Šiluva had been a Catholic Marian shrine before the Reformation; under Calvinist domination the old church and its parish records were destroyed, the buried foundations forgotten. In 1608, four Calvinist shepherd children saw a beautiful woman holding a child seated on a great rock at the edge of the village. She wept. Asked why, she answered: 'Once in this place my Son was honoured. Now they only plough and sow it.'
The local Calvinist minister investigated and learned from an elderly blind man who, by the children's account, miraculously regained his sight and recalled the location of the buried parish records. The records were excavated; the documents proving the Catholic ownership of the land were recovered; the church was rebuilt. The episode was a turning point in the re-Catholicisation of Lithuania. Approved repeatedly by Rome, the Šiluva sanctuary remains one of the great Marian shrines of the Baltic — visited by John Paul II in 1993.