Mary’s Mission in Attaching Us to Christ the Vine, Fifth Wednesday of Easter, May 13, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima
May 13, 2020
Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

• Today in the Acts of the Apostles, we come to one of the most pivotal events not only in the history of the early Church but the history of the Church, period. It’s the Council of Jerusalem, the first such Council in the history of the Church. It came about because “there arose no little dissension and debate” after some Christians coming from Judea were telling the Gentile Christians in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.” The question was far broader than merely of circumcision, but about the ground of salvation, the way we relate to God, the role of the Mosaic law in the faith and the manner in which Jewish and Gentile Christians were to behave with regard to each other. So Paul, Barnabas and others went up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it.
• St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through rigid observance of the Mosaic Law in all its details. But after he was converted on the road to Damascus, converted from a false notion of the holy life to a true one, he began to see that one is saved by Christ and not by our own actions obeying all 613 commands and all the other precepts of the Mosaic law. We’re saved by God’s mercy rather than by our merit. He would spend most of his apostolic life proclaiming this truth. He wrote two letters (one to the Romans and another to the Galatians) explaining in detail how Christ, rather than the law, is our Savior, and he spent parts of two other letters (Colossians and Philippians) talking about how baptism rather than circumcision enters us into the life of faith and the Covenant with God. He brought all of these inspirations to the Council in Jerusalem and we’ll see later how the Holy Spirit led the early Church to the solution with regard to the Gentiles.
• We learn in this scene two essential truths. First that we’re saved by God’s action to which we freely respond, not principally by our own action. The Mosaic law functions to help us prepare to receive the fullness of that saving action in Christ, when he comes to bring us fully into communion with God through his passion, death and resurrection and through the sacraments he instituted so that we might enter into his life. Second, we learn how to relate to each other. One of the reasons why this dispute between Jews and Gentiles was such a big deal was not simply the question of whether Gentiles needed to be good Jews before they could be good Christians, but it was because stricter Jews, like the Pharisees, had no interaction with Gentiles. They avoided them as if they were lepers. They didn’t eat with them. They didn’t enter into their houses. That was the background as to why the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of the bread, because many of the Jewish Christians would just keep their cultural tradition of complete separation. That obviously couldn’t work in the communion of the Church. The Council of Jerusalem was crucial so that Christians would live in communion with each other, which is what Jesus intended from the beginning, that we would be one as he and the Father is one.
• And that brings us to the Gospel, where Jesus gives us the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches, which is an image of the type of unity we’re all supposed to have in Jesus, an image of how our works are supposed to flow from our saving bond with him rather than detached from him and his redeeming grace, and an image of how we’re supposed to be in communion with the other Branches on the Vine. Over the course of Jesus’ Holy Thursday instructions to the disciples, he’s already called us to a union of love, telling us to remain in his love by keeping his commandments and remaining in his word. He’s told us our union with him should be so profound that who ever receives us receives him, because who ever receives us should be receiving us-in-communion-with-Christ-who-is-himself-in-communion-with-the-Father. Today Jesus points not just to a moral union but to a spiritually ontological union that precedes and is coupled to it. This union is the essence of the Christian life. We enter into an interpersonal communion with the Lord that flows out into deeds. How beautiful is this reality that Jesus wills! And as we attach ourselves to Christ the Vine as his branches, as God’s live flows from the Vine into us the branches, we recognize that we are connected to each other precisely in Christ the Vine. As he remains in us and we remain in him, we remain in communion with each other. We bear fruit in communion with him and in his body the Church. This is the way he says, somewhat shockingly, at the end of today’s passage that we will “become” his disciples. We’re not disciples if we merely know what he’s taught or simply follow him on the outside. We become disciples when we unite ourselves to him on the inside and through, with and in him with each other. If we become disciples in this way, united with Jesus and with other branches on the Vine, that is what will glorify the Father. All of us who together with Jesus love the Father must therefore want this type of mutual inter-abiding.
• This brings us to the feast of Our Lady of Fatima that we celebrate today. 103 years ago she appeared to the three young shepherd children in the Cova da Iria in Portugal. No one has ever been more attached as a branch to the Vine than Mary was to her Son Jesus. Not only did he in his humanity attach himself to her humanity through an umbilical cord, but we see that she kept that spiritual communion with him thereafter. When an anonymous woman praised Mary’s breasts and womb for their physical connection to Jesus (Lk 11:27-28), Jesus praised his Mother, rather, for hearing and obeying God’s word. She kept his word so that the word became flesh within her, and, as Jesus promised throughout the rest of his Last Supper discourse, when one keeps God’s word, the Father and Son will come and dwell within that person. Mary’s heart was one that constantly sought what God wanted. His redeeming blood flowed through it. Her heart beat in synchrony with us. Her pure heart saw God (Mt 5:8) and sought always to unite herself to the will of her Son. And united to him, she bore the most blessed Fruit of all time.
• When she came from heaven to Fatima, she sought to help SS. Francisco and Jacinta and (we hope one day Saint) Lucia learn both how to remain attached to God and to pray for all those who were detaching themselves from her Son the Vine. The path to abide in God, she indicated, was through consecration to her immaculate heart, a heart that always said yes to the Lord, it was to enter into her own consecration to God, something that the three pastorinhos readily did, entrusting themselves to her prayers and protection, and readily acting on what she asked of them. And what she asked were prayers and bodily penances and sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, all those who were partially or fully cut off from Christ.
• Why did she appear to children ages 7, 9 and 10? Obviously part of that answer is mysterious, but it’s likely because most of her older children — then and still now — routinely ignore this summons of her Son. It’s very moving how Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia immediately acted on this summons. They prayed the Rosary for sinners. The recited between the mysteries of the Rosary a prayer Mary herself taught them that most Catholics continue to pray to this day: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of your mercy!” From the beginning of the apparitions, Francisco began to pray almost constantly to “console Jesus for the sins of the world.” One night, when his father discovered him sobbing in his room, Francisco gave the reason: “I was thinking of Jesus who is so sad because of the sins that are committed against him.” Jacinta was so convinced by the vision of the reality of Hell of the importance of saving sinners from it that she began to pour herself into prayer and practice various corporal mortifications. “Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners,” Mary had told her. “Many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.” Jacinta responded, as did her brother, by prostrating themselves in prayer for hours, kneeling with their heads humbly bowed to the ground. They made all types of physical sacrifices, wearing tight cords around their waist, scourging themselves with stinging nettles, abstaining from water on hot days and other penitential practices. When both caught the terrible 1918 flu that took the lives of tens of thousands — the closest historical occurrence to what we are now enduring with Covid-19 —  they offered all of their sufferings for sinners. Having been told by Our Lady that she would take him to heaven soon, Francisco declined hospital treatment, bearing enormous pain with a smile and without complaint. Our Lady appeared to Jacinta and asked if she wanted to stay on earth a little longer to convert more sinners. She said yes. So the little girl allowed herself to be dragged from clinic to clinic, to have two of her ribs removed without anaesthesia, valiantly sacrificing herself as a victim for the conversion of sinners and for the Holy Father, whom she knew from the vision would suffer much. When Saint John Paul II beatified them in Fatima 20 years ago today, he lifted them up as an example to the whole world of what Christ-like and Marian love for the salvation of others looks like. He stressed that their lives demonstrate that children can be heroically virtuous and reach “the heights of perfection” — full attachment to Christ the Vine — at a very young age, and if they can so can all of us.
• Our Lady also revealed the stakes of taking this prayer and sacrifice for sinners seriously. Otherwise that self-alienation of being a cut off branch can lead to what Jesus describes today as “being thrown into the fire and being burned.” The Blessed Mother showed the three pastorinhos three different visions of the consequence of sin. The first vision was of hell, where Mary told them “the souls of poor sinners go.” They saw, as Lúcia recounted, “a great sea of fire” with “demons and souls in human form… amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair,” which made them tremble with horror. Had Mary not promised them that she would help them get to heaven, Lûcia said, she thinks they would have died of fear and terror. Pope Francis was clear about this this morning: “Our Lady foretold, and warned us about, a way of life that is godless and indeed profanes God in his creatures.  Such a life – frequently proposed and imposed – risks leading to hell.” The second image conveyed to them that World War I would soon end, but Mary said that if people did not stop offending God a worse one would erupt in which God would “punish the world for its crimes.” She warned that unless Russia were converted, the communists would spread their errors throughout the world, causing war, annihilating nations, persecuting the Church and martyring millions. The third was a prophetic vision. An angel with a flaming sword cried out “Penance, Penance Penance!” as the children beheld a steep way of the Cross through a city laden with the corpses of martyred bishops, priests, religious and lay people, at the top of which was a “bishop in white” who likewise was shot and killed, an image of what would happen to Saint John Paul II 39 years ago today on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. But he didn’t die. He himself said, in his first public comments after the assassination attempt, that “A Mother’s Hand” guided the bullet so that even though it was shot at point black range by a trained assassin, even though it pierced five vital organs, he didn’t die. By means of the three visions, the children saw the real consequences of sin — hell, a world through in total turmoil, and a Church persecuted to the point of martyrdom. This is what Mary was calling them to pray could be avoided. And Mary also revealed to them the means to overcome sin and all the evil to which sin leads. It’s imitating and entering into the consecration of her immaculate heart to Christ, which helps us to enter into her own participation in her Son’s consecration to the Father for our sanctification (Jn 17). The children took up the arms of prayer and sacrifice and heroically put them to use. Today we thank God for sending Mary with this message to help us to live the Gospel announced by her Son more fully and we ask Mary’s prayers that we might respond to her summons with the faith and trust of the pastorinhos.
• Jesus said all of these words about the Vine and the Branches on Holy Thursday and there’s a reason for that, because it’s on Holy Thursday as Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time so that we could enter into the Holy Communion with him to which the image of the vine and branches points. When I was a seminarian at the North American College in Rome, the chapel had an interesting marble pattern on the floor. At first it seemed a little strange, but when you began to notice the intercalated dark and lighter marble, the pattern began to make sense. It was supposed to put into marble Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. The marble in the sanctuary, all around the altar, was dark grape colored (I’m color blind so I won’t make a mistake by guessing what color it was!) and that dark grape color, after coming down the stairs, was interspersed with white marble, to show how all of us in the pews become branches on the Vine through the Mass. In the Mass we attached ourselves through the “transubstantiated fruit of the vine,” through Christ’s Body and Blood, and in that communion, enter into a bond with others far greater than blood. Jesus in Holy Communion is the source of our unity, for which the early Church worked so hard. This is the source of our salvation. This is the summit of the law, as we fulfill Jesus’ words to do this in his memory. And our praying this united with Jesus and truly united through, with, and in him to each other is the Father’s supreme glory! As we enter more deeply into this mystery of the Vine and the Branches, let us pray through the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima that we may abide in Christ so much that we might bear fruit always for the Father’s glory and come at last, together with each other and with all the saints, to abide in God forever.