Today the global Church will celebrate the optional memorial of Our Lady of Loreto for the first time. Unlike most other Marian feast days, Our Lady of Loreto doesn’t refer to an apparition or a Marian title. It refers to a building. Specifically, it refers to the humble home in which Mary grew up and the extraordinary measures God took to preserve it.
We know that the early Christians revered this house as Mary’s home. St. Epiphanius, St. Willibald, and the Venerable Bede all wrote about it. Later, St. Helena even built a basilica over it. St. Louis IX of France was the last saint to visit the sancta casa in Nazareth in 1251, just before the Fall of Jerusalem. St. Helena’s basilica was destroyed in 1263.
This is where the story gets interesting. The Sancta Casa appeared in Italy as early as 1291. Legend says that angels carried the house from Nazareth to modern-day Croatia, then on to Italy. There’s actually a detailed story about two brothers discovering the Sancta Casa and arguing over how to make the most profit from it. The house then disappeared and reappeared on a road next to a ditch in the town of Loreto, off the Adriatic coast.
Some historians believe that a family called the Ageli was responsible for bringing the house over by ship. That’s fine; Catholics aren’t required to believe that angels affect archeology, and there’s strong evidence supporting that theory. But archeologists in the 1960s actually did find the Sancta Casa’s stone is from Palestine, as are minute bits of pollen found in the stone. There is also graffiti on the stone that matches graffiti in St. Helena’s ruined basilica. Finally, measurements of the remains of the foundation in Nazareth perfectly match the Sancta Casa. It’s the same house.
Loreto reminds us that God didn’t choose a mighty, otherworldly being to bear his son, or even a rich and powerful empress. He chose Mary. He let his son’s mother enter this world in a small stone house in an outpost of the Roman Empire. She did chores there, brushed her hair, had restless nights staring at the ceiling. She welcomed an angel and agreed to give birth to the Messiah in that house. She packed her bags and left from that house to visit her pregnant cousin. She raised Our Lord, made his meals, watched him play with St. Joseph on that floor.
To quote Pope St. John Paul II again, Loreto is “the first temple, the first church on which shone the light of the maternity of the Mother of God.”
God in his mercy left us this ordinary building that became the setting to crucial moments in our salvation. We can touch those walls and look at that same ceiling. All of this serves as a physical reminder that we aren’t uttering empty words to a distant sky daddy; we’re part of a story that has left tangible imprints across the world.
It’s as real as he is.
-Ascension Press, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑥𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑆𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑜, Melissa Keating, 10/10/2019
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