Dear Friends,
After reading about the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock in my column last Sunday, a couple of you told me that you were curious to read about the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham which was something unheard of. Yes, that was true for almost all of us in the pilgrimage. We never heard of this shrine that is very famous in the UK. It was established around 1061 when Richeldis de Faverches, a holy woman, prayed that she might undertake some special work in honor of Our Lady. Richeldis was not a visionary like the children in Lourdes and Fatima. She was a woman of faith, she pondered, meditated, and prayed. In answer to her prayer, the Virgin Mary led her in spirit to Nazareth, showed her the House of the Annunciation where the Angel greeted Mary, and asked her to build a replica in Walsingham as a perpetual memorial of the Annunciation. This Holy House was built and a religious community took charge of the foundation.
Walsingham became a shrine, a place of pilgrimage and miracles. Many kings made pilgrimages there. This included Henry VIII, but after his break with the Church he turned against anything Catholic. In 1538, the Reformation caused the shrine property to be handed over to the King’s Commissioners and the famous statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken away to London to be burnt and the shrine was destroyed. Walsingham ceased to be a public place of pilgrimage. Devotion was necessarily kept in secret until after Catholic Emancipation (1829) when public expressions of the Catholic Faith were allowed once more. In 1897, by rescript of Pope Leo XIII, the sanctuary of Our Lady of Walsingham was restored, with the building of a Holy House as the Lady Chapel of the Catholic Church of the Annunciation, at King’s Lynn.
We were able to visit and pray in the “Slipper Chapel” where the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham is enthroned. (It is called “Slipper Chapel” because pilgrims would remove their shoes and travel the final mile – called the “Holy Mile” – to Walsingham with penitentially unshod feet.) The statue is of course a modern one but has been modelled as closely as possible on the medieval statue. Our Lady is depicted in traditional style seated on a simple chair of state with the Child Jesus on her knee. She wears a Saxon crown in token of her ancient queen-ship and carries the lily of purity.
The devotion to Our Lady of Walsingham received a further mark of papal approval during the visit to Britain of Pope Saint John Paul II in 1982. As Our Lady guided Richeldis to make a Nazareth in England, every chapel and shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham is a particular, local Nazareth, an encounter with the joy of the Incarnation in that special place. This shrine has inspired the formation of one of the new forms of consecrated life, recognized by the Church. They call themselves “The Community of Our Lady of Walsingham.” It is an Ecclesial Family of men and women who consecrate their life to Jesus through Mary. They work for the coming of God’s Kingdom by enabling people to live in the joy and freedom of Mary’s Fiat. As a Marian community they are praying and working for the re-evangelization of England and the western world, taking that popular verse from Matthew 6:10 as their guide: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Your brother in Christ,
Fr. Abraham Orapankal