Our Lady of Walsingham

Around 1860 a woman called Charlotte Pearson Boyd who was an Anglican noticed in East Anglia a barn which had a design which reminded her of a medieval chapel. She was curious and started investigating the matter and found it had once been called the slipper chapel in what had once been a great shrine to Our Lady. Indeed Walsingham had been the fourth greatest shrine in Europe and in the middle ages people had travelled from the continent to this shrine just as today English people travel to Lourdes or Fatima. The story began in 1060 when a lady called Richeldis de Faverches had a recurring dream that Our Lady took her to the Holy House of Nazareth and asked her to have a replica of the house built in Walsingham. As a young man I had some trouble with this idea, as indeed with the story of the Holy House of Loretto. As a result of being married and watching my wife as she gives such love and devotion to our own humble abode I can now appreciate the love a woman gives to her home. Mary was after all a normal housewife so I can now accept such things can happen. Eventually the Holy House was built just prior to the Crusades and pilgrims hearing the story decided not to risk the Holy Land but come to England`s Nazareth instead. Many of our Kings and Queens visited the shrine including Henry VIII who visited in thanksgiving for the gift of a son, although this son was frail and sickly. There is no doubt that in his younger years Henry was devout and it is said that when he died he was heard saying a prayer to Our Lady of Walsingham. Yet it was Henry who completely destroyed the shrine and for four hundred years it was left abandoned and forgotten until Miss Boyd rediscovered it. Almost miraculously the shrine has become the great centre of pilgrimage again. Yet not just for Catholics. Other denominations Anglican, Methodist, Orthodox , have their own churches on the site and it seem like Mary is drawing her children around her again. It is now the National Shrine once more and has visitors by the thousands every year. Well if they travelled from Europe in times gone by when travel was so cumbersome and difficult what excuse have we for not going today. Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us.