THE
P RTAL
June 2016
Page 9
The Holy House of Loreto
This holy place was visited by this year’s National Ordinariate
Pilgrimage as Jackie Ottaway and Ronald Crane report
D
id these stones once echo the voice of our Blessed Lord? Were these doors once the entrance
through which the Holy Family entered their home? Was this window the very one where Gabriel met
Mary at the Annunciation?
Such questions come to mind
when you visit the Holy House
of Loreto, Ancona, Italy. The
story goes that angels brought
the house from Nazareth
to Loreto via modern day
Croatia. Did they fly or was it
the angels that guarded a ship?
Modern
scholarship
and the discovery of new
documentation suggests that
the House was indeed brought
to Loreto by Crusaders in
the thirteenth century, the
transport being paid for by
a family called Angeli! So it
is true, these are the stones,
the doors and the window to
which scripture attests.
This year the Ordinariate Overseas Pilgrimage was
to Rome before travelling on to Loreto. Perhaps many
were sceptical about the claims made for this Holy
House when they arrived in Ancona. Certainly they
were not sceptical when they left.
Many of us attended the Holy Rosary at nine in the
evening, casting beautiful roses before the image of the
Mother of God. We witnessed the Procession of the
Blessed Sacrament for the sick and Benediction in the
main square.
Loreto is a wonderful place. It is a wonderful shrine,
full of devotion and history. Led by Mgr Keith Newton
ably assisted by Fr Keith Robinson, we celebrated mass
in the Basilica that contains the shrine.
Unlike many holy places, Loreto seems to attract
Pilgrims rather than tourists. Many in our party will
return to the holy and venerable place, and to the
house where the Word was made Flesh.
On the front cover of this edition of The Portal you
can see the happy band of Ordinariate Pilgrims on
the first part of their Pilgrimage to Rome and Loreto
outside the Church of Sant’ Alfonso de’ Liguori all’
Esquilino, Cardinal Vincent Nichols’ titular church in
Rome, on the front cover of this edition of The Portal.
The Church of Sant’ Alfonso de’ Liguori is
dedicated to its patron, St Alphonsus, founder of
the Redemptorists. The church was built in 1859 at
the expense of an Oxford convert, Redemptorist Fr
Edward Douglas, who was received into the Church in
1842 inspired by Blessed John Henry Newman.
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