Our Lady of Walsingham

Our Lady of Walsingham honors the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title given to her at the ancient shrine of Walsingham in Norfolk, England, long revered as "England's Nazareth." According to tradition, in the year 1061 a devout noblewoman, Richeldis de Faverches, was granted a vision in which Our Lady led her in spirit to the house of the Holy Family at Nazareth and asked her to build a replica of that holy house in England, so that the faithful might there honor the mystery of the Annunciation.

The Holy House and the priory that grew around it became one of the greatest pilgrimage destinations of medieval Christendom, visited by kings and countless ordinary people, until the shrine was suppressed and destroyed during the upheavals of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries devotion was revived and the shrine restored, and Walsingham once more draws pilgrims who come to entrust England and their own lives to the intercession of Mary. The observance is kept on 24 September.