MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Image of Argentina’s patron Saint ready for final resting in Falklands

The image has been peregrinated all over Argentina

An image of Argentina’s patron saint, Our Lady of Lujan, which during the last five years was taken in peregrination all over the country, will be blessed this coming weekend at her sanctuary in Buenos Aires before been flown to be enshrined at the Darwin Argentine cemetery in the Falkland Islands, according to reports in the Argentine media.

The image will be carried by the second group of Malvinas Families on Saturday October 10. This weekend the image will be part of the annual young people’s peregrination to the Basilica of Lujan when the blessing and dedication ceremony is scheduled.

This coming Saturday and the following, a total of almost 400 Argentine next of kin of combatants killed during the 1982 South Atlantic conflict between Argentina and Great Britain will be officially inaugurating the Memorial at the Argentine cemetery in the Falklands.

The Memorial, in the shape to two extended embracing arms holding engraved plaques with only the names of all Argentine combatants killed, no ranks or units identified, was built in blocks in Argentina and later assembled in the Falklands.

The remaining piece that completes the Memorial is the image of Our Lady of Lujan for which a hermite is waiting for her integration in perpetuity.

“This is the image of Our Lady of Lujan, patron saint of Argentina, the last piece of the Memorial to the fallen built in our Islas Malvinas, which farewells from its children in the continent before leaving for its final destiny from where it will care over the eternal rest of our brothers: those who have already given the good fight for national independence and sovereignty”, reads the inscription as the foot of the image.

In the week between the two flights to the Falklands the image will be exhibited at the foot of Buenos Aires city obelisk in the framework of an itinerant exhibition “Malvinas: Islands of the Memory”.

According to the Malvinas Families organization the image is 1.53 meters high, weighs 60 kilos and has toured, since 2005, over 63.000 kilometres in Argentina, from the north to the extreme south: in the Quiaca next to Bolivia, to the Marambio Base in Antarctica.

Two weeks ago the image presided over the XIIth Social Pastoral Deliberations of the Buenos Aires archdioceses in the district of Liniers where “it was revered by political, social and religious referents”.

“The blood of the dead is Christian seeding. Let us hope that blood shed by so many brothers opens the way to build a better Nation” said Carlos Accaputo Director of the Pastoral.