Description of the attraction
The Catholic Church of the Visitation in the Jerusalem suburb of Ein Karem is named after one of the most beautiful evangelical episodes - Mary's visit to Elizabeth.
The angel, who announced to Mary that She would conceive the Messiah, also told about Her relative Elizabeth, “called barren,” and now bearing a son. As the Evangelist Luke writes, the Virgin immediately hurried "to the mountainous country, to the city of Judah" - to the place where Elisabeth and her husband, the priest Zachariah, lived. Surely Maria wanted not only to share incredible news, but also to help an elderly woman. By this time, Elizabeth had been hiding from people for the sixth month, apparently avoiding idle conversations.
The meeting of the two pregnant women was amazing. Young Mary greeted Elizabeth - one can imagine that She did it with due respect. However, the older woman gave her great honors. The Holy Spirit helped Elizabeth understand Whom she sees in front of her: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And where did it come from to me that the Mother of my Lord came to me? For when the voice of Thy greeting came to my ears, the baby leaped joyfully in my womb”(Luke 1: 42-44). The leaping baby was the future John the Baptist.
For three months Mary lived in the "city of Judah." This was the present Ein Karem. It is believed that the place where Zechariah's house stood was found during excavations carried out in Jerusalem in the 4th century by Saint Helena Equal to the Apostles, the mother of Emperor Constantine. She may have built the first church where Mary and Elizabeth met. Later, the crusaders built a large two-story temple on the ruins. It fell into desolation under the Muslims when the crusaders were expelled from the Holy Land.
In 1679, the building was bought by the Franciscan Order. Reconstruction on the lower level of the temple began only in 1862. And in 1955 the final restoration of the church was completed. It was led by the Italian Franciscan monk and "architect of the Holy Land" Antonio Barlucci, who built and reconstructed many buildings here.
Barlucci decorated the upper church with a Tuscan-style painted ceiling and frescoes dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The frescoes in the lower temple depict scenes from the New Testament, including the massacre of infants. Joseph and Mary, saving little Jesus, then fled to Egypt, and Zechariah's family stayed at home. The apocrypha says that Elizabeth and her son hid from Herod's soldiers in the rock behind the stone. The stone kept in the Church of the Visitation is considered by tradition to be the same. Here you can also see the well, from which, according to legend, Zechariah, Elizabeth and John drank.
The mosaic on the façade shows Mary hurrying towards Elizabeth. Not far from the entrance is a sculptural group depicting their meeting. And on the wall there are tablets with translations into forty-two languages of the world, including Vietnamese and Swahili, of the text "Magnificat" (Magnificat anima mea Dominum). This is the glorification of the Virgin Mary, which She uttered when Elizabeth recognized the Mother of God in Her: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, My Savior …" (Luke 1: 46-47).
