“Yes, I mean, there are nothing but old dwellings in this part of the world it seems.”
“Well, this particular blessed house lay in total disrepair for nearly two millennia, until it was discovered in the early nineteenth century by Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun, stigmatic, visionary, and prophet.”
“She just happened to come upon it while traveling?”
“No, no; in fact, she’d never even been to Turkey. The vision of the house came to her in fevered dreams. The tomb of John the Apostle is in Ephesus, too. We just don’t know where. She saw the house, knew exactly where it was. But the church never verified her vision. Rantings of a crazy woman.”
“So…”
“So in 1881, fifty-seven years after her death, a French priest, Abbé Julien Gouyet, decided to follow Emmerich’s visions and traveled to Turkey, where he searched for and then discovered the remnants of the house just as she had described it. The house, she had been told in her visions, had been built by John the Apostle for the Blessed Mother, on Bülbül Mountain near Ephesus.
“Parts of the foundation as well as coal found on the site date the house to the first century. Coal used by the Blessed Mother herself! The abbé’s discovery, however, was totally ignored in Rome. No surprise there.”
“You mean to tell me that Rome would ignore the most important artifact in Christianity?”
“In fact, yes. For one thing the place where the Mother of God died is in a Muslim country—a religion at constant war with Christianity. And religious differences aside, on the financial side—and the Vatican is nothing if not brilliant when it comes to managing their trillions—they would lose billions in tourist revenue if the holiest Christian place on earth were in a Muslim country.” Then he sniffed disgustedly. “As if Jesus had ever traveled to Italy, where they have their headquarters!”
I stopped walking and looked at him. “Their headquarters? I thought you were part of ‘their.’”
He ignored me. “Anyway, we know what the Son of the Son thinks of all their gold!”
I ignored the “Son of the Son” reference and added, looking directly at the little stone house, “Not a hint of gold anywhere so far. I must say, Father, you sound as if you’ve gone off the reservation.…”
He let that pass, too, and took my arm as we approached the house. “At any rate, about ten years after Gouyet’s discovery, a Lazarist priest organized a second research team and came to this site—and found the chapel in ruins. They also found an ancient statue of the Virgin with the hands broken off.”
“But Rome doesn’t officially recognize it as the House of the Blessed Mother, correct?” I asked.
“No—and yes. In 1896 Pope Leo XIII came to see it for himself … and he left believing that it was authentic. But it took another fifty-five years for another pope to come. That was in 1951. That’s when Pope Pius XII came. He then bestowed upon Meryemana the status of ‘Holy Place’; Pope John XXIII made that designation permanent, and then Pope Paul VI unofficially confirmed the little house’s authenticity on July twenty-sixth, 1967.
“Did you know that even Pope John Paul II served mass here in November 1979? As did Pope Benedict XVI in 2006?”
When I shook my head no, he finished: “Yes, Benedict came on November twenty-ninth, 2006.”
“What? How come I never heard any of this?”
“Just another trip by another pope, that didn’t mean much—to an outsider,” he said sarcastically. “But we all know what this place means. I wonder what it will mean to you.”
He then stepped up to the threshold, unlocked and lifted the grate, and then unlocked the front door. We stepped through an archway and into a room made of ancient brick and mortar.
Above us a skylight provided light, as did the small windows that were placed high up on the walls.
“Did the Blessed Mother play for the Knicks?” I asked inappropriately.
He took no offense. “People were very tiny back then, as you know. But this place? It was built as a fortress, basically, impenetrable—that’s why the windows were so high, the walls so thick. Her protector knew that if they had killed her son, they would—if they could have found her—kill her as well. The Christian religion was spreading very quickly.”
He placed his hands around the thickness of one arch. True, it looked at least two feet thick.
“For what other inconceivable reason would a house built in the first century have been created with such extraordinary security? Walls this thick were for castles, not peasants’ homes.”