The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World
312
The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World
312eBook
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Overview
In 1295, a house fell from the evening sky onto an Italian coastal road by the Adriatic Sea. Inside, awestruck locals encountered the Virgin Mary, who explained that this humble mud-brick structure was her original residence newly arrived from Nazareth. To keep it from the hands of Muslim invaders, angels had flown it to Loreto, stopping three times along the way. This story of the house of Loreto has been read as an allegory of how Catholicism spread peacefully around the world by dropping miraculously from the heavens.
In this book, Karin Vélez calls that interpretation into question by examining historical accounts of the movement of the Holy House across the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. These records indicate vast and voluntary involvement in the project of formulating a branch of Catholic devotion. Vélez surveys the efforts of European Jesuits, Slavic migrants, and indigenous peoples in Baja California, Canada, and Peru. These individuals contributed to the expansion of Catholicism by acting as unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers of Loreto. Their participation in portaging Mary’s house challenges traditional views of Christianity as a prepackaged European export, and instead suggests that Christianity is the cumulative product of thousands of self-appointed editors. Vélez also demonstrates how miracle narratives can be treated seriously as historical sources that preserve traces of real events.
Drawing on rich archival materials, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto illustrates how global Catholicism proliferated through independent initiatives of untrained laymen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691184494 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Mysterious Anchorages
On 2 December 1295, a small, well-traveled house fell from the sky into the middle of a road leading to the town of Recanati, in Italy's Marche region. There it sat, on a forested hilltop within sight of the Adriatic Sea, on property owned by a Recanatese woman named Laureta. When locals saw it, they went inside. There they found a beautiful dark painting of the Virgin Mary that they admired without knowing its origins. Their ignorance ended only when Mary herself appeared to identify the structure. She came in a vision to the little chapel's most frequent visitor, an unnamed hermit. "Go tell this to the people of Recanati, whose country I chose from among all the nations to locate my seat, ... that this place is Holy, and terrible," she began. Mary explained that the humble mud-brick structure was her own house, where she had been immaculately conceived, received the angel Gabriel's Annunciation, and raised the Christ Child. After her death, the apostles had used it as a small church, placing inside it an image of her carved by St. Luke himself.
Mary also spoke of her house's astonishing journey (figure 1.1.a). Angels had carried it away from Nazareth in 1291 to keep it out of the hands of Muslim invaders. It had landed three times along the way before coming to a final stop. First, it crossed the Mediterranean and was deposited on a hilltop near the town of Trsat, in a region that was then referred to by various names — Dalmatia, Illyria, Slavonia — but which corresponds today to the outskirts of the coastal city of Rijeka, Croatia. The house was in Trsat for three years, enough time for a respected prior, Alessandro, to receive his own explanatory vision from Mary, and enough time for a nobleman, Nicholas Frangipani, to build a small chapel around the structure. But Mary did not feel the people of Trsat properly venerated her, so she took off once more, flying over the Adriatic Sea in search of more loyal devotees. She descended in Italy in the forest near the town of Recanati on the eve of 10 December 1294. Though the house tarried for only eight months at this second layover, it came to be known as "Loreto" for the owner of the land, Laureta. Its subsequent moves were mere hops compared to its earlier travels. When two brothers quarreled over how to divide pilgrims' offerings to Mary, angels lifted her house to higher terrain. The structure's fourth and last flight was a shift still higher up the coastal ridge, a minor adjustment again intended to keep its early pilgrims safe from thieves.
These unexpected landings were described by the sixteenth-century historian Girolamo Angelitta as a miracle. Yet in the late 1500s when Angelitta wrote, his account was also read as a beautiful, peaceful allegory for the spread of Christianity to the rest of the world. Catholicism, like Italy's Holy House of Loreto, appeared to drop abruptly from the heavens into new lands, where it anchored itself with magical ease among new peoples. The analogy appealed to the energetic young missionary order of the Society of Jesus. In the 1600s, many Jesuits self-consciously cast themselves as the latest angels in the Holy House's travels, transporting the Loreto devotion across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. They named new frontier missions for Loreto (table 1.1). These sites stand as concrete, verifiable postscripts to the much older story about the surprising mobility of religious objects. But from the twenty-first-century vantage point, the more recent anchorages also surface as an extension of the original mystery. How did Catholicism fly, and land again? How did this religion move from its Mediterranean moorings out into the world?
Jesuit archives suggest an answer to these questions, though not necessarily the answer one might expect. Early Jesuit sources show that the movement of Loreto cannot be credited solely or even mostly to the Jesuits themselves. It was not a top-down endeavor. For starters, the Society of Jesus did not have any kind of official program to promote Loreto abroad. Their writings and approaches to the Italian devotion were scattered. The Jesuit letters that inform much of this book come from three disconnected seventeenth-century mission outposts named for Loreto: Lorette, built among the Huron in Québec, in eastern Canada; Loreto Moxos, established in the Amazon River basin between today's countries of Bolivia and Peru; and Loreto Conchó, erected farthest west, on a peninsula in Baja California. Reports from these sites are supplemented with formal publications by the Jesuits and manuscript sources from Italy's Loreto shrine, the Vatican Secret Archives, Franciscan missionary collections in Bolivia, the French national libraries in Paris, the Portuguese national archives of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, and Spain's Archives of the Indies in Sevilla. Taken together, these founts reveal that Jesuit activity surrounding Loreto was tangential to the plans of the original Italian sanctuary and even to the initiatives of the Jesuit order itself.
Even before the Argentine Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, scholarship lionized Jesuits as the ultimate professional missionary organization at the heart of the early modern Catholic Church. Seen in broader global company of diffusers of Loreto, however, the Jesuits who carried this Italian devotion abroad do not stand out for primacy or elite leadership. Ordinary Catholics were already transporting Loreto abroad, and some Jesuits individually opted to join them in doing so. Jesuits, laymen, and converts alike were engaging in the same processes and stumbles around moving Loreto. In this sense, the history of Loreto is truly a history of Jesuits in — and upstaged by — the world. Modern privileging of Jesuit professionalism and internal dynamics has obscured the improvisation that Jesuits in the field shared with the laity.
This book endeavors to show the myriad human hands behind the Holy House's emergence on the Italian and global scene. Movers ranged beyond French, Spanish, Portuguese, and central European Jesuits to include Monquí pilgrims from Baja California, Moxos house builders in Bolivia, Huron female mission leaders in Canada, Inka procession organizers in Peru, Slavic migrants in the Adriatic basin, and German atlas makers, among others featured here (figure 1.1.b). These disparate groups had parallel experiences as unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers. As the adjectives suggest, the experiences of these individuals who got bundled into the history of Loreto turn Loreto's founding parable on its head. Their participation does not reveal clean, purposeful landings. Instead, their diverse interpretations point to disorder, decentralization, and independent enactments of belief that spilled across boundaries of nation, empire, church, and period.
This is not the sort of accounting that is usually made of the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. But it is in this very real individual chaos that one can discern the how behind the spread of Christianity. It should be noted that this proposed human mechanism of transport differs in magnitude from the Loreto sanctuary's updated twentieth-century explanation of its most famous miracle. Since the 1900s, the Catholic Church has modulated its authorized version of the arrival of Loreto's Holy House by acknowledging human agency, but it has done this so literally that it has prompted criticism. Giuseppe Santarelli, the director of the Congregazione Universale della Santa Casa, espouses the sanctuary's position and the Catholic Church's party line: He reports that a family of Byzantine nobles called "Angeli" were the actual movers of the Holy House in the late 1200s, and they were miscoded in Loreto's archives as "angels."
While Santarelli attaches one group of high-ranking devout to one isolated movement of one revered Catholic object, this book delves into the multiple anchorages and re-anchorages of Loreto to argue that many groups of self-appointed, mixed-rank, often peripheral amateurs carried Catholicism in general to new peoples. In order to root their personal and occasionally unorthodox devotions in new ground, these Catholics reached across cultures and deliberately wrote themselves into the glittering official script of Catholic movement. Their actions offer an alternative understanding of what drives globalization: spontaneous mass participation, not institutions, political mandates, or impersonal forces. "World Christianity" thus ceases to fit the mold of a prepackaged export and becomes the sum total of thousands of insider reformulations.
How to Read This Book, and How to Read a Miracle
The purpose of this study is not to pick apart a magnificent example of a miracle, but rather to test other strategies that today's historians can contribute to the understanding of a genuinely strange event. The next chapter critically revisits the approaches that historians have traditionally brought to bear to illuminate Catholic miracles. These deconstructive approaches do tell much about Loreto's first landings, but they also show some places where historians need to stretch or supplement their classic methods to find new answers. Chapter 2 closes by explaining the alternative approach taken in this book: instead of paring down, this history endeavors to reconstruct and consider the accumulated whole.
As outlined in chapter 2, the methodology for this project is culled self-consciously but directly from its subject matter. The way this history is being written in 2017 resembles the way Loreto's mythohistory was itself formed centuries ago. While this may seem an obvious consequence of an experiment of reconstruction, it bears repeating that the purpose here is not to blindly reproduce Loreto's past or Loreto's sources, but rather to answer the question: How, and why, could a miracle like Loreto be persuasive to people? Because of how it was made, told, and refashioned. Methodology is part of the answer to the mysterious endurance of miracles, which is why there is a full chapter devoted to making it transparent.
In order to understand how Loreto moves people, and how it was moved by people, the remaining chapters follow the mythohistorical mold. They highlight accretion and emphasize the interconnections between the original and its aftermaths. The chapters are structured to repeatedly demonstrate this process of overlay, from the moment of first encounter to final anchorages. Each chapter opens with an "Anchoring Ideal," a compelling and carefully constructed early narrative of arrival such as the one that opened this chapter: a mysterious house lands. The attractive elegance of these sanitized ideals is presented first to accentuate the contrast between them and the "Actual History" that follows.
The "Actual" chapter sections survey variant experiences among Catholics as they found their own ways to reflect and articulate the ideal. These people's messy and collaborative attempts to apply the essence of Catholic miracles reverberate back on the ideal. Miracles like Loreto's landing had staying power partly because of the earnest efforts of these people to connect with old ideas, yet their innovations and criticisms also produced change. For historians, the dissonance between people's gritty experiences and the initial motivating mystery is essential; it indicates the intrusion of reality into an ever-growing, jointly reimagined narrative.
To demonstrate how the real and the ideal interact, each chapter closes with an in-depth consideration of a "New Expression" of Catholicism, a more radical example of a lived practice being taken up and negotiated by new people. This last snapshot of a fresh inflection of devotion is offered in the same spirit as the three Jesuit missions that appeared early in this chapter, appended to the famous Italian Holy House. Which one is the true Loreto, the older Italian site or the more recent offshoots that continue to carry forward its name? By setting them both alongside each other, this book insists that both make the truth, in combination.
Following Part I, the work is divided into two main parts to reflect the exceptional journeys and pairings that mark Loreto's mythohistory. Part II, "Approaching Loreto," describes the multiple journeys of authors and pilgrims to and from Loreto. Part III, "Leaving Loreto," focuses on the pairings (and uncouplings) of objects associated with Loreto, including the Holy House, the image of Mary, and the name Loreto. The third essential component of the Loreto corpus, the lived experience of a multiplicity of people, is highlighted throughout both central parts of the book, most especially in the "New Expression" concluding sections of all chapters. In this way, the three dimensions foregrounded in Loreto's founding narrative — movement, additions, and real situations — are used to reconstruct a full picture of the power of miracles, rather than to pick the miracle apart (Part IV).
This brings us back to the initial miracle of Loreto, and the central question looming behind this study: How did Catholic devotion spread? The miracle of Loreto preserves in amber a response verified by other archives. Beneath Loreto's persistently captivating narrative of mysterious Christian arrival, there are hundreds of thousands of individually orchestrated and negotiated Catholic landings, some gathered here. These landings have been paradoxically obscured and enshrined in the historical record of Catholicism. They are presented here as a hypothesis: Vast and voluntary participation was key to Catholicism's movement and survival. Real, repeated self-enlistment, viewed by today's more skeptical audiences as miraculously unlikely, did contribute profoundly to the global diffusion of religion.
CHAPTER 2Deconstructing a Miracle
Habits of Historical Deconstruction
Since the miraculous flying house first surfaced, people have applied historical methods to better understand it. But these attempts have fallen short at explaining three hallmarks of the Loreto devotion: its movement (journeys), its grafting onto new venerated objects (pairings), and its lasting appeal (due in part to people's continued real, lived experiences). These aspects have carried over into our own times. In the mid-twentieth century, the Virgin of Loreto hitchhiked on a rocket: a medallion of her was carried to the moon. Five centuries after her Italian landing, this local incarnation of Mary was breaking atmospheric bounds, still imparting the same message: Christianity (and humans) were on the move.
Instead of addressing real movement, most scholars writing about the flying house of Loreto have been sidetracked by how magnificently it represents the category of miracle. They have brought to bear the analytical apparatuses from their respective disciplines that are usually mustered for the special situation of confronting the impossible. Researchers have tended to focus narrowly on six distinct elements of the Loreto devotion's past: the objects at its center; the political agendas surrounding it; the possibility of divine presence; the intrusion of the paranormal; the opportunity it provides to empathize with past peoples; or the particular time and place where it emerged. These facets are each summarized here because, in combination, they do provide much information about Loreto. However, taken separately, these habitual methodologies are limited: they do not adequately address mobility, accumulation, or endurance, nor do they treat seriously their sources' sweeping claims to report reality. This chapter finishes by presenting an alternative reconstructive approach that does address these components. This book puts the proposed methodology to the test on the miracle of Loreto.
The first half of this chapter includes basic background and descriptions of key features of Loreto's devotion, as indicated by the subheadings. But the bulk of the chapter is directed primarily to readers who are interested in the methodological scaffolding that holds up miracles and histories alike. What are the possible avenues that have been explored by those keen to crack past mysteries like Loreto's flying house? How do particular choices of focus constrain understanding? And of most interest to this project: How do the ways that people describe an event contribute to that event's staying power? These are questions broached and answered in the following surveys of both deconstructive methods and reconstructive counterapproaches.
OBJECTS
What are the physical objects that make up Loreto, and why are they holy? Particularly since the twentieth century, archaeologists and art historians have placed Loreto's material core in the limelight. Thanks to the efforts of these specialists, the visible centerpieces of Loreto's miracle have been carefully examined, classified, and functionally analyzed. The two objects in question, a very old house and a Marian icon, come across as deceptively plain at first viewing and require some unpacking.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Abbreviations, xv,
PART I FIRST LANDINGS, 1,
CHAPTER 1 Introduction, 3,
CHAPTER 2 Deconstructing a Miracle, 11,
PART II APPROACHING LORETO, 43,
CHAPTER 3 First Authors, 45,
CHAPTER 4 Accidental Pilgrims, 77,
PART III LEAVING LORETO, 115,
CHAPTER 5 Holy House Builders, 117,
CHAPTER 6 Anonymous Renovators of Icons, 153,
CHAPTER 7 Counters, Namers, and Processers, 192,
PART IV NEW DEPARTURES, 231,
CHAPTER 8 Reconstructing Catholic Expansion, 233,
Bibliography, 251,
Unpublished Primary Sources, 251,
Published Primary Sources, 252,
Secondary Sources, 256,
Index, 279,
What People are Saying About This
“Through close examination of the Catholic devotion known as ‘Our Lady of Loreto’ and its spread from Europe to various locations in the Americas, this wonderful and moving book offers a compelling case that Catholicism’s expansion was not just accomplished by force, but much more often occurred through the agency of people who survived chaotic events and accidental journeys.”—Diana Walsh Pasulka, author of Heaven Can Wait “While plenty of histories of the Holy House of Loreto have been written since the late Middle Ages, those texts have not taken an analytical approach, much less one as eclectic, perceptive, and wide-ranging as this. The scholarship is exemplary and praiseworthy. As far as the subject of the Holy House of Loreto is concerned, this richly layered book has no equals.”—Carlos Eire, author of Reformations“Deeply researched and utterly engaging, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto unfolds the ‘mythohistory’ of the transportation of the Virgin Mary’s childhood home from Nazareth to Italy. Catholics from Le Marche to the Amazon basin built, painted, narrated, counted, and walked themselves into the miracle of the Holy House of Loreto. It takes a global village to make a miracle, and Karin Vélez shows us with wit and learning how this was done.”—Robert Orsi, author of History and Presence“In this exciting and eloquent book, Karin Vélez shows us what it meant to believe that the House of the Virgin Mary flew to its Italian resting place in Loreto—and why priests and lay people worked together to build replicas of it around the Catholic world. Vélez reimagines the Counter-Reformation as a global, collaborative movement, and in doing so opens up forgotten worlds of religious experience.”—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University