December 10
The saints and feasts remembered on December 10, each with a short life, a Bible passage and a prayer.
Our Lady of Loreto
A small house venerated as Mary’s home in Nazareth, kept in an Italian shrine
Loreto is a hilltop town near the Adriatic coast of Italy, in the Marche region. Its great basilica shelters a small room of rough stone, the Holy House, which many Catholics venerate as part of the home in Nazareth where, according to Luke’s Gospel, the angel Gabriel told Mary she would bear Jesus.
A medieval legend says angels carried the house from Nazareth in the 1290s, first to Trsat in today’s Croatia and then to Loreto, arriving on the night of 9–10 December. Some historians think instead that the stones were shipped from the Holy Land, perhaps by a family called Angeli. Pilgrims have come for centuries, and the litany of titles for Mary sung at the shrine spread across the Church.
In 1920 Our Lady of Loreto was named patron of aviators, and in 2019 Pope Francis added the feast to the universal calendar. It invites Christians to think about the ordinary home where God’s Son grew up.
In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin pledged in marriage to a man named Joseph, who was of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. The angel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Luke 1:26–28 · BSB
A prayer
God of all, your Son was conceived in Mary’s humble home and grew up in an ordinary house in Nazareth. Make our own homes places where your word is welcomed, where love is patient and faith is shared, so that Christ may live among us each day. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The lives are written with AI help from public-domain histories and checked before publishing; the prayers are ours. Bible quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), in the public domain. How we write.