Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima

The story

The Barnabite Fathers — Clerics Regular of St. Paul, founded in Milan in 1533 — came to Western New York in the early 1950s wanting a seminary. In 1954 Walter Ciurczak and his wife offered fifteen acres of farmland on one condition: a small grotto to Our Lady behind it. Around the same time a Barnabite saying Italian Mass in Niagara Falls was handed a complete statuary set — Our Lady of Fatima, the three shepherd children, three sheep. Seminary fundraising stalled, so the Fathers promoted the Fatima devotion instead, much in the news in 1960 over the release of the secrets. Enough pilgrims came that a grotto stopped being adequate.

Joseph E. Fronczak designed what replaced it: 100 feet in diameter, 55 feet high, the dome skinned in two layers of glass and plexiglass mapped with the contour of the Northern Hemisphere, and at the pole a 13-foot, ten-ton Mary carved from Vermont granite. Two flights of stairs, 63 steps each, climb to the top. The shrine's own brochure notes that the grey stone disappears under the spotlights at night and the statue “seems to beam as a star.” It was dedicated in 1965; Pope Paul VI conferred the title of basilica on October 7, 1975.

The Avenue and Aisle of Saints runs over 130 life-size marble statues — Lorenzo Ruiz, Kateri Tekakwitha, the 117 canonized Vietnamese martyrs — and in front of the dome a giant rosary of 59 lights ends in a marble corpus, its pool shaped as a heart, the apostles ringed around it with St. Paul, the Barnabites' patron, in the good spot. Inside: a Carrara marble altar, fourteen copper bas-relief rosary panels circling it, bronze Stations of the Cross made for this building by Russell Vacanti, and a relic of St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria. The Barnabites still run it; the seminary next door is closed to the public.