Residents of Silhouette were treated to a number of social events to remember last weekend, when different partners involved on the island joined hands to commemorate the parish feast ‘Our Lady of the Rosary’ (Notre Dame du Rosaire) celebrated on October 7.
The celebration included an extended mass hosted by the Catholic Church alongside the Silhouette Stakeholders Committee (comprising the department of community development, Islands Development Company and Labriz Silhouette) and a number of other activities bringing together different groups living and working on the island.
Those included staff from the Hilton Labriz Resort and Spa as well as representatives of the Island Conservation Society (ICS), whose presence on the island call attention to the conservation of Silhouette’s dense forest and indigenous life forms, believed to be untouched by human activities.
But for once conservation was a secondary cause to the reason residents and other partners had come together over the three days of activities, with focus lying heavily on the religious aspect of the occasion.
For that occasion the church was specially decorated for the mass on Friday evening, celebrated by guest cleric, Father Frederick coming all the way from Mahé.
The priest’s sermon accentuated the importance of the occasion and that of religion in the lives of residents and workers earning their livelihood on the island, but more importantly it shed light on the parish’s feast, the reason for the special gathering.
Also known as the feast of Our Lady of Victory, Our Lady of the Rosary is the title of the Blessed Virgin Mary in relation to the Rosary.
The Rosary is a form of prayer in the Catholic Church, named for the stream of prayer beads used to count pieces of prayers.
This basically translates in patrons seamlessly counting the beads to achieve a desired number of prayers needed to reach a required target.
Our Lady of the Rosary is the patron saint of several places around the world, including that of the diocese of Malaga in Spain, one of the more popular sites to share the distinction with Silhouette.
Its iconic figure is inaugurated in at least two known locations on the island of Silhouette, the more popular of the two being a shrine statuette of the Virgin Mary found half way to ‘Grand Barbe’ in the gruesome hills separating ‘La Passe’, the main area on the island, from the other habitation.
Usually patrons from both ends of the island climbed through the hill all the way to the shrine on the occasion of the parish’s feast, but IDC’s representative Christianne Commetant said this was not done on this occasion due to the fact the parish’s feast is not celebrated yearly which may have contributed to the oversight.
She remarked for example that last year the feast was not commemorated at all due to it falling on a weekday.
“With it being on the weekend this time, we thought it was fitting to mark the occasion properly and in the process provide the residents with a good time,” she added.
Besides the special mass, this year’s feast of the ‘Our Lady of the Rosary’ was celebrated through multiple mass sports activities involving all the factions on the island.
The accompanying photographs show highlights of the activities on Silhouette to commemorate the parish feast ‘Our Lady of the Rosary’.
Source : Seychelles NATION