The shrine of Our Lady of Loreto is located on the Adriatic coast of Italy, three hours from Rome. It is the third largest shrine to Mary in Europe, next to Lourdes and Fatima. The ministry of the shrine is the hospitality shown to pilgrims especially through the sacrament of penance.

The tradition of the shrine at Loreto goes back to the year 1291. As the last of the crusaders returned to Western Europe they brought with them a number of relics, objects of devotion and remembrances of holy shrines. It happened that the dwelling of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the house which both tradition and Christian devotion had maintained as the site of the appearance of the archangel Gabriel and therefore the Incarnation of our Savior, was moved from Nazareth to Christian Europe. The house arrived at Loreto on December 10, 1294.

Our Lady of Loreto Parish was founded in 1998, the year of the Holy Spirit. We firmly believe that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God has become man in Jesus Christ – a man like us in all things but sin. In his humanity the eternal Word was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary in his humanity he died on the cross, at the foot of which stood the Blessed Virgin Mary; in his humanity he rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples and to Mary in the upper room. The holy house of Mary at Loreto has been preserved by our fathers and mothers in the faith to serve for generations as a reminder of the faith of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of her love of God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We, too, here in Foxfield Colorado, are called to be homes, dwellings, and tabernacles of the Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is our mission as Catholics now and in the new millennium to recall for one another, for our neighborhoods, our communities, and our world that Jesus Christ became man, that he rose from the dead, and that he is alive. This we are called to do above all by showing to the world that Jesus Christ lives in us, that Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, has made his home in us as he did in the womb of Mary and in the house of Nazareth.