Text on Icon: Our Lady the Theotokos Grieving for Infants Killed in the Womb
The history of the icon:
Schema-Archimandrite Jonah (Ignatenko) - the famous elder from Odessa - blessed people to organize a religious procession and go throughout Ukraine in order to stop abortions. The priest said that the cup of God's patience was overflowing and if that terrible and wholesale extermination of children was not stopped, the Lord would punish the people. According to the words of the elder, if religious processions were to take place and people would repent of the sin of abortion, the Lord will extend the time for repentance.
For a long time nothing could be organized and there was no icon. Then, one day the Mother of God revealed an icon on a flat stone by the seashore to a resident of Kyiv, Tatiana, who was an iconographer and parishioner of the Makarievsky parish. She saw a drawing in the stone that gave her the idea for an icon.
Tatiana began to sketch her idea on a piece of paper showing the grieving Theotokos holding the Infant Christ and the Lord stretching out His hands to the murdered infant held by an angel with red blood flowing from the baby. As she continued to sketch, it grew dark however she noticed that only the piece of paper, the place around it, the pen and the stone were glowing with light so that she could finish the drawing!
Later, the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine, Volodymyr, blessed her to paint a large icon and make a religious procession with it. The icon of the Mother of God was called "Our Lady the Theotokos Grieving for Infants Killed in the Womb".
On August 14, 2012, the first All-Ukrainian penitential religious procession "For the salvation of unborn children and the preservation of family values" was started. For more than a year people went through the territory of Ukraine from east to west and from north to south, about 4.5 thousand kilometers long. The icon of the Mother of God turned out to be miraculous. The icon which shed tears during the procession began to open the hearts of many women, leading them to repentance.
