Vigilavi ad postes ... the secrets of her House

" ... Loretto; no wonder our Lady chose this spot for the resting-place of the Holy House, a town in which peace and joy and poverty reign undisturbed. The women there keep up the old national dress instead of imitating Paris fashions as they do in other towns. Altogether, Loretto appealed to me, and as for the House, I can't tell you how deeply I was moved to share the same roof, as it were, with the Holy Family. On these walls our Divine Redeeemer had gazed; on this ground the sweat had fallen from Joseph's brow; here Mary had carried, in and out, the Child of her virginal womb. To have seen the little room in which the Angel greeted her, to have put down my rosary beads for a moment in the bowl from which the Child Jesus had eaten-- those are things you can't remember without a thrill.

"Best of all, we received our Blessed Lord there in his own house; became living temples of him on the very spot which had once been consecrated by his earthly presence. The Italian custom is to have the Blessed Sacrament reserved on one single altar, which is the only one where you can make your Communion. Here at Loretto, where the basilica is only a marble casket in which the Holy House reposes like precious diamond, the Blessed Sacrament is outside the sacred enclosure. This wouldn't do for Celine and me; we wanted to go to Communion inside. So we left Papa to do as the rest of the world did, like the gentle soul he was, and went off to find a priest belonging to our party who had got special leave to say Mass in the Holy House itself; it was just a matter of getting him to put two small hosts on the paten, and there we were, fortunate enough to make our Communion on this hallowed ground. This was a blessing straight from heaven; no words can do justice to our feelings. It was a foretaste of that moment when we shall be made one with our Lord in that other, eternal dwelling-place of his; when our joy will be unending, when there will be no more sadness of saying good-bye, no need to scrape a fragment or two from walls sanctified by a divine presence, because his home will be our home for all eternity. He just lets us have a look at his earthly home, to make us love poverty and the hidden life; what he keeps in store for us is his heavenly palace, where we we shall no more see him hidden under the form of a little child, or of a consecrated Host, but as he really is, in all the splendour of his majesty."