Our Lady of Good Success (Quito)

The Story

Our Lady of Good Success is a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with the Royal Monastery of the Immaculate Conception in the historic center of Quito, Ecuador, and with Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres (1563-1635), a Spanish-born Conceptionist nun who served several terms as abbess of the community. According to the traditional account, preserved chiefly in an eighteenth-century biography by the Franciscan friar Manuel Sousa Pereira, Mother Mariana received a series of apparitions of Our Lady between 1594 and 1634. Mary is said to have asked that a statue of herself under the title of Good Success be made and enthroned in the abbess's chair as perpetual superior of the convent, and, according to the same tradition, she entrusted Mother Mariana with prophecies concerning trials of faith and morals in later centuries, often understood by devotees as referring to the twentieth century. The statue was completed in 1611 and placed in the convent, and tradition holds that the devotion received the approval of the local bishop at that time. The image has been venerated continuously by the cloistered community and the faithful of Quito for four centuries; its principal feast is kept on February 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord and the Purification of Mary, marked by a candlelight procession. Because the principal narrative sources were written long after the events they describe, the details of the apparitions rest on tradition rather than on a modern canonical inquiry; the devotion itself, however, remains a living and Church-sanctioned expression of Marian piety in Quito. A cause for Mother Mariana's beatification has been opened, and pilgrims to Quito's historic center may venerate the statue in the Conceptionist convent church, one of the oldest religious foundations in the city.

Church Recognition

Approved by the local bishop, Salvador de Ribera, in 1611.

Catholic Teaching

Tied to the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Jesus; a call to faith and fidelity.

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Practical

1 Additional Information ▾

The venerated statue is kept at the Conceptionist convent in Quito's historic center.

Go Deeper

See Fr. Manuel Sousa Pereira's eighteenth-century biography of Mother Mariana, published in English as The Admirable Life of Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church on private revelation (CCC 67) and Marian devotion (CCC 971).