by Marie-Lucile Kubacki
Banneux –Showing the link that unites devotion to the Mother of God with the missionary vocation, and the joy of proclaiming the Gospel, an experience open to every baptized person: this is the heart of the first edition of the Marian Missionary Festival, which will take place at the Shrine of Our Lady of Banneux, Belgium, on Sunday, July 26, 2026. Organized by the Pontifical Missionary Union in collaboration with the European Vietnamese Pilgrimage Community, this unprecedented event gathers faithful and missionaries around the Marian figure, whose devotion is widespread across the Asian continent. As Father Dinh Anh Nhue Nguyen , Secretary General of the Pontifical Missionary Union, explains: “This is the first edition of a festival that brings together the Marian matrix and the missionary matrix. Marian devotion, deeply felt in Asian countries, unites with the missionary commitment of all the baptized. They are called to be missionary disciples like Mary.”
On the occasion of this first edition, a Mass of Thanksgiving will be celebrated for the beatification of the martyr priest Francis Xavier Trương Bửu Diệp on July 2, 2026, an event of major significance as it was the very first beatification ceremony ever celebrated on Vietnamese soil. The Eucharistic celebration will be presided over by His Excellency Most Rev. Frédéric Rossignol, Bishop of Tournai. Prior to the Mass, two conferences—given in English and Vietnamese—will be led by Father Anthony Chantry , National Director of Missio for England and Wales, and Father Dinh Anh Nhue Nguyen.
Father Anh Nhue indicates that these teachings “will focus on aspects of living and witnessing to the faith in all circumstances of life, whether at the parish, at work, at school, and in the family, and therefore also on martyrdom, around the promise of Christ who came ‘to give his life’ so that his sheep ‘may have life in abundance.'” He also emphasizes that this perspective aligns with the Pope’s message for the upcoming World Mission Sunday, in which the Sovereign Pontiff highlights the “Mission of Love.”
By placing the Mother of Christ at the center of this festival, the organizers also highlight an important reality of spiritual life in Asia: Marian devotion as a privileged locus of inculturation and intercultural encounter on the continent. But how? And what conclusions can missionaries draw from this observation?
Mary, Bridge Between Believers and Cultures
On Sept. 12, 2023, the US-based Pew Research Center released an important survey on Buddhism, Islam, and religious pluralism in South and Southeast Asia, interviewing more than 12,000 people from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The survey indicated that numerous non-Christians venerated Mary. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of how Asian Christians and non-Christians approach the Mother of Christ, the Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics —an international academic network hosted by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore—partnered with the Center for Marian Studies in London to conduct a research conference entitled “More Universal than Catholicism? Mary Among Asian Religions.” Gathered in mid-May 2023, this conference featured 18 research papers exploring Marian devotions in 11 countries and across five religious traditions.
Theologian and anthropologist Michel Chambon, coordinator of ISAC, presented the findings in World Mission Magazine, noting that the Virgin Mary transcends religious boundaries, and highlighted several key examples. At Novena Church in Singapore, as well as at the pilgrimage sites of Velankanni in India or Mariamabad in Pakistan, thousands of Muslim and Hindu devotees regularly come to entrust their petitions and make vows to Mary. In Singapore, the movement Origin of the Self, rooted in a Taoist worldview and founded by Professor Zhang Bu Sheng, integrates Mary into its pantheon alongside Jesus and St. Joseph. For these devotees, physical maternity does not really matter; for them, seen from the perspective of their beliefs, the figure of Mary rather embodies the perfect model of a person who, “through her meditation and virtue, she engendered a divine being from within and overcame death,” illustrating “the universal capacity that humans have to engender a higher being from within and to transcend death.” In East Asia, Mary coexists with female deities such as the Bodhisattva Guanyin or the goddess Mazu in Taiwan. From Japanese Edo-period statues to hidden Qing dynasty paintings strategically attributed to the artist Tang Yin to avoid political scrutiny, to contemporary Korean granite statues sculpted by Choi Jong-Tae in the 6th-century Buddhist style, the Marian figure engages in deep dialogue with Asia’s artistic and spiritual heritage.
Michel Chambon also points out that the attraction to Mary is rooted in the intimacy of homes, where her images sometimes sit alongside other spiritual figures . The domestic sphere thus becomes a key site of a “lived religion.”
Furthermore, the cultural reappropriation of figures like Our Lady of La Vang in Vietnam, represented since the late 1990s wearing traditional Vietnamese outfits and a golden headdress, illustrates how Catholicism continuously recasts itself as an authentically Asian faith. “Asian devotions highlight her centrality to the dialogue that Asian people cultivate with Christian and non-Christian traditions,” states Michel Chambon. “Mary in Asia remains an intriguing question taking us beyond our comfort zone. With her colorful devotees, she is a challenging figure who invites us to reconsider our religious position and the ways we conceptualize religion, Catholicism, and interfaith dialogue.”
By gathering the community in Banneux, this first Marian Missionary Festival illustrates that mission is above all a matter of encounter: one embodied by the witness of martyrs, and one that Mary continues to foster among cultures and believers throughout the world.
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