Holy Name of Mary

On September 12 the Church keeps the optional memorial of the Holy Name of Mary — a feast extended to the universal Church by Pope Innocent XI in 1683 as a thanksgiving for the relief of Vienna. On that day the Christian relief army led by King John III Sobieski of Poland descended from the Kahlenberg heights above Vienna and broke the Ottoman siege under Kara Mustafa, ending the last great Ottoman advance into Central Europe. Sobieski had prayed at the Marian shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska before the campaign, and the army heard Mass on the Kahlenberg on the morning of September 12 before charging down into the plain. The feast was assigned to that date because the victory fell on it.

The devotion to the Holy Name of Mary parallels that of the Holy Name of Jesus, kept on January 3. The name "Mary" (Miriam) has been venerated in the Church since the medieval period for its meaning and its intercessory power. A local feast of the Holy Name appeared in Cuenca, Spain, in 1513 and was extended to Spain and Naples by Innocent XIII in 1721. Innocent XI's 1683 extension to the universal Church came in the bull Plures inter.

The feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar by Paul VI's Mysterii Paschalis in 1969, as a duplication of other Marian celebrations. Pope John Paul II restored it as an optional memorial in the 2002 typical edition of the Roman Missal.

The pilgrimage sites of the September 12 memory lie along the line of the relief. Vienna keeps the day with a civic-Marian character; the chapel of St. Joseph on the Kahlenberg marks the place where Sobieski heard Mass before the charge. Mariazell, the great Austrian national shrine of the Magna Mater Austriae, was long invoked for national deliverance. Maria Taferl on the Danube was founded as a votive shrine in thanks for the 1683 deliverance from the Turks. And in Poland, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska — the UNESCO-listed Calvary complex where Sobieski prayed before the campaign — is the Marian shrine of the Polish victory. Częstochowa, the national shrine of Poland, was the other great Marian site of Sobieski's devotion. In Rome, Innocent XI is buried in St. Peter's, where the vow of thanksgiving was formalized.