Three Holy Houses: Walsingham, Loreto and the Restoration of the Soul
MASS Terribilis est
LESSON Eccles. 24: 11-13, 15-20
GOSPEL St Luke 1: 26-38
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The Church begins this Mass with a word that ought to arrest us: Terribilis. “Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est, et porta caeli” — “How awe-inspiring is this place: this is the house of God and the gate of heaven.” These are Jacob’s words at Bethel. He is not standing in a sanctuary. He is a fugitive, fleeing Esau and travelling towards Haran. Night falls; he lies down in the open and takes a stone for his pillow. There, where he expects only darkness and uncertainty, heaven is opened. He sees a ladder joining earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. Jacob awakes and cries: “Indeed the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” He sets up the stone, pours oil upon it, and names the place Bethel — the House of God.
That context matters. God takes a place of exile and makes it a sanctuary; earth is shown joined to heaven. And the Church gives us Jacob’s words today because Walsingham is likewise the mystery of a dwelling and a meeting-place between heaven and earth. Before Walsingham there was Nazareth; before the Holy House in Norfolk, the Holy House in Galilee; and before any Christian church built of stone, there was Mary herself: Domus Dei, the House of God; Porta caeli, the Gate of Heaven.
The Gospel makes this explicit. Gabriel comes to Mary, and the Angel tells her: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” The words recall the divine cloud overshadowing the Tabernacle. The Fathers therefore saw Mary as the true Ark: not carrying merely the Law, but the Lawgiver Himself; not manna, but Him who is the Bread of Life. St Ambrose teaches that in every Christian soul there should be something of Mary: her soul to magnify the Lord and her spirit to rejoice in God. Already the feast presents us with three Holy Houses: Nazareth, Mary herself, and the Christian soul in which God dwells by grace.
According to the ancient English tradition, the story of Walsingham begins in 1061, five years before the Norman Conquest. Richeldis de Faverches, a widowed noblewoman, was shown in vision the house at Nazareth where Gabriel had announced the Incarnation and was asked to build its likeness in Norfolk. Thus, in an obscure East Anglian village, a little house arose in memory of Mary’s Fiat, and Walsingham became England’s Nazareth.
There is a striking correspondence here with another of Christendom’s great Marian shrines: Loreto. According to its ancient tradition, the house associated with Our Lady at Nazareth came from the Holy Land and reached Loreto in 1294. Strikingly, the medieval Holy House at Walsingham and the original Nazarene footprint associated with Loreto were of nearly identical proportions, particularly in width. Two independent traditions, separated by centuries and geography, converge upon the same concrete mystery: the house at Nazareth where God entered human history.
Even the traditions echo one another. At Walsingham the house is said to have been miraculously established elsewhere when the workmen could not erect it as intended; Loreto likewise became famous for the tradition of miraculous translation. Whatever judgement one makes about those particulars, the theological instinct is unmistakably Catholic: God sanctifies matter because the Word became flesh.
That is why the Holy House matters. Christianity is not an abstraction. The Son of God entered history at a particular moment, in a particular town, within a particular house, and took a real human nature from a real woman. Catholicism therefore takes matter seriously because the Incarnation takes matter seriously: water baptises, oil anoints, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, altars are consecrated, churches become sacred places. At the centre of everything stands the astonishing fact that God once inhabited a human home.
By about 1130, Augustinian Canons had charge of Walsingham, and the shrine became one of the great pilgrimage destinations of medieval Christendom. Edward I is traditionally reckoned to have visited thirteen times. Henry VIII came as a pilgrim in 1511, before his revolt from the Church. Kings and labourers, priests and peasants came in pilgrimage. England was called Our Lady’s Dowry not because the English were sinless, but because the nation still knew where to kneel.
And elsewhere today the Church also keeps the feast of Our Lady of Ransom. As we reflected earlier this week, that devotion arose especially from the ransoming of Christian captives and the work of the Mercedarian Order. The two feasts are distinct, but their mysteries meet beautifully. Walsingham recalls the moment when the Redeemer took flesh from Mary; Our Lady of Ransom reminds us why He came. The Son conceived at Nazareth came to redeem fallen man. Mary does not ransom us — Christ alone is our Redeemer — but she gives the world Him who pays the price.
Then came the destruction. In 1537 the sub-prior, Nicholas Mileham, was executed amid the suppression of the religious houses. In July 1538 the priory was surrendered, its treasures seized, the Holy House destroyed, and the image of Our Lady carried away, traditionally believed afterwards to have been burned in London. Within twenty-seven years, the pilgrim king who had knelt at Walsingham had become the king under whose authority the shrine was extinguished.
Yet men could destroy Walsingham; they could not destroy Nazareth. They could burn an image; they could not erase Gabriel’s salutation. They could suppress pilgrimage; they could not repeal the Incarnation. Human power may profane what is sacred; it cannot make false what God has done.
And even the stones waited. The Slipper Chapel, about a mile from Walsingham, was the place where pilgrims traditionally removed their shoes before walking the final “Holy Mile” barefoot to the Holy House and shrine church. That little chapel survived. In 1896, Charlotte Boyd purchased and restored it. On 20 August 1897, Catholic pilgrimage returned publicly to Walsingham, significantly organised by the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom. Then in August 1934, Bishop Laurence Youens celebrated Mass publicly in the restored chapel, and four days later Cardinal Bourne led a national pilgrimage of some twelve thousand souls.
Thus the title of Ransom is woven into Walsingham’s modern restoration as well as into its theology. A shrine once lost was recovered; pilgrimage once forbidden returned; and the devotion of Our Lady of Ransom helped bring Catholic England back publicly towards its Nazareth.
Yet restoring a shrine is easier than restoring a people. Stones may be repaired quickly; souls and civilisations may require generations. And so today’s Collect carries us beyond Norfolk. We ask God, who sanctified the house of the Blessed Virgin “by the mystery of the Word made flesh,” that we may shun the dwellings of sinners and become worthy to dwell in His holy house. Suddenly the feast turns inward.
St Thomas Aquinas teaches that God is present to every creature by His power, presence and essence, but that He dwells in the rational soul in a further and intimate manner through sanctifying grace, as One who is known and loved. By Baptism the Christian soul becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost. Mortal sin is terrible precisely because it profanes that sanctuary.
Here, then, are the three Holy Houses: Nazareth, where the Word became flesh; Mary, in whose immaculate womb the Word dwelt; and the Christian soul, in which Father, Son and Holy Ghost desire to dwell by grace.
Walsingham therefore asks a more uncomfortable question than whether England has preserved its Catholic inheritance. It asks whether we have preserved the Holy House within ourselves. We may lament the destruction of shrines while permitting resentment, impurity, vanity or pride to strip the sanctuary of our own hearts. We may pray for the conversion of England while resisting the conversion God asks of us.
Our Lady shows us how restoration begins: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done unto me according to thy word.” Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. St Bernard imagines the whole world waiting upon Mary’s reply: Adam and Eve wait, the patriarchs and prophets wait, fallen humanity waits. And Mary says yes. Her Fiat makes room for God.
That is the great question of Walsingham: have we made room for God? What sin must be confessed? What resentment surrendered? What prayer resumed? What attachment relinquished? The Holy House is rebuilt in us when the sinner returns to confession, when temptation is refused, when prayer begins again, whenever the soul answers God with Mary: Fiat.
And therefore pray for the conversion of England — but give that prayer names. Pray for the child who has ceased to believe, the spouse who has left the sacraments, the grandchild who has never learned the Faith, the friend who lives as though God did not exist. Pray without contempt and without despair. St Monica prayed through years of anguish for Augustine, and the son over whom she wept became a saint and Doctor of the Church.
The Communion gives the final word: “He who shall find me shall find life, and draw salvation from the Lord.” That is what true Marian devotion does. Mary does not keep us for herself. She opens the door and says: here is my Son.
Jacob awoke in the wilderness and discovered that he had slept at the gate of heaven. Richeldis built a house in Norfolk so that England might remember Nazareth. Loreto has kept before Christendom the same mystery for centuries. And Our Lady of Ransom reminds us why the Word entered that house at all: He came to set captives free.
Men destroyed the Holy House at Walsingham in 1538 because timber can be torn down. They could not destroy the mystery it proclaimed. Nor can the world destroy the sanctuary of a soul that remains in grace and continues to answer God with Mary: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum — “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
Then the mystery proclaimed at Nazareth bears fruit anew in us. Then the Holy House is rebuilt. Then the captive is ransomed. Then Walsingham has accomplished its purpose. And then the conversion of England has already begun, because one more human heart has become a place where Jesus Christ is welcomed, obeyed, adored and loved.
Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us. Our Lady of Ransom, pray for us. Our Lady of Loreto, pray for us. Pray for the conversion of England. And make of us, by thy intercession, living houses in which thy Divine Son may find His home.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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