Marilene Phipps

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At the Immaculate’s Shrine, 2000
Oil on linen, 60 x 80”
Gift of the artist

The shrine that Phipps has depicted exists in a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. Phipps recalls walking there many times. She also sometimes kept her devotion to the Immaculate Conception there as well. In the raised grotto near the center of the painting is a statue of St. Bernadette visible within an archway. Before her stand many Haitians with the arms raised in gestures of prayer. Offerings dot the benches. Offside, daily life goes on unperturbed.

St. Bernadette, Catholic patron saint of sick people, the family and of poverty, was born Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, in l844. She is said to have experienced many visions of “a lady” who eventually identified herself as the Immaculate Conception, and who upon one occasion told Bernadette to tell the village priest to build a chapel at the site of the apparitions. The shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes has become a major site of pilgrimage for Catholics worldwide. As a result of her many visions, St. Bernadette is credited with numerous miracles. She died of tuberculosis at the convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers at the age of thirty-five.

Immaculate Conception is the Roman Catholic assertion that the Virgin Mary was “without stain” of original sin. Pope Sixtus IV established the feast of the Immaculate Conception as a Holy Day of Obligation in l476, the Immaculate Conception was not pronounced as official Catholic dogma until l854—four years before Bernadette’s vision in which the lady identified herself as Immaculate Conception—by Pope Pius IX.