Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham (Slipper Chapel)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1061, the noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches was led in spirit to Nazareth, shown the house where the angel greeted Mary, and asked to build its replica in her Norfolk village, and so Walsingham became England's Nazareth, one of the four great shrines of medieval Christendom, second in England only to Canterbury. Pilgrims paused at the little Slipper Chapel of 1325 to slip off their shoes and walk the final Holy Mile barefoot, until 1538, when the Holy House was destroyed and the beloved statue carried to London and burned. The chapel sank to a poorhouse, a forge, even a cow byre, until Charlotte Boyd bought the ruin in the 1890s and gave it back to the Church; in 1934 the first Mass in four hundred years was offered there, a cardinal led more than ten thousand pilgrims in reparation, and the Slipper Chapel became the Catholic National Shrine. On today's feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, her statue, carved after the image on the medieval priory seal and crowned in 1954, again receives England's pilgrims by the hundreds of thousands in the basilica Pope Francis raised in 2015.