On this remote isle, an icon of the Virgin Mary has endured the flames of war

Little is known about the miracle of the wooden statue that endured flames, yet remains unsinged.

The figurine can be found in Bougainville, a little-known island in the South Pacific. Roughly the size of Hawaii’s main island—though far less visited—it’s in the most remote part of Papua New Guinea.

Carved from dark wood, the statue is an icon of Saint Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Had its supernatural story played out somewhere else ― such as Mexico, where a cloak bearing Mary’s image is venerated, or Italy, where some claim a Mary statue weeps blood ― it might have attracted more attention.

But to those in Bougainville, which has a population of 300,000, this icon is no less miraculous. Its existence and what it represents are a source of strength for the people.

“Even though it was made of wood, it wasn’t burned,” said Marina Kuresu, 56, a caretaker of the icon. “It’s God’s plan that the statue is still surviving.”

The story of its reputed imperviousness to flames began many decades ago.

Throughout the 20th century, American and European missionaries traveled long distances to reach Bougainville and convert its Indigenous people to Catholicism. Many found that eyes widened when they spoke of Mary. The islanders have believed, for eons, that women are divine: spiritual guardians of their life-giving and sacred land. All Bougainvilleans belong to one of several thousand large clans ― and most clans are matrilineal, with power flowing from grandmothers to mothers to daughters.

“When Christianity came to Bougainville, it really fit with our culture,” said Simon Koraikove, a former high-ranking official in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bougainville, the island’s link to the Vatican. “Mothers are special to us. Mothers mold us, like what Mary did for Jesus when he was a child.”

One of the foreign priests who came to Bougainville sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s brought the statue with him: a likeness of Mary, hooded, head bowed, hair flowing down over her shoulders. 

He said it was carved in Italy. According to Kuresu, the priest kept the icon in his wooden home, built at the base of a lush mountain near the town of Arawa.

Then in the late 1980s, war erupted in Bougainville ― the bloodiest fighting in the South Pacific since World War II. Locals were aghast that a copper mine, among the world’s most profitable, was poisoning their ancestral lands. They were doubly enraged that so little wealth was shared by the mine’s owner: Rio Tinto.

When Bougainvilleans rebelled, security forces from Papua New Guinea, armed and trained by Australia, flooded the island to get the mine running again. Locals resisted, at first with blades, bows and arrows, and later with machine guns won in combat. Villagers such as Kuresu, then a young woman, fled into the jungle. Many Bougainvilleans, thumbing their rosaries, hailed Mary as the patron saint of their struggle ― a celestial, feminine force that would protect their island from rapacious outsiders.

In 1994, during a lull in fighting, a few locals emerged from the jungle to check on the priest. He was gone. So was his wooden home, reduced to cinders and scorched planks. “The house was burned down,” Kuresu said. “We don’t know who burned it.” 

They presumed the Mary icon was rendered into ash — until “someone had a dream that the “Miracle Mother” was buried underneath the ashes.

It was, and when the locals brushed off the dirt and soot, the statue bore no black marks or char. Nearby there was a Bible in Tok Pisin, an English-based Creole spoken on the island. It, too, was largely unharmed, though mushrooms grew from its cover.

Today, the Mary icon is contained within a shrine: a one-room wooden structure painted eggshell white, built near the remains of the priest’s home. The statue stands inside a small alcove built into an interior wall. A rosary, its beads the color of pearls, hangs from Mary’s clasped hands.

“We are not just praying to the statue or whatever, the wood,” Kuresu said. “We feel the presence of Mother Mary with us while we pray here at the shrine.”

They often pray that the war’s bloodshed, ending in the early 2000s, won’t come to naught. 

Bougainvilleans only agreed to stop fighting if they could peacefully pursue their ultimate dream: a country of their own, free from Papua New Guinea. A referendum five years ago, overseen by the United Nations, saw 98% of the island’s voters opting for independence. And Bougainville’s leaders have vowed to announce the world’s newest country no later than 2027.

Marina Kuresu believes the time has come for a new generation of Bougainvilleans to tap into Mary’s divine powers. “Only through the prayers of our people, if we are close to Jesus and Mary, will we truly achieve independence.”