This morning, as Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass on the island of Lampedusa, her image was displayed on the altar. She has been there — in one form or another, through wars and storms and centuries of crossing — since before the island had permanent inhabitants.
Her name is Our Lady of Portosalvo. Porto salvo literally means “safe harbor.” It is the right name for this place and for this moment.
Lampedusa lies closer to Tunisia than to Sicily — 70 miles from one shore, 125 from the other. For centuries it was a stopping point, not a destination: a rocky island in the middle of the Mediterranean where sailors took on water and wood before heading back out to sea. The first traces of a chapel dedicated to Mary in the valley the islanders still call Cala Madonna date to at least 1202, at the time of the Fourth Crusade. By the 16th century the sanctuary was a place where Christian and Muslim sailors alike kept an oil lamp burning before the stone statue of the Madonna and Child. The cave was divided: one part used by Christians, another by Muslims, with a Turkish marabout buried in its walls. A hermit named Andrea, who lived there around 1500, welcomed without distinction of faith everyone who wished to pray.
The sanctuary was a place of truce, at a time when piracy made the Mediterranean one of the most dangerous waters on earth. Pirates and the sailors who hunted them both rested there, filled their water barrels, and prayed before the same Madonna before going back out to sea. The place where enemies prayed together was called, in Italian, isola di pace — island of peace.
The island received its first permanent settlers on September 22, 1843, when two steamships of Italian colonists arrived under Governor Bernardo Maria Sanvisente. They found the chapel in ruins and the statue of the Virgin fallen and mutilated on the ground. Sanvisente ordered both restored, and established a Mass to be sung every year on September 22 in honor of the Madonna of the Safe Harbor and the founding of the settlement. That feast day is still the most important celebration on the island’s calendar — a procession in which the 330-pound statue is carried through the streets on the shoulders of the faithful.
During the Second World War, Allied bombing destroyed the church. The statue was unharmed. Not a single islander was killed. The Lampedusans interpreted both facts as a sign of their patroness's protection and rebuilt the sanctuary immediately, in gratitude.
Beneath the sanctuary, at a depth of 50 feet, a bronze statue of the Madonna di Portosalvo has been installed in the sea itself — at a spot off Isola dei Conigli where the currents are strong and the diving is spectacular. She rests on the seabed, arms open, looking up. It is an image that carries more weight than it was perhaps intended to, given what the waters around Lampedusa have become.
Since the early 1980s, migrants from Africa and the Middle East have used the island as their entry point to Europe, crossing the same waters that medieval sailors once crossed in search of safe harbor. More than 182,000 arrivals have been recorded over the past three years alone. Many do not arrive. The cemetery Leo visited this morning contains graves marked with crosses made from the splintered wood of shipwrecked boats. Among them is the small grave of a child named Joussef, at which the Pope laid flowers.
Pope Francis came to Lampedusa in July 2013, on his first trip outside Rome as Pope, and celebrated Mass at an altar made from a migrant boat. He called what he saw the “globalization of indifference.” Today, Leo XIV — the first American pope, spending his country’s Independence Day on this island — followed the same path: the cemetery, the Gateway to Europe memorial, the pier where he greeted migrants and blessed a plaque renaming it in honor of his predecessor. Then Mass, with the image of Our Lady of Portosalvo displayed on the altar.
The name she carries has always described an aspiration as much as a reality. The waters around Lampedusa have never been consistently safe. What the Madonna of the Safe Harbor offers is the presence of someone watching the crossing, keeping the lamp lit in the cave, holding open the gate of the sanctuary for whoever arrives, of whatever faith, from whatever shore.
She has been doing this, on this island, for eight centuries. Today she did it again, with a pope celebrating Mass beneath her image and the Mediterranean shining beyond the walls of the church.
