Our Lady of Ta' Pinu: the voice heard by Karmni Grima

The chapel of Ta' Pinu stands in open country outside Għarb, on the Maltese island of Gozo. Before 1545 it was called Tal-Ġentili, dedicated to the Assumption. In 1575 the apostolic visitor Pietro Duzina ordered it demolished. Tradition says a workman broke his arm on the first blow, so the chapel was spared. In 1619 it received an altarpiece of the Assumption, attributed to Amadeo Perugino.

22 June 1883. About 10 in the morning. Karmni Grima was walking home from the fields near Jordan Hill, praying silently. She was 45 and unmarried, a farm worker and the daughter of Tumas. A great devotee of the Blessed Virgin.

At the junction leading to the chapel, a voice called her: "Ejja...ejja!" The fields were empty. She hesitated and kept walking, and the voice spoke again. "Come, ... come today. For a whole year, you will not be able to return."

She was frightened and began to run. Then she realised the voice came from inside the chapel. She turned back, expecting to see the Blessed Virgin alive. She looked through a small opening in the door. She saw no one.

Inside, she said her usual prayers. The voice seemed to come from the image of the Blessed Virgin. It asked her to recite three Hail Marys in honour of three days in the tomb. She felt an overwhelming sense of rapture. Soon after, she fell ill and was confined to bed for more than a year, unable to return.

For about two years Grima kept quiet. Then she told her friend and neighbour Franġisk Portelli. When she asked whether he had heard voices in the chapel, he said yes. Around the same time, a woman's voice had asked him to pray and to venerate the hidden wound on Christ's shoulder. Soon afterwards a mother was said to have been healed, in most accounts Portelli's own.

The Bishop of Gozo, Pietru Pace, spoke to both witnesses. He concluded the voice was of heavenly origin. The accounts give no date for that inquiry. Pilgrimages began in 1887. In 1891 Mgr Giuseppe Farrugia, who gathered information directly from the people involved, published the first written account.

The open questions are quiet ones. The two accounts were compared only two years later, and Grima prompted Portelli's answer. The first written account came eight years after the event. Even the sources differ on whose body lay three days in the tomb, Mary's or Christ's. In 2014 Joseph Bezzina put the question plainly in the sanctuary periodical: "Karmni veru semgħet lill-Madonna?", meaning did Karmni really hear the Madonna.

In 1920 work began on a Neo-Romanesque church built around the old chapel. Pius XI made it a minor basilica, and the image was crowned in 1935. John Paul II celebrated Mass there in 1990. Benedict XVI gave the image a Golden Rose in 2010. Francis came to pray in 2022.

Grima died in 1922, and her house is now the museum Dar Karmni Grima. Bezzina called the event "the most notable occurrence in the history of the diocese." It began with a voice in an empty chapel.