A jubilee pilgrimage of hope through the Shrine of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Small, unassuming Pontiac chapel and shrine have been a place of pilgrimage, prayer and hope for more than 100 years

The Archdiocese of Detroit has designated 12 local pilgrimage sites for Catholics to visit during the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope. Each month during 2025, Detroit Catholic will highlight one of these sites to encourage Catholics to take advantage of the extraordinary graces offered during the jubilee.

PONTIAC — Tucked away on a residential street in Pontiac, the unassuming exterior of St. Joseph Chapel and the Shrine of the Immaculate Heart of Mary could easily be missed by passersby. However, once curious visitors cross the thresholds of the chapel or the shrine, they instantly become pilgrims on a spiritual journey of hope that began in 1923 at the behest of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The chapel and shrine are the northernmost of the 12 pilgrimage sites designated by the Archdiocese of Detroit for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope. What began in 1923 as the mission church of the Orchard Lake Seminary to serve the Polish-speaking community of Pontiac is now a rosary and Fatima shrine dedicated to Our Lady and run by Terra Sancta Ministries, a Franciscan pilgrimage ministry headed by Fr. Alex Kratz, OFM.

Terra Sancta Ministries began in 2008 in Southfield, but in 2015, the ministry purchased St. Joseph Church in Pontiac, which had closed a few years earlier during a parish merger. Since 2018, the chapel and shrine have become a place of pilgrimage, retreat and spiritual renewal, operated by a dedicated team of volunteers, Fr. Kratz said.

However, between the parish’s founding in 1923 and its reopening as a shrine in 2018, Fr. Kratz points to a “pivotal moment” in the site’s history in 1947, which took place nearly 500 miles north of Pontiac.

In June 1947, the Marian Congress was held in Ottawa, Canada, and Fr. Bernard F. Mary Jarzembowski, a Polish priest and pastor of St. Joseph’s in Pontiac, attended.

During the congress, which Fr. Kratz said was “the largest religious event in North America,” 40,000 men escorted a statue of Our Lady of the Cape on a three-mile procession through Ottawa. While praying before that very statue during the congress, Fr. Jarzembowski had a profound spiritual experience.

“Father was praying in front of her in June 1947, and weeping tears as the Holy Spirit came over him,” Fr. Kratz explained. “Our Lady asked him to start a shrine in Pontiac, where people could develop a relationship with her that would be a treasure for the rest of their lives.”

By 1948, Fr. Jarzembowski had received permission to create a replica of the statue from the Oblates who ran Our Lady of the Cape Sanctuary in Trois-Rivieres, where the original statue was kept. In a corner of St. Joseph Chapel, he set up a shrine of Our Lady for the people of Pontiac, where, to this day, pilgrims can visit the replica statue he commissioned and leave their prayer intentions at the feet of Our Lady.

Fr. Kratz said pilgrims from all over the United States have journeyed to this “offshoot of the Trois-Riviere” shrine since its inception.

“Mary requested this shrine,” Fr. Kratz said. “There wasn’t a miraculous apparition. It was like an interlocution, the way she communicated to (Fr. Jarzembowski) to have this shrine started. Last year, during the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, the original traveling Our Lady of the Cape statue that Fr. Jarzembowski prayed before was brought down, and we were one of the stops along the way. I told people that 77 years later, she came to check out what she asked for.”

Over the years, many people have reported miracles at the shrine, including one in 1960, when several women said they saw the statue animate from the waist up and shed a tear. A single tear streak can be seen on the statue's left cheek, Fr. Kratz said.

The chapel and shrine help pilgrims feel closer to Jesus through his mother, and embolden them to live their faith in the world today, Fr. Kratz said.

“It’s hard to live the Gospel today in our culture, and hopefully we’re just a little place where people can find renewal and then go back home to their parishes to live the Gospel and contribute,” Fr. Kratz said. “We are not a parish — we aren’t trying to be that — but this is what we can be.”

During the Jubilee Year of Hope, one of the many fruits of a visit to the chapel and shrine is an increase in the virtue of hope, Fr. Kratz added.

“We are agents of hope, and I think when people come here and experience the closeness of our spiritual mother to them, they’re encouraged to not only continue on the pilgrimage of faith in their own lives, but to share that encouragement and hope with other people," Fr. Kratz said. "You can’t give what you don’t have. There’s a tangibility of God’s presence here.”

The jubilee year is a chance to remind the world that Christians are "perpetual jubilarians," not just once every 25 years, Fr. Kratz said.

“A jubilee is a time of favor from God, and I think pilgrims who visit here experience that favor or grace,” Fr. Kratz said. “They live that jubilee not just in a year of jubilee, but in their normal lives. Jesus came to bring a year of favor for us, but really our whole life is a type of jubilee — jubilation or joy in the Lord.”