Holiday home – On the rise and soft landing of the Holy House of Loreto

In some Christian calendars, today is the anniversary of a miraculous event that at the height of its fame, according to one commentator, attracted “the ridicule of one half of the world and the devotion of the other”.

Despite a childhood in which I must have been surrounded by many members of the latter community, the phenomenon had somehow passed me by until a few years ago when I first learned of it on a visit to Croatia.

But the main event is celebrated in the Italian town of Loreto: supposed final resting place of the house of the Virgin Mary, after it left Nazareth sometime in the middle ages, or earlier, and travelled west.

How did a house get from the Middle East to Italy? Well, according to the original tradition, it was flown there by angels. But when that version began to attract scepticism even among the devout, the Vatican advanced a more rational alternative, that the building had been transported from the Holy Lands on a crusader ship.

Egyptology and Dublin music halls – the many careers of Belzoni

---

Poet in suburbia: A memoir about Patrick Kavanagh’s Stillorgan spring

---

Indian File - On the mysterious origins of a notorious quotation

---

Reflections on Revolution - A French account of the War of Independence

---

This did not dampen the faith of the more enthusiastic believers, however, and the cult of Our Lady of Loreto as patron of aviators survived into modern times. When Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927, he had her medallion on board. So did the crew of Apollo 9, one of the preparatory missions for the moon landings.

But if the Holy House did indeed travel by air, then like many long-distance flights it had a stop-over en route. Hence the Croatian angle. For tradition also has it that the house first landed at Trsat in northern Dalmatia, and spent 3½ years there, from 1291 to 1294, before an onward flight across the Adriatic.

Sceptics have noted that in Trsat, the destination was located conveniently close to the powerful Francopan family,who had a castle there (later the home of one of Ireland’s Austrian Wild Geese, Marshal Laval Graf Nugent von Westmeath). If the Francopans were implicated in the choice of landing site, however, why they allowed such a prestigious relic to take off again is unclear.

The dating of these events suggests they coincided with the start of a certain Dante Alighieri’s literary career. Dante would immortalise another pilgrimage of the period (the great gathering in Rome of Easter 1300) by making that the date of his Divine Comedy. In the process he helped establish the popularity of a concept then only recently approved by the Vatican: purgatory.

But it must have been too early for him to notice the Loreto cult, which became popular only from the 14th century onwards and thereafter attracted such pilgrims as Galileo, Descartes, Cervantes, and Mozart, among countless others.

Less reverent visitors including Napoleon’s troops, who sacked the church in 1797 and may have looted its by then considerable treasures (although it’s also said that those were used by the Vatican to pay off debts imposed by Bonaparte).

As to the credibility of the Holy House story, not everyone has fallen into the starkly opposed camps referred to in the opening paragraph. The writer Rebecca West, for example, English-born of a Scottish mother and Anglo-Irish father, came down firmly in the middle.

Detailing the Croatian episode in her magnificent history of Yugoslavia between the wars, she wrote: “This is a story that enchants me. It gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘God moves in mysterious ways’; and the picture of the little house floating through space is a lovely example of the nonsensical function of religion, of its power to cheer the soul by propounding that the universe is sometimes freed from the burden of necessity, which inspires all the best miracles.”

On the other hand, West noted that the cult “has often grieved the matter-of-fact”. She quoted an English priest who visited Loreto in the early 19th century and declared that “many of the more sensible of his faith were extremely distressed” at the legend.

They rather believed the Virgin Mary’s home to be a “cottage or log building long buried in a pathless forest, and unnoticed in a country turned almost into a desert by a succession of civil wars, invasions, and revolutions”.

West was having none of that. Even as she noted the suspicious proximity of the Holy House’s Croatian site to the local castle, she concluded cryptically: “We must admit that sometimes human beings quite simply lie, and indeed it is necessary that they should, for only so can poets who do not know what poetry is compose their works.”