The House Where It All Began (The Holy House of Loreto), by Regis Martin

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 18, 2024

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. …

The Holy House of Loreto is precisely the place where it all began—namely, the Incarnation of God Himself.

If the whole point of doing theology is to conduct reasoned discourse about God, whose mysteries defy all human efforts to master, how then does one measure success? By what criteria are we to know the job is done, that the market on the meaning of God, both who He is and what He’s done, has been, as it were, finally cornered? The answer is by faith, there being no other dynamism to drive a discipline dependent on data drawn from God Himself. That is, Divine Revelation, without which, to quote a wise and holy monk named Anselm of Canterbury, there can be no understanding.

And what is it that this faith is being asked to understand? Well, among other things, the fact of an infinite God becoming a finite man, a virgin becoming a mother, a helpless child born into the world He made. …

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