The Visitation

Luke's Gospel narrates that shortly after the Annunciation, Mary traveled to visit her relative Elizabeth, described as already six months pregnant with the child who would become John the Baptist. According to the account, as Mary greeted Elizabeth, the unborn John is described as leaping in his mother's womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, greets Mary as blessed and as the mother of her Lord, recognizing the significance of Mary's pregnancy before it has been otherwise announced to her.

Mary's response, a hymn of praise known from its opening Latin word as the Magnificat, draws heavily on Hebrew Bible language, particularly echoing the song of Hannah in the first book of Samuel, and celebrates God's action in lifting up the lowly and bringing down the powerful, themes that recur throughout Luke's Gospel as a whole. The Magnificat has since become one of the most frequently recited texts in Christian liturgical life, incorporated into the daily evening prayer of the Western church and set to music by composers across the history of Christian sacred music.

The scene closes Luke's account of the period before John's and Jesus's births with the two women together, before the narrative moves on to describe John's birth directly in the episode Luke narrates immediately afterward.

The Visitation was kept in the Western church for centuries on 2 July, a date without any independent claim to represent the actual timing of Mary's journey, chosen instead for reasons of the medieval liturgical calendar. In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church's calendar reform moved the feast to 31 May, positioning it to fall between the Annunciation on 25 March and the Nativity of John the Baptist on 24 June, so that the liturgical calendar would follow the narrative sequence Luke's Gospel itself describes rather than an older date detached from that sequence.

This kind of calendar adjustment illustrates a broader point about how Christian liturgical dates function: many are organized to express theological and narrative relationships between events, such as the nine month gap between Annunciation and Christmas or the six month gap between the conceptions of John and Jesus that Luke's text specifies, rather than to record independently established historical dates, which for events this early in Jesus's traditional biography are not recoverable through any surviving source.

Different Christian traditions have made different choices about exactly where to place the feast, and Eastern Orthodox churches, which did not adopt the 1969 Western reform, generally do not observe a separate Visitation feast in the same form, reflecting the broader divergence between Eastern and Western liturgical calendars that developed over many centuries of separate development.