Mount Mary Church

In the 1700s, Bandra was invaded by a pirate army of the Muscat Arabs. They were looking for treasures and hoped to find them in the shrine. Much to their disappointment, when they started ransacking the shrine, they realised there was no treasure there. Down and desperate, they chopped off the right forearm of Mary's statue, thinking it was made of gold. Frustrated at the futile effort, they decided to set fire to the church and burn the whole place down. Just as they finalized on this thought and prepared to execute it, a huge swarm of bees entered the church and attacked them! They were writhing in pain from the brutal stings. That is when they realized that it was a consequence of their evil thoughts, and were compelled to leave the church empty handed- with no treasure and no ill minded thoughts either.

To protect the devotees from disappointment, the damaged statue was stored in the lumber room and replaced with a statue of Our Lady of Navigators from the side altar of St. Andrew's Church. This statue has an interesting story behind its discovery.

A Koli fisherman once dreamt that he would find a statue of the mother in the sea, and to his surprise, he found the statue the very next day! A Jesuit Annual Letter that dated back to 1669 supported that the statue had in fact been floating in the sea between 1700 and 1760. In 1761, the church was rebuilt. The broken statue of Our Lady of the Mount was fixed by moulding in a detachable statue of a child Jesus, the one that we see and worship now.