HOUSE OF VIRGIN MARY
It is known with certainty that the
Virgin Mary went to Ephesus and lived there for some time. Whether
or not she died in Ephesus was not known until Anne Catherine
Emmerich’s vision. The stigmatized German nun who had never been to
Ephesus had a vision of the House of the Virgin Mary and described
it in detail to the German writer Clemens Brentano who later
published a book about it. Catherine Emmerich died in 1884. In 1891
Paul, Superior of the Lazarists from Izmir read about her vision and
found a little building which corresponded with Emmerich’s
descriptions. Archeological evidence showed that the little house
was from the 6C AD but that the foundations were from the 1C AD.
This place was officially declared a shrine of the Roman Catholic
Church in 1896, and since then it has become a popular place of
pilgrimage. Pope Paul VI visited the shrine in 1967, Pope John Paul II in 1979 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.