The Holy House of Loreto

"To us, Nazareth and its Holy House, exiled, wandering, angel-borne, Syrian, Dalmatian, Italian, all by turns, are consecrated places, doubly consecrated by their old memories, and also by their strange continued life of local graces, and the efficacious balm of a Divine Presence, awful and undecayed." Father Frederick Faber. On the Feast of the Visitation, July 2, 1884, I set eyes for the first time on Loreto and its Holy House. I had been ordained priest a few months before, and was on my way home. Loreto drcw Ine to itself, as it has drawn so many, as it drew the illustrious Newman under circumstances similar to nly own, in the late forties of the same century. I believed in the miraculous translation of the Holy Honse with the faith of a little child. Had I been asked to give a reason for my faith, I fancy I should have given the same that John Cardinal Newman does: "Everybody in Rome believes it," and the whole Catholic world has believed it for hundreds of years. On the first appearance of Canon Chevalier's Notre Dame de Lorette, I procured a copy of it. The upholders of the old tradition had been threatened with the book at least two years before its publication. A somewhat cursory reading of the first part, where the learned Canon sets himself to show that the House of the Virgin had ceased to exist in Nazareth centuries before the traditional date of its translation thence, aroused in my mind serious misgivings as to whether the tradition in question was any longer tenable. Yet I clung to it, mainly bee a use I could not see how the God of truth would work so many and so great miracles at the shrine of Loreto if the devotion tha t gave occasion to them were rooted in error or fraud. A second and more careful reading convinced me that my misgivings were without foundation, and led. to the writing of the critical review of Canon Chevalier's work that is published in these pages.