She is the Madonna of the Streets, the Madonna of the Refugees, the Madonna of the Ghetto. But she is also Our Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham, not to mention Guadalupe, Lourdes and Fatima. She is in short our maternal guide from the trials of Earth to the everlasting happiness of Heaven

Our Lady of Lourdes is praying, halfway up the stairs. At the end of my daughter’s bookshelf the Immaculate Conception dispenses benedictions. When my daughter gets bored by Mass, she revives with talk of Mary. After all, I say, Mary is only human; she is easy to understand. She has become Our Lady of Homework, Our Lady of Sleeping Alone in the Dark.

In the past two millennia she has been taken a long way from the woman of Nazareth. After the birth, the death, the Resurrection, she became a kind of triage nurse in the hinterland between Heaven and Earth, speeding some closer to God, dispensing mercy, appearing and disappearing at critical moments in our history. She first appeared before she was even dead, to St James in Saragossa. Since then it has been a centuries-long curtain call as she does that thing we need so badly: she finds us where we are at.

Wherever she appears – Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima – she talks the talk of the natives; she trades in their signs and symbols (in Mexico, for example, she wore the Aztec maternity belt to show she was pregnant). Over the centuries, Mary of Nazareth has gone native in countless countries. She is Our Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham. In one early twentieth-century painting she is even the Madonna of the Prairie, driving a covered wagon, the shape of the tarpaulin creating a halo around her head. Wherever she is, she is the fearless missionary entering dangerous territory, donning the clothes of the country until she can say: “Do you know who I am?”