Sir, – Frank McNally's discussion of the Holy House of Loreto (An Irishman's Diary, December 10th) reminds me that the Holy House provides a central episode in Brian Friel's 1993 play, Wonderful Tennessee.
“A flying house is an offence to reason, isn’t it? It marches up to reason and belts it across the gob and says to it ‘F*** you reason, I’m as good as you any day. You haven’t all the f***ing answers, not by any means’.”
Friel told me that the episode was inspired by his childhood memory of a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet on the subject. The House is also the subject of Karin Velez’s 2019 study The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: spreading Catholicism in the early modern world.
– Yours, etc,
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RICHARD PINE,
Corfu,
Greece.