Nossa Senhora Desatadora dos Nós

Around 1700 a canon in Augsburg named Hieronymus Langenmantel gave this altarpiece to the Perlach church, and the reason was personal. His grandparents had nearly divorced almost a century earlier, and a Jesuit priest had prayed over their wedding ribbon, asking to loosen every knot in it. The marriage held. So the picture you see grew straight out of that family story. Mary stands between heaven and earth, and in her hands runs a long white ribbon full of tangles that she is patiently working loose, one knot at a time, while a second stretch of it comes out smooth below. For centuries the devotion stayed mostly local. Then a young Argentine studying in Germany in the 1980s came across it here, carried the image home, and much later, as Pope Francis, made Mary Untier of Knots known far beyond Bavaria.