Shrines around the World: Our Lady of Mariazell, Austria

by Gunther Simmermacher · Published June 12, 2025 · Updated June 12, 2025

Our Lady of Mariazell, Austria. (Photos: Wikipedia, Austrian embassy)

Where’s that? In Styria province, southern Austria.

Our Lady’s connection: A miraculous wooden statue.

The Marian sanctuary of Mariazell is the national shrine of traditionally Catholic Austria — the only one in the German-speaking regions. But it is also important in South Africa, because Abbot Franz Pfanner, the Austrian-born founder of Mariannhill, named a mission in the Eastern Cape, near the border to Lesotho, after the shrine.

Mariazell, located about 125km southeast of Vienna in Austria’s Styria region, attracts a million pilgrims annually to pray before the 13th-century wooden figure of Magna Mater Austriae (Great Mother of Austria).

Legend has it that in 1157, a travelling Benedictine missionary called Magnus was carrying the wooden figure with him in the region when a huge boulder blocked his path. After he prayed to Our Lady, the boulder split, giving the monk free passage to continue on his way. When he arrived at his destination, he placed the figure on a tree trunk and built a cell around it, which served as both his accommodation and a wooden chapel. The name given to the small structure was “Mary in the Cell”, which later became shortened to Mariazell (Mary’s cell). The story of the statue and devotion to Our Lady of Mariazell soon spread, and the small chapel attracted pilgrims.

In around 1200, Heinrich, the governor of Moravia, and his wife made a pilgrimage to Mariazell in thanksgiving for a healing of gout which they attributed to Our Lady. There they funded the construction of the first stone church on the site. In the 14th century, King Ludwig I of Hungary and Poland built a gothic church on the site. That church was entirely remodelled and expanded in baroque style in the 1600s.

Today the three-towered basilica houses the monk’s 48-cm-high wooden figure of Mary cloaked in finest cloth. The statue of Our Lady of Mariazell was crowned by decree of Pope Pius X in 1908.

Published in the March 2025 issue of The Southern Cross magazine