Ministers of Christ’s Love Toward His Mother, Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, May 24, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church
May 24, 2021
Gen 3:9-15.20, Ps 87, Jn 19:25-34

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today for the fourth time, the Church celebrates with joy the Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, decreed in 2018 by Pope Francis to occur on the Monday after Pentecost. May 24, coincidentally is also the Feast of Our Land, Help of Christians, decreed in 1815, and the Feast of Our Lady of Sheshan, the most famous Chinese Marian sanctuary, located in western Shanghai, and the day on which Catholics throughout the world pray for the Christians and the Church in China. So we pray to Our Lady as our Mother, today, who is always ready to help, especially when we are in greatest need.
• Today’s feast is not just about the importance of Mary’s spiritual maternity but also concerns the way we’re all called not just to receive the fruits of her love but to love her as Jesus did. Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, wrote in his Decree establishing this memorial that in the scene we have in today’s Gospel of Mary with John on Calvary, “The Mother standing beneath the cross accepted her Son’s testament of love and welcomed all people in the person of the beloved disciple as sons and daughters to be reborn unto life eternal. She thus became the tender Mother of the Church which Christ begot on the cross handing on the Spirit. Christ, in turn, in the beloved disciple, chose all disciples as ministers of his love towards his Mother, entrusting her to them so that they might welcome her with filial affection.” So this feast is not just about the privilege we have to receive Mary’s love but about the call we have, with Christ, to love his mother with filial affection!
• It’s important for us to understand a little bit of the history of this feast because it shows us how the Holy Spirit has been guiding the Church throughout the centuries to recognize Mary’s maternity of the Church and respond with Christ-like Marian love.  St. Augustine and St. Leo the Great all spoke about the maternity of Mary in the Church. St. Augustine said that she is “acknowledged and honored as being truly the Mother of God and of the redeemer” but she must also be considered “the mother of the Members of Christ … since she has by her charity joined in bringing about the birth of believers in the Church, who are members of its head.” St. Leo said that the birth of Christ the head is also the birth of the Church his Body. Pope Benedict XIV in 1748 and Pope Leo XIII affirmed Mary as Mother of the Church but it was Pope St. Paul VI who formalized the title. It was a result of the focus that the Second Vatican Council gave to Mary, taking a schema for a separate document on Mary and incorporating its insights and the Council’s teaching on Mary into the eighth and “summit” chapter of Lumen Gentium, its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. On November 21, 1964, as the third session of the Council was closing, St. Paul VI reflected joyfully on the significance of putting Mary into the dogmatic Constitution and said it was time to “fulfill the vow we highlighted at the end of the last Session and that many Council Fathers have made their own, insistently asking that during this Council the maternal mission that the Blessed Virgin Mary fulfills in the Christian people be explicitly declared. For this reason, it seems necessary that in this public setting we officially announced a title with which the Blessed Virgin is honored, … because it expressed with a wondrous synthesis the privileged position this Council has recognized that the Mother of God has in the Church. Therefore, for the glory of the Blessed Virgin and our own consolation, we declare Mary most holy Mother of the Church, that is of the whole Christian people, both faithful and shepherds, that they may call her their most beloved Mother; and we establish that with this title the whole Christian people from this point forward should give her greater honor still and entrust to her their prayers.” In 1975, a votive Mass to Mary Mother of the Church was inserted into the Roman Missal. In 1980, John Paul II included “Mater Ecclesiae” into the Litany of Loreto. In 1986, three Masses dedicated to Mary, Mother and Image of the Church were placed into the Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And on March 3, 2018 (dated February 11, the 160th anniversary of Mary’s appearance in Lourdes), Pope Francis through the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments made it an obligatory memorial. We are grateful for this growth in Marian recognition and piety!
• One of my favorite lines from among the many great Marian hymns is “Monstra te esse matrem,” from the Ave Maris Stella. “Show yourself a mother.” And Mary is constantly proving her maternal love. Today’s first reading is from the Book of Genesis, where we see Eve’s vocation as the “mother of all the living.” Mary, whose fiat remedied Eve’s sin, is the “New Eve,” and mother of all of the living in the order of grace. When we look at Sacred Scripture, we find that there are various stages in the way that she exercised her Motherhood in the Church.
  • The first is at the Annunciation. When she gave God her fiat, she was assenting not just to Christ’s virginal conception, but also to her share in his saving mission. As he received from her his human body, she received from him, in a filial bond, his Mystical Body. The Preface for our Mass today (from the Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary, Mother and Image of the Church, I) says, ” Receiving your Word in her Immaculate Heart, she was found worthy to conceive him in her virgin’s womb and, giving birth to the Creator, she nurtured the beginnings of the Church.” Our grateful response is to enter into Mary’s maternal womb, to hear the beat of her contemplative heart, to be nourished umbilically by her faith, and to grow more and more in union with Christ our head.
  • The second stage is at the Wedding Feast of Cana, where she was already exercising her maternal care as the spiritual mother of the bride and groom (and the Groom and Bride, Christ and the Church) by having Jesus intervene to help the couple before the couple even recognized the problem they had on their hands. She showed her the way her spiritual maternity is linked to and entirely dependent on her Son’s saving mission. As the Preface for the Votive Mass of Our Lady of Cana attests (Collection of Masses), “With loving care for the bridegroom and his bride, she turns to her Son for help and tells the servants to do what he commands. Water is changed into wine, the wedding guests rejoice, as Christ foreshadows the wedding feast that is his daily gift to his Bride the Church.” Our grateful response is to recognize that she’s interceding now for so many graces for us, for things we may not be aware of, and to thank her for past graces received, for present ones and even for those she’ll obtain in the future.
  • The third stage is on Calvary. It’s here that she experiences what St. John Paul II called her “third annunciation.” (The first was by the Archangel Gabriel in Nazareth, the second was by Simeon at Jesus’ presentation in the Temple.) Jesus himself announces to her, “Woman, behold your Son,” and then to St. John, “Behold your mother.” That’s when Mary’s spiritual motherhood was explicated over the Church and when our duty to receive Mary into our home, into our lives, into our love was likewise received. The Preface for today’s prays, “Standing beside the Cross, she received the testament of divine love and took to herself as sons and daughters all those who by the Death of Christ are born to heavenly life.” Our grateful response is to receive this motherhood in a Eucharistic key. The reason why today’s Gospel reading doesn’t stop immediately after the phrase, “And from that hour the disciple took her into his home,” is because, as Cardinal Sarah said in his commentary on the feast, there was a desire to connect the incarnation to the Eucharist. “The water and blood that flowed from the heart of Christ on the Cross as a sign of the totality of his redemptive offering, continue to give life to the Church sacramentally through Baptism and the Eucharist. In this wonderful communion between the Redeemer and the redeemed, which always needs to be nourished, Blessed Mary has her maternal mission to carry out.”
  • The fourth stage is Pentecost, which we celebrated yesterday, when all of the members of the Church huddled around her and she breastfed them on her faith, on her prayer, on her docility to the Holy Spirit, on her recollections of the scenes of Jesus’ early life. She helped form them every more as a family. In the preface, we pray, “As the Apostles awaited the Spirit you had promised, she joined her supplication to the prayers of the disciples and so became the pattern of the Church at prayer.” Our grateful response is continuously to enter her school, to let her help us get to know Christ, to learn from her how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit, how to grow in communion with each other both by our divine filiation and our Marian filiation. Her motherhood is shown in a particular way at St. Peter’s Square, where in 1980, St. John Paul II installed in a window of the Secretariat of State, the image of Mary, Mater Ecclesiae, taken from a fifth century painting in the Basilica over the tombs of Pope Saint Leo II, III and IV. As the arms of Bernini’s colonnade welcomes the entire Church not just on earth but in heaven (depicted by the 140 saints over the columns of the Colonnade), Mary is there giving us her Son and helping us, whenever we convene there, to pray in communion with her for the perpetual Pentecost in the Church.
  • The fifth and last stage is with her assumption and coronation to the Church triumphant. There she continues her maternal intercession and love. If St. Therese wanted to spend her heaven doing good upon earth, how much more would Mary’s maternal love have wanted to do the same! For her in heaven, as St. John Paul II wrote in his exhortation Mother of the Redeemer, “to reign is to serve,” and she seeks to serve us by her prayers. I think about what was revealed to St. Catherine Labouré that Mary’s hands all have rings on them, brilliant golden rings for the graces she’s prayed for that have been received by those of us on earth, and black or dull rings for graces obtained but not received. She wants our collaboration so that through those graces we might one day come to meet her in an eternal embrace.
• I finish by turning to Mary’s work in the Eucharist. Cardinal Sarah mentioned it in including the much larger passage from John 19 so that we could focus on the water and blood, which is the source of sacramental life in the Church. But I think back to St. John Paul II’s great words at the end of his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucaristia, in which he said that the Church draws her life from the Eucharist, comparing our receptivity to Jesus in the Eucharist with Mary’s in the Incarnation. Mary as Mother of the Church drew her life from her proto-eucharistic bond with her Son, and later drew it from her Eucharistic bond receiving Jesus in the Masses of St. John and the first apostles. She’s the model for how we’re called to receive. St. John Paul II commented on how the Ave Verum Corpus links the Eucharist to Mary’s Maternity both in Nazareth and Calvary. “Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine, vere passum, immolatum, in cruce pro homine!” Hail, true body born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, immolated on the Cross for man! John Paul II wrote, “In a certain sense Mary lived her Eucharistic faith even before the institution of the Eucharist, by the very fact that she offered her virginal womb for the Incarnation of God’s Word. The Eucharist, while commemorating the passion and resurrection, is also in continuity with the incarnation. At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood. As a result, there is a profound analogy between the Fiat which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. Mary was asked to believe that the One whom she conceived “through the Holy Spirit” was “the Son of God” (Lk 1:30-35). In continuity with the Virgin’s faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.” So Mary’s spiritual maternity is Eucharistic, the Mater Ecclesiae is the Mater Eucaristiae. We ask her to intercede today, as we prepare to receive her Son in Holy Communion, for all of the suffering Christians in China and for all of us in the Church, that we may grow to love her, and trust her, and depend on her, just as much as Jesus did.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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