The Home of Jesus and Mary

I’ve noticed some interesting things about my home and was going to write a post about my home and its decorations --- but that will be another day.  Today I saw a posting in the Consecration to St. Joseph book about Mary and Joseph’s home where they lived in Nazareth.  That house is now in Loreto, Italy, transported there by angels!

I am a reader.  I’ve read thousands of books, many of them by or about saints or about Jesus or the Church.  I thought I had read about most miracles which might be categorized as “major”, but I had never read or heard about this one before (unless my senility has hidden the memory).  These are facts of the story I read about the house of Joseph and Mary, where they raised Jesus.

 It was tradition that Mary was raised in the house where the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her and the Word became flesh.  After the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the Holy Family fled Herod to Egypt and eventually came back to Nazareth, where St. Joseph came into possession of the house Mary was raised in, and the nearby home where he had lived became his workshop.  The home of the Holy Family was a much noted and visited landmark in Nazareth, until it disappeared in one night, May 10, 1291.  (The speculated reason was because Muslim invaders demolished all of Nazareth 3 years later.)  On that exact same date in 1291 the house appeared in the village of Trsat, Croatia, where it remained for 3 years.  Then a similar thing happened in a single night and the home appeared in Piceno, Italy.  It remained there, where robbers began to plague pilgrims to the site.  In August 1295 it again moved, in a single night, to a hill owned by two brothers, who began to argue over its ownership, and then it moved yet again to a nearby site in Loreto, where it stands today.

In all those sites, everyone agreed that the house came and went in a single night, with no noise or notice.  And in the sites where it was moved from, there were outlines in the dirt of the house which had been there.  What is interesting is that in 1296 the Catholic Church appointed 16 envoys to investigate everything.  Among other things, they did measurements of the house outlines in Loreto, Trsat, and Nazareth.  All three measurements were exactly the same, exactly.  Centuries later, chemical analysis determined that the stones, wood, and cement of the house in Loreto are those unique to the area of Nazareth.

Various saints and mystics have said they were told or shown that angels had moved the house.  It is a major shrine today, with many visitors and tons of miracles occurring over the years.  Huge numbers of saints and popes have visited the site.

And I never knew (or I forgot).

Perhaps I never knew because I was too bound up with self.  My last post noted the problems of focusing on self, and the meditation I read today (in Minute Meditations for Each Day) said: “If a man wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self (Mt 16:24).  The struggle against self is not an easy one and requires constant effort.  Its purpose is to rid ourselves of all that separates us from the will of God.  But the reward is great and with God’s grace and our own effort we can become better persons --- disciples of Christ.”