Sanctuary of Loreto: the irrefutable historicity of the miraculous translation of the House of the Virgin
In the Sanctuary of Loreto, Italy, the Holy House of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth is preserved. It was there that she received and accepted the Archangel Gabriel's announcement that she would be the Mother of God.
The Holy House arrived at its current location in a miraculous translation that took place in the 13th century, recognized by numerous Popes and commemorated in its own liturgical feast.
There are three distinct pieces of evidence. First, the correspondence between the three walls of the Sanctuary of Loreto and what remains of the house in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth (the foundations and the opening in the grotto that served as a fourth wall). Second, the evidence of the Translation itself. And third, the rebuttal to the arguments put forward to deny the supernatural Translation, replacing it with a "pious" but very human transport of some stones. Between 1962 and 1965, an archaeological study was conducted at the Sanctuary of Loreto, which corroborated:
1) that the dimensions of the three walls and the thickness of the walls coincide with the foundations of the house in Nazareth;
2) that the stones of the Holy House are typical of Palestine and worked using specific local techniques;
3) that the walls rest on a trench that existed at the site where they were laid, not on ground prepared for a new construction;
and 4) that the stones are sealed with cement mortar typical of Palestine, using a technique belonging to the Nabataean people and unknown in Italy at the time, and uniform throughout, which rules out human transfer brick by brick, because a difference in the mortar's chemical composition would have been evident.
In 1291, after the fall of the Crusader city of Acre, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was left at the mercy of the Muslims, and the Holy House of Nazareth, a place of pilgrimage for thirteen centuries, was in real danger of being desecrated. On the night of May 9-10, angels lifted it from its foundations and placed it in Tersatto, now a district of Rijeka (Fiume in Italian), Croatia.
From there it went to Ancona in 1295 and then to the forest of a woman named Loreta, on the plain where the city of Loreto now stands, its name derived from this first owner. In 1296, the angels left it for a time in the field of two brothers and finally in the middle of a street, its current location, under the dome of the church built there.
Each of these five translations has numerous eyewitnesses, explains Nicolini, who were rigorously verified by the local bishops of the time, who issued canonical pronouncements of veracity in official documents.
Pope approvals followed quickly: Nicholas IV in 1292 and Boniface VIII in 1294. And they have continued to this day. First, with the liturgical commemoration of the miracle, celebrated on December 10. Centuries later, in 1920, when flight became part of everyday life, Benedict XV proclaimed Our Lady of Loreto Patroness of Aviation.
And John Paul II in 2005, Benedict XVI in 2013, and Francis in 2019 with the Loreto Year—extended due to the pandemic—have all referred to the Sanctuary as the authentic house where the Virgin Mary was born and lived and received the Annunciation.
Particularly expressive is the papal bull Inter Omnia of August 26, 1852, in which Pope Pius IX establishes as proven fact that "in Loreto is venerated the House of Nazareth, so dear to the heart of God, made in Galilee and later separated from its foundation and, by the power of God, transported far away, beyond the seas, first to Dalmatia [in present-day Croatia] and then to Italy."
The Holy House was never broken down into blocks, but rather arrived in Loreto—after other mysterious relocations—with the stones joined together with the same mortar used more than two thousand years ago in Nazareth, just as it appears today.
Its final location on a street in Loreto, where it still stands, is also humanly impossible, as attested by all the archaeologists and architects who have examined, over the centuries, the subsoil of the Holy House and the street on which it came to rest.
The Holy House rests, on one side, on the end of an ancient street and, on the other, is suspended over the adjacent moat.
The three Holy Walls came to rest on the street and were not rebuilt; the only unique feature is a thorny bush that stood on the edge of the street at the time of the impact and was trapped.
The building of the Holy House, even without any foundation and situated on unstable, loose, and overloaded ground, remains unaffected, without yielding in the slightest and without any cracks in the walls (Annali Santa Casa, 1932, 290).
The construction of the Holy House in its current location defies all building codes and the very laws of physics.
Therefore, if the entire Holy House of Nazareth could not have been 'transported' by men, it could only have been transported 'miraculously' by the work of Divine Omnipotence, through the 'angelic ministry'.
So what is there not to believe.....that The Holy House was divinely transferred to Loreto is easy to believe...it’s like belief in trans substantiation, the changing of the bread and wine..in the miracle of life, our own and how nature revives itself by itself every spring ..no problem here.