Imitating Fulton Sheen in Love of Mary Immaculate, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
December 8, 2019
Gen 3:9-15.20, Ps 98, Eph 1:3-6.11-12, Lk 1:26-38

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

The following text guided the homily: 

St. John Paul II in his 1996 exhortation Vita Consecrata described the connection between the reality of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and the life of consecrated religious. “Mary,” he wrote, “is the one who, from the moment of her Immaculate Conception, … is the sublime example of perfect consecration, since she belongs completely to God and is totally devoted to him. Chosen by the Lord, who wished to accomplish in her the mystery of the Incarnation, she reminds consecrated persons of the primacy of God’s initiative. At the same time, having given her assent to the divine Word, made flesh in her, Mary is the model of the acceptance of grace by human creatures.” She is the model of God’s initiative, the model of acceptance of that initiative, and the sublime example of the consecration that flows from that initiative.

We see all of those realities in today’s readings. In the first reading, after Adam and Eve sinned, God took the initiative and announced the redemption, what’s called the “first Gospel,” telling the serpent he would place “enmity between you and the woman and between her offspring and yours.” Mary is the one who had nothing to do with the devil and her Offspring, Jesus, was the one who defeated him once and for all. Mary received the fruits of Jesus’ triumph 47 years in time before he accomplished it eternally on Calvary. The prevenient grace she received from the first moment of her existence is this sign of God’s initiative. We see that initiative continue to be proclaimed in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in which we learn that “before the foundation of the world,” God the Father ” blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him … to be holy and without blemish before him,” destining us for adoption. God has these blessings in store before we were conceived, before the world was conceived. We see God’s initiative likewise with Mary, sending the Angel Gabriel to announce to her “Rejoice, you who have been filled with grace.” She was filled with God by God before even her first choice. She was filled with every spiritual blessing and the greatest of all, God himself, in her heart and then her womb.

But we also see in her how to respond. After having her questions about God’s modality answered — essentially asking how she would be a mom while remaining true to her consecration to God as a virgin — she replied, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.” This points not only to her receptivity of the grace God was extending, but the whole model of her life: a handmaid of the Lord, consecrated to the Lord’s service, not just allowing but wholeheartedly wanting her life to develop according to God’s will. She shows a wholehearted response to God’s blessing. Mary so identified with God’s initiative at the beginning that when, in 1858, St. Bernadette asked her what was her name, she didn’t reply, “Miriam,” or “I am the Mother of God,” but rather “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Her whole life was defined by this grace. And when she appeared to the three shepherd children in Fatima in 1917, she told Lucia and SS. Francisco and Jacinta that, in response to the evil continuously caused by the serpent, the remedy was consecration to her immaculate heart, a heart that, like hers, was full of God, full of grace, wholeheartedly intent on love and trusting obedience. She wants to help us have a heart like hers. She wants to help us to cooperate with God’s grace, in the Sacrament of Baptism, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and in all the Sacraments, to become holy and immaculate in God’s sight. Today as we commemorate the beginning of the life of our spiritual mother and her spiritual greatness, as we rejoice at the beginning of our redemption in the womb of St. Anne, we also celebrate how Mary continues her consecrated life, interceding for us and helping us to imitate her in receiving God’s initiative, in responding to it with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and consecrating ourselves to God’s service and glory.

Someone who had an extraordinary love and devotion to our Lady and allowed her prayer to become fruitful in his life was Archbishop Fulton Sheen, whom the Lord came to New York 40 years ago today to call home. There’s a movement of priests all across the world, in view of the delay in his beatification, to remember him at Mass in particular today on his 40^th anniversary, praying that his beatification go forward and that God will take the initiative to extend many graces to people praying from Sheen’s intercession today.

Yesterday, as I was praying in the confessional at St. Michael’s during the Advent Mass for the Sisters of Life, I had a chance to ponder Sheen’s rich thoughts on Mary’s Immaculate Conception. He made several beautiful points.

First, he says that in eternity God has two pictures of us: who we are by our choices and who he really intended us to be. There’s also some disproportion he said between God’s original plan to be holy and blameless in his sight and the way we by our free choices have worked it out. Mary, he said, is the one person in all humanity for whom there was this perfect conformity between God’s ideal and who she was. “The melody of her life is played just as it was written,” he wrote. “Mary was thought, conceived, and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realization.” God had this image of her not only in eternity but at the beginning of time, as the response to the first sin and every sin.

Second, Sheen says not only that God could foresee this correspondence between image and copy, but chose her with particular qualities. “If you could have preexisted your mother, would you not have made her the most perfect woman that ever lived?,” he asks. “Why, then, should we think that God would do otherwise?” Jesus was born of a Mother whom “He chose before He was born. It is the only instance in history where both the Son willed the Mother and the Mother willed the Son. … Before taking unto Himself a human nature, He consulted with the Woman, to ask her if she would give Him [humanity]. The Manhood of Jesus was not stolen from humanity…; it was given as a gift.” And she was chosen to be immaculate, holy and blameless before him. “The closer one gets to fire, the greater the heat,” he said, and therefore, “the closer one is to God, the greater the purity. But since no one was ever closer to God than the woman whose human portals He threw open to walk this earth, then no one could have been more pure than she. … This special purity of hers we call the Immaculate Conception.”

Third, he insists that the Immaculate Conception “does not imply that Mary needed no Redemption. She needed it as much as you and I do.” But whereas we receive the fruits of redemption in our soul at Baptism, “She was redeemed in advance, by way of prevention, in both body and soul, in the first instant of conception… as a result of the merits of Our Lord’s Cross being offered to her at the moment of her conception.” She had this privilege, he said, not for her sake but for Jesus’, because she was an image of the goodness that existed before sin took over. She was an image of the separation, the enmity, between God and sin.

Lastly, he said that God has given her to us as a model. While insisting that Jesus is the image of the invisible God whom we are always to follow, he added that Jesus’ divinity can sometimes intimidate. “There ought to be, on the human level,” he said, “someone who would give humans hope, someone who could lead us to Christ, someone who would mediate between us and Christ as He mediates between us and the Father.” That’s who Mary is by God’s design. “One look at her,” Sheen said, “and we know that a human who is not good can become better; one prayer to her, and we know that, because she is without sin, we can become less sinful.”

As we prepare on this great Solemnity to receive within us the same Son for whom Mary was immaculately conceived in order to bear for nine months, we ask her lovingly to intercede for us, to help us become better, to lead us to Christ, so that we, receiving God’s grace-filled initiative and responding with wholehearted, lifelong consecration, may be “holy and immaculate in his sight” and “live for the praise of his glory,” so that one day we may come to experience true joy with her and, we pray, with Archbishop Sheen and all the saints where the redemption begun on this day in the womb of St. Anne reaches its fulfillment

The readings for today’s Mass were: