Novena
Every hour that the church is open you will find people lifting pleading faces before the picture of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Framed in burning tropical gold, shooting forth a sunburst of mellow rays, the Picture reminds you how help, Perpetual Help, has gone forth from it into every area of human life, from mortgages to marriages, from examinations to temptations. 
The devotion to Our Lady in Boston, can be traced to the very first evening sermon preached in the original Redemptorist church in 1871. That first smaller church was dedicated in the morning, and in the evening Father Timothy Enright, C.Ss.R. preached a sermon on the new church’s patroness, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Seven years later, the icon was carried in procession to the present church that we know as the Basilica, affectionately called Mission Church. The picture was placed in the shrine where it remains to this day.
Two vases filled with crutches and canes adorn each side of the Shrine, providing testimony to the multitude of cures and graces granted through the intercession of Our Lady. The silver plaque gleaming on one pyramid of crutches was placed there by Colonel P.T. Hanley, of the Civil War, as a tribute for the cure of his daughter, Grace. When Grace was four years old, a fall had shattered her spine. From then on, she was severly disabled, her body boxed in a cast. For years, her parents shuttled her from doctor to doctor, always hoping. They made Novena after Novena at the Shrine, always praying.
And then, on the eighteenth of August, 1883, on the last day of one more Novena, when Grace herself was praying with them, suddenly gave her crutches to her brother, walked over to the Shrine, thanked Our Lady, and marched down the aisle and out of the church.
The dramatic cure became a breathless wonder throughout Boston. More cures began to follow at that time and newspapers across the country hailed the Mission Church Shrine as the “Lourdes in the Land of the Puritans.”
THE ICON
The exact origins of the original painting of Our Lady of Perptual Help are unknown. It is an icon presented in the Byzantine style of the Eastern Catholic church. The painting depicts the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the Holy Child Jesus. They are surrounded by the Archangels Michael and Gabriel holding the instruments of Christ’s passion. On the left side, Michael holds an urn filled with the gall which the soldiers mockingly offered Jesus on the cross, the reed with the sponge soaked with gall, and the lance which pierced His holy side. On the right side, Gabriel carries the cross and four nails.
In this sacred image, Jesus sees His destiny and flees to the protective arms of His Mother. In His haste, one sandal nearly falls off His foot. Our Lady of Perpetual Help solemnly looks at us. Although she cannot remove the suffering which her Son must undergo for us, she is His refuge in her embrace as she perpetually intercedes for us.
The original icon was entrusted to the Redemptorists by Pope Pius IX in 1866, with the instructions to “Make her known”. The restored icon remains in the church of St. Alphonsus, at the Redemptorist headquarters in Rome, Italy. The icon at the Mission Church Shrine is one of the first copies to come to the Americas. Through the efforts of the Redemptorists and other lovers of Mary, the one picture of Mary that is known most throughout the world today is the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
THE NOVENA
Devotions in honor of Our Mother of Perpetual Help are held at the Shrine every Wednesday of the year. People from Charlestown and Chelsea, from Winchester and Winthrop, from North Reading and South Natick, from East Weymouth and West Newton, pour down the marble aisles and stir the lofty arches with the prayers and hymns to Our Mother of Perpetual Help.
The golden age of the Novena may was from 1935–1970. During those banner years there were eight services each Wednesday, with the three evening services being broadcast over speakers in the lower church to accommodate the crowds overflowing the massive upper church. It was Cardinal Cushing who suggested that the Novena should take to the broader airwaves, and on April 19, 1945, the Novena was broadcast for the first time on Radio Station WHDH, which would carry the Novena every Wednesday for the next thirty years. In 1975 WHDH chose to drop the Novena, and the Redemptorists decided to solicit funds to pay for a weekly broadcast on WROL, a small AM station with mostly religious programming. That radio broadcast lasted until 2007.
The Novena entered the world of television in 1984, and for the last twenty five years the Novena has been carried into people’s homes in English and Spanish over the CatholicTV Network.
