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    The original font had long gone, of course. What made Altötting special, what attracted the tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Germany, the rest of Europe, even the world, in planes, trains, buses, coaches, cars and even on foot, was the presence of the Mother of God. Or rather, Sister Galina corrected herself with a smile for she had almost erred on the side of heresy, Her miraculous image. The little seventy-centimetre crude wooden carving of the Holy Virgin had been brought to Altötting, nobody knew from where, some time in the early fourteenth century, but its cult dated from 1489 when a three-year-old child believed drowned had miraculously come back to life when brought before it. Since then the legend of miracles attributed to the statue had spread like a bush fire to make Altötting the German-speaking world’s prime pilgrimage site dedicated to the cult of Mary, visited annually by up to 300,000 believers. The Altötting cult had reached its climax not in the Middle Ages but on the 15th of August, Ascension Day, 2008, when Benedict XVI, the first German pope in nearly 1,000 years, and coincidentally a local lad by birth, returned to his homeland to bestow on Altötting a papal Golden Rose, one of the highest honours of the Catholic Church.
    It was not Sister Galina’s job to attend to the Blessed Virgin; she was too lowly to be allowed the job of dusting around Her, let alone cladding Her in any of the vast wardrobe of silver, gold and jewel-encrusted robes accumulated over the centuries.
    She bowed her head in the direction of the holy image before turning to open the door on the right which led into the sacristy. This was the mundane part of the chapel, a little room furnished in relatively modern style, that is with the dull functionality of thelate twentieth century. It contained a desk, two chairs, filing cabinets and, as Sister Galina demonstrated by clicking a switch, even had electric light. The only obvious ecclesiastical item in the room was a large silver chalice which stood on the desk next to several heavy, leather-clad books.
    She sat down at the desk and opened the uppermost ledger at the bookmark she had placed within its pages yesterday. Then she opened the desk drawer and took out the expensive italic fountain pen kept specifically for the purpose of making entries in the ledger.
    It was not exactly state-of-the-art, but even a nun younger than Sister Galina brought up on the cusp of the twenty-first century would still regret the day – possibly not far off, now that the order had its own website and email address – when even tasks such as this were computerised. It would not exactly be sacrilege but a break with the past, with centuries of tradition. Here above all else tradition mattered.
    It was Sister Galina’s task, although she thought of it more as an honour, to record the letters, prayers and offerings sent by grateful recipients of divine mercy. She would note down, as her colleagues and predecessors had done for hundreds of years, the names of those offering their thanks to the Madonna, the city, town, district or even foreign land they came from, what their prayer to her had been and in what way it had been answered.
    Some pilgrims whose prayers had been answered, often months or years afterwards – and sometimes with the intervention of modern medicine rather than by instantaneous intercession, but deemed their cure miraculous nonetheless – came back to leave offerings. There were crutches no longer needed piled by the door. Others, following an ancient, if somewhat grotesque, tradition, sent replicas of their formerly afflicted organs. The custom had begun with mediaeval princes, some of whom had donated near life-size silver images of themselves. The greatest among them had obtained permission for their hearts, after death, to be encased in elaborate gold or silver urns and entombed in niches in the wall around the sacred statue. No fewer than twenty-two