Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

May 31 is the feast of the Visitation, commemorating the journey of the Blessed Virgin, after the Annunciation, to her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judah (Luke 1:39-56). The child in Elizabeth's womb — John the Baptist — leapt at the sound of Mary's greeting, and Elizabeth cried out the words that have become the Hail Mary's second half: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." Mary answered with the Magnificat, the canticle sung at every evening prayer of the Church.

The traditional site of the Visitation is Ain Karim, west of Jerusalem, where the Church of the Visitation — built over the traditional house of Zechariah and Elizabeth — commemorates the meeting. The courtyard bears the Magnificat carved in forty-one languages on ceramic tiles, and the spring below the church is said to have flowed at John's birth. The Franciscans have kept the site since the 14th century.

The feast was added to the Roman calendar in 1389 by Pope Urban VI, in the context of the Western Schism, to ask Mary's intercession for the unity of the Church. It was fixed on July 2 — the day after the octave of John the Baptist — until the 1969 reform moved it to May 31, between the Annunciation (March 25) and the Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24), so that the liturgical sequence follows the Gospel chronology. From Jerusalem to Le Puy-en-Velay, where the cathedral of the Visitation keeps a Black Virgin venerated since the 7th century, the feast is kept wherever the Magnificat is sung.