The feast has a Franciscan origin: the Friars Minor celebrated it before 1263, when the first testimony appeared. Pope Urban VI made it universal, imposing it on the entire Latin Church to seek the end of the Great Western Schism. Due to the pope’s death, the decree remained unpromulgated; it was made public by his successor, Boniface IX, in 1389. Since the states supporting the antipopes did not recognize the feast’s constitution, the Council of Basel confirmed the universal celebration in the session on July 1, 1441.
Initially, the Visitation was celebrated on various dates. It would have been natural to celebrate it on a day close to March 25, that is, the Annunciation; this would have better matched the chronology of sacred history. But a celebration in late March often falls during Lent. If Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, as Saint Luke writes in his gospel (1:56), July 2, the date we recently celebrated the feast, exactly after the octave of Saint John the Baptist’s birth, represented the end of the period Mary spent with her cousin.
There was also another explanation for July 2: in the East, this was the festive day for placing the Virgin’s dress in the wooden sarcophagus, which, according to tradition, was the authentic tomb where the Virgin Mary had rested; the box, transferred from Jerusalem to Constantinople, was venerated in the church in the neighborhood called «Blachernae.»
The latest calendar reform has found it convenient to abandon the traditional date of July 2, moving the feast to the last day of May; this way, it falls between the Annunciation and Saint John’s birth, and—say the authors of the new calendar—it better fits the gospel narration. Additionally, the episode of the Visitation is also commemorated during the Advent liturgy.
