Untier of Knots

It is a 17th-century devotion that Jorge Mario Bergoglio discovered in Augsburg in 1986, a devotion to Our Lady the Untier of Knots – especially the "knots" of sin and twisted relationships that afflict families and destroy marriages. He brought it back to Argentina with him and promoted it there. The devotion is connected with the image of our Lady the Virgin of the Snows, which helps to explain his visit to Santa Maria Maggiore in his first day of office in Rome. CTS have published a book by Miguel Cuartero Samperi on this topic, and it is touched upon in this article from which the illustration was borrowed.

Cuarto writes: "The devotion to Mary Untier of Knots has been, since its origin, closely connected to marriage and the family, as it was to save the indissoluble bond between two spouses that the Virgin Mary desired to manifest her closeness and the efficacy of her intercession. Mary Untier of Knots is therefore invoked above all for family problems: marital crises, incomprehension, infidelity, separations and divisions between spouses, problems of every kind with the children, disputes between siblings, risky pregnancies, violence in the family, illnesses, work problems and other kinds of difficult situations that, like small and large knots to be untied, make family life a cluster of tangles."