…the day in Germany is half over.

This morning, Pope Benedict left Munich, and flew by helicopter to Altötting, the site of an important Marian shrine, housing one of the several Black Madonnas venerated around the world.

Here is more about Altötting and its shrine:

Small in form, but large in history and significance, the Miraculous Image chapel rules the spacious Kapellplatz (Chapel Square). Its Octagon (octagonal tower), the core construction of this church, presumably from the 700’s, may be the oldest central construction in Germany.
The octagonal ground plan of the Miraculous Image Chapel indicates the original purpose as a baptismal chapel. According to legend, the holy Bishop Rupertus of Salzburg baptised the first Christian Bavarian duke here. The approx. 70 cm-high, early Gothic scene of a standing Mother of God with the Child, which stems from Burgundy or along the Upper Rhine and is carved out of lime-wood, arrived here around 1330. About 150 years later, in 1489, after the reports of two healing miracles, it became a pilgrimage goal and miraculous image of the Madonna.

The walkways to the chapel are decorated with votive plaques.

There is a Capuchin saint associated with the shrine, St. Conrad of Parzham:

The link goes to a rather lengthy biography of St. Conrad at the Capuchin site, and it’s worth a read. St. Conrad, who died in 1894 and was canonized in 1934 by Pope Pius XI, was a porter of the Capuchin friary near the shrine – and some day I’m gonig to write an article on Holy Porters – it is such a profound metaphor for discipleship on many levels, these men and women who ministered to the seekers, the pigrims, the poor and those seeking healing and reconciliation, at the doors of monasteries and convents through history. Venerable Solanus Casey, also a Capuchin, served as a porter, as did Blessed Andre Bessette.

Conrad of Parzham was the first German canonized since the Reformation. Like Therese of Lisieux, who died three years later, he was the saint of little things.

During Pope John Paul II’s visit to Altötting on Nov. 18, 1980, he called Conrad the "humble and cheerful porter of St. Ann’s friary. Let us observe him kneeling before the little window he opened in the wall to see the altar. Let us too, in our daily lives, break through the wall of the visible world to see the Lord."

There’s also a connection to the US:

We Capuchins of Mid-America very appropriately honor him as our heavenly patron. Many of our predecessors, the old friars who labored in Kansas in the late 1800s and early 1900s, knew Conrad personally.

Indeed they were fellow members of his Bavarian Province and, on their way to America, they had passed through the very portals of St. Ann’s Friary in Altötting, which Conrad personally tended.

On a pilgrimage to Our Lady’s shrine at Altötting in 1891, Charles J. Jaegle, a journalist from Pittsburgh PA, made Bro. Conrad’s acquaintance. In the course of one of their conversations at the friary door, Bro. Conrad spoke to Jaegle of the Seraphic Work of Charity which the Capuchins operated at Toner Institute in Pittsburgh and urged him to use the Pittsburgh Observor, which Jaegle had founded, to support this activity.

Jaegle was surprised at Conrad’s knowledge of America and the work done there by his confreres and at his inquiring after old friends and the progress of the young Province of St. Augustine—the western half of which was later to be the Mid-American province named after Conrad himself. "Every day," Conrad assured Jaegle, "I pray for my brothers in the United States."