Solemnity of the Assumption (C), August 15, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA
Solemnity of the Assumption, Year C
August 15, 2010
Rev 11:19,12:1-6,10; 1 Cor 15:20-27; Lk 1:39-56

The following text guided today’s homily:

• On this very rich feast of the Assumption of our Lady, we celebrate as a family several things today:
• First, we celebrate once again the reality of heaven.
  • As depicted in the beautiful stained glass in our Church, at the end of her earthly life, Mary the Mother of the God-man, and our spiritual mother, was taken up body and soul by God into heaven. She shares fully in the resurrection of her Son, his total triumph over sin and death. She is experiencing the full measure of God’s love and happiness.
  • The Church teaches us that her resurrection is an anticipation of our resurrection and is meant to give us hope. She has crossed the finish line of life victorious and she shows us that heaven is real and possible.
• This brings us to the second point: Mary hasn’t just crossed the eternal finish line, but now from her Son’s right side, she both shows us how to cross that same finish line victorious and cheers, helps, and intercedes for us during the marathon of life so that we might make it.
  • Pope John Paul II tells us in his beautiful exhortation on the Mother of the Redeemer that Mary is the guide for us on our pilgrimage of faith home.
  • He says that she “helps all her children, wherever they may be and whatever their condition, to find in Christ the path to the Father’s House.”
  • She does this by serving for us as a “model of the virtues” which allow us, whenever we raise our eyes to her, to learn the path to grow in holiness through conquering sin. She shows us, as she showed the first apostles, how to pray. She trains us, as she trained them, to receive and respond to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. She demonstrates for us how to welcome the Son of God within us and to do whatever he tells us. She “mirrors within her,” Pope John Paul II says, the “central truths of the faith and the mighty works of God.” But she’s more than a model, she’s also an intercessor. In heaven, she imitates her Son for whom to reign is to serve. She serves us by her prayer, by her interceding for us for what we need, just like she interceded for the young couple in Cana before they even knew what they needed. She guides us on our pilgrimage not merely from afar, in other words, but right next to us, helping us in whatever ways we need it.
  • This is because the pilgrimage that each of us is called to walk in, and all of us are called to walk together, is not an easy or safe one. The first reading today focuses on the dragon, symbolizing the devil, who is constantly warring against the woman and against her offspring, which means not just Jesus but us.
  • In the midst of that dangerous and difficult journey, sometimes full of persecutions, she serves as a constant reference point, guide, intercessor and inspiration. John Paul uses the beautiful Latin hymn, the Alma Redemptoris Mater, to make the point. “Loving Mother of the Redeemer, gate of heaven, star of the sea, assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again.” She is the star of the sea, that fixed reference point of hope and direction that no storm on the sea can shipwreck. She is the gate of heaven, who bids, no matter how many times we’ve fallen, to get up again, to pass through the gate, to enter into her relationship with her Son, her maternal mediation, so that we can experience the joy on the other side.
• These teachings are all very beautiful, but we need to make them practical. Just as the North Star would be useless if sailors didn’t know where it was in the sky, or if they knew where it was ignored it, so it’s not enough for us to know that Mary is the Star of the Sea and the Gate of Heaven: we need to look to her, to follow her, to enter into her. If she’s the guide of the pilgrim people of God on our journey home to the Father’s house, we need to follow her direction; otherwise we will end up lost and eventually perish.
• So how do we do it? How do we follow her? How do we keep our eyes on her and receive the fruits of all her loving, maternal mediation? How do we follow the example of the first apostles and draw close to her, to learn from her how to love Jesus, to follow him, to let his will be done, to enter into his suffering, his death and his resurrection? We do it through a real Marian life, full of love and devotion to the Mother who God the Father chose for his Son and the Mother that Son chose for us as he was dying on the Cross.
• Being Marian, having a real love and devotion to the Blessed Mother, is not an option for Catholics. It is supposed to define who we are as a disciple of Jesus. Some of the early Protestants thought that not only was this devotion superfluous but should be banned. They misunderstood her meditation as taking the place of her Son’s, rather than cooperating totally with her Son’s, as we see in Cana, by bringing our needs directly to him. Over the course of the centuries, but particularly in the last 50 years, this false idea that devotion to Mary is optional has come into the Catholic Church and has done a lot of damage. There were some excesses in the past that needed to be addressed — for example, those who prayed the Rosary during Mass rather than listening to the prayers or the homily; those who would spend thousands of dollars and weeks to go to Marian apparition shrines in other countries, but never seem to make it down the street to their Church to adore the Lord Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament — but fundamentally they threw the baby out with the bath water. We need to recover a true Marian piety in order to become faithful, good and better Catholics.
• What’s involved in a true Marian piety?
  • The Holy Rosary
    • Entering into the School of Mary, meditating on the principal events in her Son’s life and seeking ever greater union with the “blessed fruit of her womb.”
    • John Paul II wrote an encyclical in 2002 in which he called the Rosary our greatest spiritual weapon and told all of us to pick up these spiritual arms. He said, “The Rosary of the Virgin Mary, which gradually took form in the second millennium under the guidance of the Spirit of God, is a prayer loved by countless Saints and encouraged by the Magisterium. Simple yet profound, it still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. … With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer.”
    • We all should be praying the Rosary, either on our own, or preferably together with our family or our parish family every day. It’s the great family prayer. It takes 15 minutes. It’s like a liturgy at home. John Paul II said, “The Rosary is and always has been a prayer of and for the family. At one time this prayer was particularly dear to Christian families, and it certainly brought them closer together. It is important not to lose this precious inheritance. We need to return to the practice of family prayer and prayer for families, continuing to use the Rosary. The family that prays together stays together. The Holy Rosary, by age-old tradition, has shown itself particularly effective as a prayer which brings the family together. Individual family members, in turning their eyes towards Jesus, also regain the ability to look one another in the eye, to communicate, to show solidarity, to forgive one another and to see their covenant of love renewed in the Spirit of God. Many of the problems facing contemporary families, especially in economically developed societies, result from their increasing difficulty in communicating. Families seldom manage to come together, and the rare occasions when they do are often taken up with watching television. To return to the recitation of the family Rosary means filling daily life with very different images, images of the mystery of salvation: the image of the Redeemer, the image of his most Blessed Mother. The family that recites the Rosary together reproduces something of the atmosphere of the household of Nazareth: its members place Jesus at the centre, they share his joys and sorrows, they place their needs and their plans in his hands, they draw from him the hope and the strength to go on.
    • If you don’t know how to pray the Rosary, it’s easy to learn. I have sheets in the various racks around the Church, for adults and for children.
    • Before Mass next weekend, when we will be welcoming the pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Fatima to our Church, we will be praying the Rosary as a parish a half hour before each of the Masses. I’m asking every parishioner next week to come early so that we can pray the Rosary as a family of faith and ask Mary to help us to become more faithful and loving followers of her Son. This is the first time I’ve ever asked you in five years to come to Mass early. Please do what you can next week to come here. The family that prays together stays together and the parish that prays together to Mary will become much more united.
  • Marian consecration
    • Next week, we will have a chance to focus a little bit on the message Mary gave us in Fatima 93 years ago. After showing the three young visionaries images of hell, of the destruction to be done by communism and through the persecutions of the Church, she proposed the remedy: consecration to her immaculate heart, to a heart that is pure, that loves God, that treasures God within.
    • St. John Vianney, whose new statue we have in this Church, consecrated his entire parish to the Blessed Mother as we will do next weekend. He asked mothers to consecrate their families to the Blessed Mother every morning upon looking at a Marian image in their home. It made a huge difference in their parish and their whole village.
    • To consecrate ourselves to Mary means to entrust ourselves to her, to rely on her, to receive her gifts and follow her direction. Various saints and popes have written consecration prayers. We will pray one together next week written by Pope John Paul II.
    • If you haven’t consecrated yourself to Mary up until now, I would urge you over the course of the next week, to prepare yourself to do so and to come early for Mass next week. We will make the consecration, individual and parochial, to her at the end of the Rosary and before Mass begins.
  • Saturdays
    • Saturdays have always been dedicated especially to Mary. In places where Marian devotion flourished, Saturday morning Mass attendance really flourished. In Fatima, Mary herself asked us to receive Holy Communion worthily on Saturdays.
    • I made two pastoral promises on the day of my ordination. One was to go way beyond the call of duty in preparing couples for marriage, because of the importance of this sacrament in the life of the Church and as a means to help people come to heaven. The second was to celebrate Mass on Saturdays for Our Lady. Lots of Churches don’t have Saturday morning Masses. There’s a reason why many of those parishes are dying. While there’s so much good I can say about this parish, one of the things that has always saddened me is how few people come on Saturday mornings, even among those who go to Mass all the rest of the days of the week. I can never figure it out. When I was growing up, Saturday morning daily Mass was always the best attended, not just because of Marian devotion but also because many of the people who couldn’t attend Mass during the week were out of school or work on Saturday. I’d urge you to try to make coming to daily Mass on Saturday morning, and renewing your Marian love and devotion, a staple of your life. You won’t be disappointed. You can’t love Mary without experiencing the full measure of her love in return.
  • Other Marian devotions:
    • There are many other ways we could grow in Marian piety, from prayers like the Angelus, the Memorare, the Magnificat, to pilgrimages to Marian shrines like LaSalette, to adorning the rooms in our house or workplace with images of Our Lady, to more. All of these are good.
    • But I’d like to try to focus on the three I’ve named, because I think that, as important as the others are, these three are the most important: to pray the Rosary each day, meditating on the mysteries with a Marian heart; to consecrate ourselves, our families, our parish, to Mary, and to renew that consecration often; and to begin to live Saturday as a day in which we look to the Star of the Sea, to the Gate of Heaven, and allow her to bring us into ever greater literal communion with her Son through Saturday morning Mass, the same Son she conceived in her womb, gave birth to, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
• As we prepare now to receive that same Jesus, we ask him to help us to honor his mother just as he honored her in life and after her earthly life was finished, raising her to heaven, body and soul, and crowning her Queen of heaven and earth. The best way we can honor her is not merely by singing beautiful hymns or reciting splendid prayers. It’s by allowing her to reign by serving us, by forming us to love God like she loves him, and by taking her outstretched hand as she seeks to lead us all the way to that place where her Son wishes to crown us with an imperishable wreath and number us among all those who have followed Mary’s guidance across the Gate of Heaven into the Father’s House.

The readings for today’s Mass were: