Saturday  Aug. 14  - memorial feast of St. Maximillian Kolbe, last day of our novena.

Well, we made it !  After a memorable Thursday evening stay at a lovely house in Brandon Manitoba (where we were showered with love by a cat and a dog), we pressed on for Swift Current with a stop in Regina precisely the minute to attend Friday noon Mass at Sacred Heart church. There we met friend John and Sharon, who feted us for a fishy lunch and sent us packing with lots of goodies.

Sunset over the prairies was a sight to behold, with the air bearing a hazy pastel patina, under winds from northern B.C. and Alberta, where wildfires are burning .. many of them out of control. Speaking of fires, as we approached Our Lady of the Rockies in Canmore, passing Dead Man's Flats a pesky wildfire on the south side, being battled by water-bombers, had the east-bound traffic backed up some five kilometres, virtually to the door of the shrine.

We were perhaps too distracted to pull into the shrine, supposing that we'd visit on the feast of the Assumption, tomorrow. We nodded to the shrine and blessed ourselves as we passed, arriving in Banff moments before the Saturday vigil at the shrine's alma mater: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. This was the place of a 'coda' on my mountaintop experience 41 years ago, so you might imagine how newly impressing was the reading from Revelation about the 42 months of divine protection on the Woman clothed with the sun !  The Magnificat never rang more clearly.

This church was built in 1952 to commemorate the declaration of this doctrine by pope Pius XII, whose encyclical Fulgens Corona would then be published on our Lady's birthday in 1953. That's a significant day this year, marking the end of the year of St. Joseph. Let's ask the two co-patrons of Canada to pray for a renewal of faith in our land, a clearing away of the pall of smoke that seems to represent something baleful, and a return of blessed rains in the west.