas’ hums fill the secluded park. Nearby, a member of the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity trims a tree’s branches; another sits at a bench in the shade.
It’s this serenity that visitors of Euclid’s Our Lady of Lourdes National Shrine have sought for the past 100 years. Built in 1926, the grounds were modeled after its namesake shrine in Lourdes, France. There, Marian apparitions — reported supernatural appearances of the Virgin Mary — were reported by Saint Bernadette Soubirous and later confirmed by the Catholic Church in the 1800s.
Like its counterpart in France, Euclid’s shrine has reportedly been the setting of Marian apparitions, too, according to author Jennifer Boresz Engelking. In 1870, Julia Harms, a member of the family which owned the land at the time, said that a vision of Mary appeared to her while she was praying. Later, in 1912, writer Joseph Geisler visited the area and also said that Mary appeared to him, leading him to convert to Catholicism. Both stories are recounted in the book Our Lady of Lourdes National Shrine of Euclid, which Boresz Engelking wrote with her mother Joanne Boresz this year, in honor of the Euclid shrine’s 100th anniversary…