Slipper Chapel

The Catholic National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady, at Walsingham, is actually located one mile outside Walsingham, at Houghton Saint Giles, Norfolk, England. It incorporates both the historic Slipper Chapel, built around 1340, and the more contemporary Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation, completed in 1982 and its surrounding grounds The Slipper Chapel, originally known as the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, was the last chapel on the pilgrim route to the Priory of Our Lady of Walsingham. The entire site was elevated to the special status of a Minor Basilica by Pope Francis in 2015. In 1934, the venerated Marian image of Our Lady of Walsingham was translated from the Our Lady of the Annunciation Church in King's Lynn to the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Slipper Chapel), which has served as a Catholic National Shrine and a focal point of Marian devotion since that year. On 15 August 1954, Pope Pius XII granted a canonical coronation to the venerated image of the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Walsingham, which remains enshrined within the Slipper Chapel and continues to be a site of Marian pilgrimage.

When the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Slipper Chapel) was built, Walsingham was second only to Canterbury in importance as an English pilgrimage site, attracting pilgrims from across the country and beyond. In 1538, following King Henry VIII's English Reformation, the chapel fell into disuse and was repurposed over the centuries as a poorhouse, a forge, a cowshed, and a barn. In 1863, Charlotte Pearson Boyd (1837–1906), a wealthy local woman and convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, identified the chapel. She purchased the building from the farm owner in 1896, restored it, and then donated the chapel to Downside Abbey for Catholic devotion. The chapel underwent further restoration in 1904 under the direction of architect Thomas Garner. On 6 February 1897, the Our Lady of the Annunciation Church in King's Lynn was re-established as the Pontifical Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, authorising the image for public veneration by papal rescript from Pope Leo XIII. In 1934, the image was subsequently translated

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