Flying House, Anyone?

June 21, 2007

I visited the Santa Maria di Loreto today, a beautiful stone church dedicated to the House of Mary (the Casa di Loreto). The church was a simple affair, with beautiful marble floors and remnants of a recent wedding. The chapel at the back had a stained glass window with a dove descending out of a cerulean sky, and I fell in love (pthelo, Mer?).

I found the legend of the Casa particularly fascinating. It holds that Mary and Joseph raised Jesus in a small, humble house in Nazareth. Three centuries later, Emperor Constantine built a basilica over it to honor and protect the abode. Threats from the crusades saw angels miraculously picking up the house and moving it to Romania in 1291. Muslim invasions caused the angels to move it again, this time to Italy, in 1294. A final move placed it in Loreto, Italy, where a startled parish priest saw it appear in an abandoned field. A vision of the Virgin telling him that it was her house caused him to venerate the site, and subsequent popes built basilicas over it to protect it.

Sounds like a load of nothing, right? Well, scientists have studied the composition of the house, and they have found two interesting things. Its materials are not found anywhere in this area--the building materials are those only found in the Middle East. Also, the house has absolutely no foundations in a place where buildings are liable to collapse without them. It truly looks as if it has just been plopped down on that spot and preserved. Maria di Loreto became the patron saint of pilots in the early 1900s in honor of the house's miraculous flights.

I love stories like this.