Church of Our Lady of the Sablon

The Gothic facade conceals an active church that grew from a chapel of the city's crossbowmen. Their brotherhood received a plot of cemetery land by the city wall of the time and maintained a small sanctuary of Our Lady here; the name Sablon remained from the sandy soil around it. When pilgrims began coming to the chapel, it was replaced by a large Gothic church. Catholic worship continues inside, and the statue of Our Lady is dressed in embroidered mantles of different liturgical colors.

In thirteen forty-eight, the spinner Beatrice Soetkens took a statue of Our Lady from a church in Antwerp, hiding it beneath her cloak. That is what a Brussels legend tells; there are no documents that would turn this woman and her journey into an established fact.

According to the legend, Soetkens earned her living processing cloth and twice heard a command from the Virgin Mary herself: to take the neglected image and bring it to Brussels. For a poor craftswoman, that meant appropriating a venerated church object from another city. A sacristan tried to stop her, but miraculously lost the ability to move. Then Beatrice and her husband loaded the statue into a boat. The legend sends them upstream without a sail raised and immobilizes the pursuers whenever they draw near.

The boat arrived at a sandy patch beyond the city wall of the time. The name Sablon—“sandy place”—came from this soil. Several decades before Soetkens's journey, those administering the Hospital of Saint John had ceded part of the cemetery land here to the Great Guild of Crossbowmen. The crossbowmen were an armed civic brotherhood: they took part in the defense of Brussels and maintained a small chapel of Our Lady at the Sablon.

At the end of the legend, John III, Duke of Brabant, the ruler of these lands, meets the boat together with the crossbowmen. Beatrice hands him the statue; she is not put on trial, and the image is ceremonially carried into the chapel. The guild adopts Our Lady as its patroness and begins carrying the statue around the sanctuary every year. This circuit was called the Ommegang.

More and more pilgrims came. In the early fifteenth century, the crossbowmen replaced the chapel with the large Gothic church now before the listener. In fourteen forty-eight, Brussels city councilors took control of what had previously been the guild's procession. The Ommegang went beyond the bounds of the brotherhood and became the city's main procession. After handing over the statue, Beatrice disappears from the story, but the spinner's act determined the church's size, its dedication, and the festival that still exists today.

The statue brought from Antwerp was destroyed during the religious wars in fifteen eighty. The present image of Our Lady was given to the church by Archduchess Isabella, ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. In this active Catholic church, the statue is dressed in embroidered mantles of different liturgical colors. And in the right transept, beneath a stone rose window, there is a boat—a physical retelling of the legend of the theft from which the Church of Our Lady of the Sablon grew.