Category Archives: Prague

Top Blog Posts of 2019

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Who doesn’t enjoy looking back over the highlights of the past year? These were my most popular blog posts during 2019. Click and revisit any of them or leave a comment to share which one–or any other post that didn’t make the “Most Popular” list–was your personal favorite.

Corpus Christi: Wafer vs. Bread … read it here

St. Panteleimon and His Liquid Blood … read it here

Bake an All Soul’s Cake … read it here

St. Agnes in Prague … read it here

Passiontide … read it here

Melchizedek, King of Salem … read it here

Conception of the Mother of God … read it here

Holy Week: The Death of Death … read it here

Resurrecting Easter … read it here

Dog Days, Part 2—with St. Roch … read it here

Which post was your favorite? What subject would you enjoy reading about in the upcoming year? Leave a comment below!

Walsingham and Prague and Loreto… and Nazareth

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Detail from the marble chapel built around the Prague replica of the Holy House from Nazareth. Construction started in 1626 and the Holy House was blessed on 25 March 1631.

The marble facade of the Holy House in Loreto, Italy is very similar to the marble facade of the Holy House in Prague.

Everyone agrees that Jesus grew up in Nazareth. He lived there with the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. So how can so many places in Europe claim to have the Holy House of the Virgin Mary?

There was a chapel of the Virgin in Loreto, Italy since the late AD 1200s. It contained a small replica of the house in Nazareth for the faithful to visit if they could not go on pilgrimage to the Middle East. Monks (often referred to as “angels”) brought a few stones from Nazareth to add to the Holy House in Loreto. During the Renaissance, an elaborate marble façade was built around the Holy House to protect it and then a large church was built around the marble chapel. “Our Lady of Loreto” is the title of the Virgin Mary with respect to the Holy House of Loreto and her statue, carved from Cedar of Lebanon, is a “Black Madonna” (owing to centuries of lamp smoke).

Other replicas of the Holy House were constructed in many places. The most famous are in Prague and Walsingham. (The Holy House in Walsingham was destroyed by order of King Henry VIII but new shrines of the Mother of God were built there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.) The original statue of the Mother of God was thought to be destroyed when the Holy House–often called “England’s Nazareth”–was destroyed but it might have been cleverly hidden instead. A statue of the Virgin in the Victoria and Albert Museum might be the original; read about it here.

D-Day … and Lidice

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Memorial plaque for Lidice at the Orthodox cathedral of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Prague. A Gestapo report suggested Lidice was the hiding place of the assassins, since several Czech army officers exiled in England were known to have come from there.

The commemoration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day was all over the news this past week. This 75th anniversary has brought the horrors of the Nazi regime and the struggle of World War II to the consciousness of many people who are otherwise forgetful of what happened. Another anniversary of another event, also important in the struggle against the Nazi evil, is still often forgotten but deserves to be remembered.

June 10, 1942 – In one of the most infamous single acts of World War II in Europe, all 172 men and boys over age 16 in the Czech village of Lidice were shot by Nazis in reprisal for the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich. The women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Ninety young children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau, with some later taken to Nazi orphanages if they were German looking. The village was then completely leveled until not a trace remained.

The Nazis destroyed the town by first setting the houses on fire and then razing them to the ground with plastic explosives. They did not stop at that. Instead, they proceeded to destroy the church and even the last resting place – the cemetery. In 1943 all that remained was an empty space. Until the end of the war, the site was marked by notices forbidding entry. The news of the destruction of Lidice spread rapidly around the world.

But the Nazi intention to wipe the little Czech village off the face of the Earth did not succeed. Several towns throughout the world took the name of Lidice in memory of the Czech village that met such a horrific fate. Also, many women born at that time were named Lidice. The once tranquil village Lidice continued to live in the minds of people all over the world and after the war the Czechoslovak government decided to build Lidice again.

You can read the story of the assassination and the reprisals here. A recent movie is an excellent depiction of the historic events.