Red-Letter Day
The Visitation
May 31
also known as The Visitation, Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, Visitation of Our Lady
On this day the Church keeps Mary's journey into the hill country of Judah to the house of Zechariah, where Elizabeth greeted her as the mother of the Lord and Mary answered with the Magnificat. Luke alone records it, and gives it no date. The feast itself is late: instituted at Prague in 1386 and extended to the whole Latin Church in 1390, kept for centuries on 2 July, and moved to 31 May in 1969.
Two women meet in a house in the hill country, and both of them are carrying a child they were told about before they conceived. Elizabeth is old and had been barren; she is in her sixth month. Mary has just been told by an angel what she will bear, and has been given Elizabeth's pregnancy as the sign that with God nothing is impossible. So she goes, Luke says, with haste, to a town in Judah that he does not name, and that later tradition has identified variously as Hebron or Ein Karem. What she goes to do is ordinary: she stays about three months, through the end of an elderly kinswoman's pregnancy.
What happens at the door is not ordinary. Before Mary has said anything but a greeting, the child in Elizabeth's womb leaps, Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, and she cries out what no one has told her: "And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Then she says the thing the day is really built on, which is not about the child at all: "And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord." Mary answers with the song the Church has sung at evening ever since, in which God is magnified for looking on the humble estate of his servant, for scattering the proud, for putting down the mighty and lifting the lowly.
Ambrose, preaching on this passage at Milan before the year 400, fixed on the order of it: Elizabeth heard the voice first, but John felt the grace first; she heard by the order of nature, he leapt by reason of the mystery. The infant leapt, the mother was filled. The mother was not filled before the son, but when the son was filled with the Holy Spirit, he filled the mother also. The recognition runs from the youngest and least visible person in the room outward. Nobody in that house arranged any of it.
The day itself came very much later, and for a reason that had nothing to do with two women and a doorway. In 1378 the Western Church split between rival popes, and Jan of Jenštejn, Archbishop of Prague, set himself to have a feast of the Visitation instituted as a plea for its healing. He wrote to the pope that the schism was execrable and pestilent, and asked Mary to settle the attack of the storm and lead the troubled small ship to port. He announced the feast in his own archdiocese on 16 June 1386. It was contested at once: his own scholasticus objected that the thing was superstitious, that no archbishop could add a feast, that the visions of a susceptible metropolitan were no ground for a celebration. When the matter came before a papal consistory on 8 April 1389 the first objection minuted was blunter still, that the feast of the Visitation could never be called Catholic. Urban VI declared he would institute it anyway, and said plainly that he did so to heal the schism. He died before issuing anything; the bull came from Boniface IX on 9 November 1390, fixing the day at 2 July with a vigil fast and an octave. In 1441 the Council of Basel promulgated it again, because bishops of the rival obedience had never taken it up. For nearly six centuries afterward the day's own collect asked that the solemnity of her Visitation might procure increase of peace.
Rome moved the feast to 31 May in 1969, so that it would fall between the Annunciation and the Nativity of John the Baptist and better agree with the Gospel narrative. That is where our own calendar keeps it, and the placement lets the calendar run Luke's first chapter in its own order: the message, the journey, the birth. The feast that was invented to mend a broken Church now sits at the hinge of that sequence, where a young woman who has been told something incredible walks into a house to be useful, and is met at the door by the only person who already knows.
You are not likely to be asked this week to do anything more visible than what Mary did here, which was to travel to someone who needed help and stay for three months. Notice how little of the recognition in this story is arranged by anyone: Elizabeth does not deduce who has arrived, the child does not decide to leap, and Mary announces nothing before she is greeted. The blessing Elizabeth pronounces is not for a great deed but for having believed that what was said would be fulfilled. Where, in what you have been given to do this week, are you waiting for something more obviously important before you go?
The event is known from one source and one only. Luke 1:39-56 is the sole witness, composed decades after the fact and not eyewitness in form, and it supplies no calendar date, no year, and no place-name beyond "a town in Judah." Nothing in Luke or in any early Christian source fixes a civil date, and no tradition surveyed has ever claimed that its feast-date recovers the day the visit happened; every date below is a placement decision, openly documented as such. The town is identified by later tradition variously as Hebron or Ein Karem; neither is scriptural. The Protoevangelium of James carries a variant of the episode and Pseudo-Matthew omits it, but these are second-century and later, dependent on or parallel to Luke rather than independent attestation.
The passage had a pastoral life for six centuries before it had a day. Bede, who died in 735, preached it as an Advent homily, and treated it as a cure for pride: because the human race had perished at the touch of the plague of pride, it was proper that the time of salvation should first begin with the putting forward of the medicine of humility by which it might be healed. In the same homily he reports the custom already established of the Magnificat being chanted daily by everyone along with the psalmody of the evening office, so that a frequent reminder of the Lord's incarnation might kindle devotion. That is the sturdiest fact about this passage's reception: the Church has prayed it nightly for longer than it has kept a feast for it. In the later Middle Ages the Visitation was the standard miniature at Lauds in Books of Hours, so a layperson who owned one met it every morning; and the Magnificat was written on parchment strips and inscribed belts used in childbirth, alongside the names of the Trinity, the Virgin, and St Margaret.
The feast's own history begins in Bohemia. The received account, printed in a 1912 encyclopedia article and repeated almost everywhere since, holds that the Franciscans adopted the feast in 1263 on Bonaventure's advice; that claim rests on an eighteenth-century annalist and does not survive modern scrutiny. It was refuted in 1911 by Golubovich, who showed the annalist had conflated four feasts into a single chapter, and again by Pfaff in 1970, who stated flatly that the Visitation is not found in Franciscan service books before its general promulgation of 1389. The error is still live: the official Calendarium Romanum of 1969 prints it. The secure beginning is 16 June 1386, when Jan of Jenštejn announced the feast in the archdiocese of Prague and assigned it to 28 April, so that it would fall inside Eastertide. He composed the first office for it, Exurgens autem Maria; the office actually promulgated in 1390 was a second commission, by the English Benedictine Adam Easton, cardinal-priest of St Cecilia in Trastevere.
In the East this feast is a modern graft rather than an ancient parallel. Russian Orthodox sources report a commemoration of the Meeting of the Most Holy Theotokos and the Righteous Elizabeth kept on 30 March, dating from the consecration of a church at the Gorny Convent at Ein Karem on that day in 1883 by the Archimandrite Antonin Kapustin, who composed a service for it; not all Orthodox jurisdictions have received it. The Melkite Greek-Catholic Church instituted its own observance in 1844, on the Friday after Pascha, and after objections from Constantinople moved it; it is now kept on 23 June, the eve of the Nativity of St John the Baptist. No dedicated Visitation feast has been located in the Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Armenian, Malankara, Mar Thoma or Syro-Malabar calendars.
Lutherans kept the day without argument, the feast being directly biblical, and kept it musically: at Leipzig it was one of three Marian feasts requiring figural music, and Bach wrote for it. His German Magnificat, Meine Seel erhebt den Herren (BWV 10), is a Visitation setting; and Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (BWV 147), first written at Weimar in 1716 as an Advent cantata, was expanded for the Visitation at Leipzig, its final chorale the ancestor of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." Modern Bach scholarship dates that Leipzig performance to 2 July 1723, Spitta to not before 1727; either way it belongs to the old July date.
Of domestic custom the record is thinner than it looks. German-speaking lands are reported to have hung hazel branches or rosaries at windows and doors before sunrise on 2 July against storms, with weather-lore attached, but no century can be assigned from the sources available. One devotional site reports a Polish custom under the title Our Lady of Berries, and a patronal procession at Enna in Sicily. Notably, this feast produced no ritual object comparable to a Candlemas candle; what it produced was textual and musical, two rhymed offices and a canticle sung every evening.
Book of Common Prayer 2019 (Anglican Church in North America): the collect for 31 May (p. 628), the kalendar entry naming the day a Red-Letter Holy Day (p. 699), and the appointed lessons: Zephaniah 3:14-18, Psalm 113 (New Coverdale Psalter) or Ecce, Deus, and Luke 1:39-56 in the ESV. Quotations of the Gospel and of the psalm are from the propers as printed in the official leaflet for the day.
*Ambrose of Milan, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, Book 2, sections 23 and 26-27: the passage on Elizabeth hearing first and John feeling grace first, given here in a working English rendering from the Latin text at la.wikisource.org (based on Migne, Patrologia Latina* 15). No published translation is quoted.
Bede, homily on Luke 1:39-56: the "medicine of humility" and the daily-Vespers Magnificat, translated by Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, Bede the Venerable: Homilies on the Gospels I (Cistercian, 1991), pp. 30, 32, 35, 42-43, quoted at Rhianydd Hallas, Two rhymed offices composed for the feast of the Visitation (PhD dissertation, Charles University, 2021), pp. 26-28.
*Rhianydd Hallas, Two rhymed offices composed for the feast of the Visitation (Charles University, 2021): the standing critical study of the feast's institution, and the source for the Prague chronology, Jenštejn's letters (from Loserth's edition of the Codex Epistolaris), the objections of Adalbertus Ranconis, the consistory of 8 April 1389 (from Neumann, 1935, pp. 469-70), the bull of 9 November 1390 (from Tomassetti, Bullarum … Taurinensis IV, 602-604), Polc's finding that the record is silent on why 2 July was chosen, and the refutation of the 1263 Franciscan claim by Golubovich (Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 1911, pp. 65-66) and Pfaff (New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England*, 1970, p. 42). Available at dspace.cuni.cz.
**Calendarium Romanum (Vatican Polyglot Press, 1969), pp. 93 and 128**: the Latin of the 1969 transfer to 31 May, its stated reason, and its record of Urban VI's purpose; also the surviving 1263 error and the retained memoria of SS Processus and Martinian.
*Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year: Time after Pentecost, vol. III (2nd English edition, 1900), pp. 469-70 and 496-513*: the historic Roman collect in Latin with facing English (p. 513), the forty-third session of Basel (p. 499), the vigil, octave and indulgence provisions (p. 497), and the 1849 context of the 1850 elevation.
*Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer (1901), pp. 337-39*: the 1549/1552 exclusion of the Visitation and the "recent importations into the Kalendar" rationale.
Drew Keane, "A Note on Blackletter Days in the Prayer Book Calendar": Canon 88 of 1604, Whitgift's civil rationale, and the devotional justification added at the Savoy Conference.
Common Worship: Times and Seasons / the Church of England's calendar and collects (2000), churchofengland.org: the collect for "The Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth," which the ACNA collect follows.
*Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, vol. II (English edition, 1899), pp. 381 and 412-13*: BWV 10 as a Visitation setting and the alternative dating of the BWV 147 adaptation.
**The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), "Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary" and "Visitation Order"**, newadvent.org: the received institutional narrative, the pre-1390 regional dates, Pius V's suppressions, the Ruiz office, and Pius IX's 1850 elevation. Cited here as the source of both the standard account and three of its persistent errors.
The universal institution ran through a consistory on 8 April 1389, at which six objections were minuted and two more raised from the floor, including one that a new feast meant a day's lost wages falling hardest on low-wage earners; the reply was that if the Church had to weigh such things she would relinquish all liturgical authority. Urban VI declared the feast and then died, on 15 October 1389. Boniface IX issued the bull Superni benignitas Conditoris on 9 November 1390, fixing 2 July, with a vigil fast, an octave, and indulgences at the rate Urban IV had given Corpus Christi. The widely repeated dates of 6 April 1389 for the papal act and 9 November 1389 for the bull come from that same 1912 article and are not supported; the consistory and bull dates given here follow the standing critical study. Why 2 July was chosen is not documented at all: the day already belonged to SS Processus and Martinian, and the familiar explanation that it follows the octave of St John the Baptist is a modern reconstruction, of which the acta and the other documents are silent. The Council of Basel confirmed the feast in 1441, in a session Guéranger identifies as the forty-third, because bishops of the opposing obedience had not received it; the decree itself has not been read here. England adopted it for the province of Canterbury in 1480, where it stands in the Sarum kalendar as a greater double feast of nine lessons on 2 July.
Later Roman acts contracted rather than expanded it. Pius V's reform of about 1568-70 abolished the rhymed office, the vigil, and the octave, though many orders and dioceses kept an octave anyway; Clement VIII had a new office compiled by the Minorite Ruiz; Pius IX raised the feast to a double of the second class on 13 May 1850. The general purge of octaves and vigils in 1955 removed whatever remained of the original apparatus. Then in 1969 the Calendarium Romanum moved the feast to the last day of May, between the solemnities of the Annunciation and the Nativity of John the Baptist, so that it might better agree with the Gospel narrative; the same book records that the feast had been instituted by Urban VI to obtain an end to the schism of the West. Germany, Austria and Switzerland are reported to have retained 2 July out of regard for popular devotion.
The Anglican course is the sharpest swing this feast undergoes anywhere. Cranmer's 1549 kalendar had no black-letter tier at all, and the Visitation was excluded outright. Procter and Frere, whose history is the standard account, note that the Visitation was excluded, and, like the Transfiguration, in spite of having biblical authority, only received later recognition as a black letter festival; their reconstruction of the reasoning is that biblical warrant was the test for a red-letter day, and that days like this one were probably rejected on the ground that they were recent importations into the Kalendar. A feast invented in the 1380s was, in 1549, too new to be safe. When it returned as a black-letter day at 2 July is not established by any source read here; the often-cited 1561 date is an inference. What black-letter status meant is documented: Canon 88 of the 1604 Constitutions and Canons confirmed that no proper lesson, collect, epistle or gospel attached to such days, and Archbishop Whitgift's stated rationale was frankly civil, that the days served to express the usual times of payments, and the times of the courts and their returns. Only at the Savoy Conference did the bishops add the devotional justification that the days were useful for the preservation of the saints' memories. The English Deposited Book of 1928 (proposed, never authorized) supplied a full set of propers; the American 1928 Prayer Book, by contrast, contains no Visitation propers at all. The 1979 American book was the first with full propers for the day, at 31 May; Common Worship followed in 2000 under the title "The Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth"; and the ACNA Book of Common Prayer 2019 keeps it at 31 May as a Red-Letter Holy Day, the same rank as Christmas and the Apostles, under a title that names Zechariah as well as Elizabeth.
One further point about our own collect is worth recording, because it is easily assumed otherwise. It is not a descendant of the historic Roman collect, which asked instead that the votive solemnity of her Visitation might procure increase of peace and shares no language with it. It is Common Worship's collect of 2000 with four small edits: Mighty becomes Almighty, Mary becomes the blessed Virgin Mary, "her Son our Saviour" becomes "her Son as our Savior," and the orthography is Americanized. Whether the Church of England composed that text fresh or rendered a post-1969 Latin original is unresolved.
Almighty God, by whose grace Elizabeth rejoiced with the blessed Virgin Mary and greeted her as the mother of the Lord: Look with favor on your lowly servants, that, with Mary, we may magnify your holy Name and rejoice to acclaim her Son as our Savior; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Zephaniah 3:14–18Psalm 113 or Isaiah 12:2–6Colossians 3:12–17Luke 1:39–56