The Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas was founded in 1954 by Fr. José María Azpiazu, a refugee priest who had brought from his home village of San Juan de los Lagos in Mexico a small 14-inch wooden statue of Our Lady of San Juan. The shrine grew rapidly into a major pilgrimage destination for the Mexican-American Catholic community of the southwestern United States.
On Friday, October 23, 1970, at 10:45 AM, a former priest named Francis B. Alexander, who had been laicized and had become increasingly mentally unstable, took off in a rented Piper Cherokee from McAllen Airport. He flew the plane directly into the dome of the shrine. The plane struck the roof, broke through, and exploded inside the church. Alexander and the three workers inside were killed; the shrine was destroyed.
Pilgrims and clergy waded into the burning wreckage in search of the small statue of Our Lady, which had stood on the high altar at the moment of impact. They found her among the ash and twisted steel, perfectly intact — not even the paint scorched, not the rosary on her hand displaced. She was carried out and re-enshrined in an undamaged adjacent building while the new basilica was being constructed.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, dedicated in 1980, replaced the destroyed building on the same site. The original statue, four hundred years old and twice translated across the US-Mexico border, still stands at its high altar. The basilica was elevated to its present rank by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and receives over a million pilgrims annually — the most-visited Catholic shrine in the United States.