Our Lady of Loreto

Optional Memorial

Feast Day

December 10

The Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto commemorates the small stone house, the Santa Casa, venerated within the Basilica of the Holy House at Loreto on the Italian Adriatic coast. According to a tradition first attested in writing in the fifteenth century, the house was the dwelling of Mary at Nazareth where she received the Annunciation and the Holy Family lived after the return from Egypt; when the Holy Land fell definitively to Muslim forces in 1291, the Santa Casa is said to have been miraculously translated, first to Tersatto in Dalmatia (1291) and then to Loreto (1294). Modern archaeological and documentary research, particularly the discovery of Crusader-era documents naming the noble Angeli family of Epirus, has suggested a historical mechanism: stones of Mary's house in Nazareth were dismantled by the Angeli and shipped to Italy as the Holy Land Christian presence collapsed.

Whatever the means of their arrival, the stones at Loreto have been venerated continuously since the late thirteenth century, the basilica was built around them by Pope Paul II beginning in 1469, and Loreto became one of the principal Marian shrines of Western Christendom, visited by saints (Francis Xavier, Charles Borromeo, Therese of Lisieux), popes, and the faithful for over seven centuries. Pope Benedict XV in 1920 declared Our Lady of Loreto patroness of aviators on the basis of the tradition of the flying house. Pope Francis added the optional memorial to the General Roman Calendar by decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship on October 7, 2019.