Wednesday, September 24
Our Lady of Walsingham (Image credit: W.F.F.)
Today is the feast of the famous shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, known sometimes as the Virgin by the Sea, founded in 1061 after the aristocratic Lady Richeldis de Faverches had a vision instructing her to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth. This predates the shrine at Loreto, which only appeared in Italy during the following century. An Augustinian canonry grew up around the oratory, and soon it became a thriving center of English devotion. However, in 1534, the monks sold out, signed the Oath of Supremacy of Henry VIII, and watched over the dismantling of their monastic treasures. Dissenters were executed, and in 1538, the statue of Our Lady was burned in London. The shrine soon became little more than a cattle barn.
Pope Leo XIII, amid the growth of English Catholicism at the turn of the last century, re-founded the shrine in 1897, and a new statue was erected in 1922, marking great cooperation between Catholics and Anglicans. The shrine still represents this, and both English Catholics, high-church Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics hold a great reverence for Our Lady under this title. The feast was re-established in 2000 on this date, and in Texas, a church of the Roman Catholic Anglican Use was erected under her protection in June of 2003.
Today's a big day for Our Lady generally-speaking. She's also honored on this date as Our Lady of Mercy or of Ransom today, which commemorates her miraculous part in the founding of the Mercedarian Order in Spain, who would pay the costs of freeing Christian captives from the Moors.
Today is also the feast of Bl. Anton Martin Slomsek, the Slovene Prince-Bishop of Lavant in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; as well as St. Gerard (or Collert) Sagredo, a martyred friend of St. Stephen of Hungary; St. Pacificus of San Severeno, an ecstatic philosophy professor; and St. Geremer, an ex-Merovingian courtier who founded the abbey of Flay and who was nearly murdered by his monks for being so strict.
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