The Call of a Mother, Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (A), January 1, 2011

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford, MA
Mary, Mother of God, Year A
January 1, 2011
Num 6:22-27; Gal 4:4-7; Lk 2:16-21

The following text guided today’s homily: 

THE CALL OF A MOTHER

• Why would the Church have us begin each civil year with the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and consider it so important that it would make it a holy day of obligation?
• Let’s be honest: on the vigil of the feast, December 31, the attention of most of us is not on Mary but on the last year, as we look to what 2010 brought us, the good memories, the difficult crosses. We recall with joy the happy times, the births, the weddings, the reunions, the achievements in school or work. We also remember with a little sadness the deaths or sufferings of loved ones, the pain of relationships and friendships that have broken down, the personal and familial consequences of a tough economy, and more. The reason why the Church proposes that we mark a Marian feast on this vigil is precisely because, as we see in today’s Gospel, she teaches us how to “contemplate things in our heart,” to “treasure” the graces, to ponder the Crosses. All the events of 2010 are meant to be taken to our prayer, are meant to be taken to the Lord, internalized in a way that binds us ever more to God, but few of us profit from the events of our life in this prayerful way. Mary, the Mother of God and our Mother, is looked to by the Church on December 31 as an icon of how not to let so many of the graces of the past year just pass away.
• Likewise, on January 1, most of us look ahead wondering what 2011 will bring. We look forward with excitement to graduations or retirements, to long-desired proposals and weddings, to the births of kids, grandkids, or younger brothers and sisters, to pilgrimages and vacations, to new friends, experiences, and loves, hopefully to a better year economically for ourselves or so many we know who are struggling, to world championships for the Patriots, Celtics and Red Sox. We also look ahead with some dread of what we pray will not occur, a terrorist attack, a fire or burglary, a drunk driver, a terrible call by in the middle of the night by a hospital or the state police, the funerals of loved ones, especially those our age or younger. As we look ahead blindly, not knowing what the year will bring, the Church also has us focus on the Mother of God, because she shows us how to approach all of these events with a trusting faith, a deep faith that the Father of her Son is the Lord of history, and that everything — both what seems adverse or propitious — works out for the ultimate good for those who love God. The Blessed Virgin Mary helps us to look back on the previous year and ahead to the one that’s beginning as a believer, as someone in communion with the Lord should and does. She shows us how to be grateful and hopeful, how to live not merely through the passing of time, but live in the fullness of time, in the fullness her Son brings. These are key lessons for the Christian life, lessons on which we need constant reminders, lessons that are particularly important on occasions like this.
• As we look back on the events of 2010 and ahead to how we’ll live 2011, I’d like to turn to a major event that was made known just over three weeks ago by the Bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin. After a two year investigation by theological experts, Bishop David Ricken published a formal decree confirming as worthy of belief three apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Adele Brise a 28 year-old Belgian immigrant, in October 1859.
  • The first apparition occurred when Adele was going to a grist mill with a sack of wheat on her head. As Adele came near the mill, she saw a lady all in white standing between two trees. Adele was frightened and stood still. The vision slowly disappeared, leaving a white cloud after it. Adele continued on her errand and returned home without seeing anything more. She told her parents what had happened, and they wondered what it could be — maybe a poor soul who needed prayers?
  • On the following Sunday, she had to pass by the same location on her way to Mass at Bay Settlement, about eleven miles from her home. This time, she was not alone, but was accompanied by her sister Isabel and a woman neighbor. When they came near the trees, the same lady in white was at the place where Adele had seen her before. Adele was again frightened and said, almost in a tone of reproach, ‘Oh, there is that lady again.” Adele didn’t have the courage to go on. The other two did not see anything, but they could tell by Adele’s look that she was afraid. They thought, too, that it might be a poor soul that needed prayers. They waited a few minutes, and Adele told them it was gone. It had disappeared as the first time, and all she could see was a little mist or white cloud.
  • After Mass, Adele went to confession and told her confessor how she had been frightened at the sight of a lady in white. He [Father William Verhoef] told her not to be afraid, and to speak to him of this outside of the confessional. Father Verhoef told her that if it were a heavenly messenger, she would see it again, and it would not harm her, but to ask in God’s name who it was and what it desired of her. After that, Adele had more courage. She started home with her two companions, and a man who was clearing land for the Holy Cross Fathers at Bay Settlement accompanied them.
  • As they approached the hallowed spot, Adele could see the beautiful lady, clothed in dazzling white, with a yellow sash around her waist. Her dress fell to her feet in graceful folds. She had a crown of stars around her head, and her long, golden, wavy hair fell loosely around her shoulders. Such a heavenly light shone around her that Adele could hardly look back at her sweet face. Overcome by this heavenly light and the beauty of her amiable visitor, Adele fell on her knees.
  • “In God’s name, who are you and what do you want of me?” asked Adele, as she had been directed.
  • “I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning, and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession, and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them.”
  • “Adele, who is it?” said one of the women. “O why can’t we see her as you do?” said another weeping.
  • “Kneel,” said Adele, “the Lady says she is the Queen of Heaven.” Our Blessed Lady turned, looked kindly at them, and said, “Blessed are they that believe without seeing. What are you doing here in idleness…while your companions are working in the vineyard of my Son?”
  • “What more can I do, dear Lady?” said Adele, weeping.
  • “Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”
  • “But how shall I teach them who know so little myself?” replied Adele.
  • “Teach them,” replied her radiant visitor, “their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing. I will help you.”
  • The manifestation of Our Lady then lifted her hands, as though beseeching a blessing for those at her feet, and slowly vanished, leaving Adele overwhelmed and prostrate on the ground.
• For the rest of her life, Adele Brise made that two-fold mandate the mission of her life. She began to pray insistently for the conversion of sinners and, though somewhat timid and formally uneducated, started to travel on foot all across the forests and farms in northeast Wisconsin, sometimes journeying more than 50 miles to visit children in their homes and teach them the faith. She soon assembled around her a group of women who, hearing of the message imparted by Mary to Adele, wanted to share in that prayer and catechesis; together they became Franciscan tertiaries. Adele’s hardworking father built a little shrine at the place of the first apparition, in what is now Champion, Wisconsin, and over time, with her fellow third order Franciscans, Adele opened up on the property an orphanage and Catholic school where they would be able to give catechesis and other schooling for children throughout the region. The shrine itself became a place of local pilgrimage, prayer and spiritual and physical healings.
• In his homily during the December 8 Mass in which he read his formal decree, Bishop Ricken said that the message Our Lady gave to Adele and to which she responded with lifelong fidelity is the same mission to which we are called today: “We need this message today as much as they needed it 150 years ago: the message to proclaim the Gospel, each one of us, in our families and in our workplace. We need to have that same zeal for souls that Adele Brise had. And we need to make sure that we are responsible to our children and to the next generation by providing adequate catechetical formation for them so that they understand the Gospel and that they are able to defend and explain the teachings of the Church. This message is ever ancient and ever new. Each generation must take it.”
• Our response to the publication of the decree recognizing the apparitions as worthy of belief by the Christian faithful, therefore, is not meant to be one of historical curiosity or even national spiritual pride, but deeper commitment to living out the Gospel especially in those ways the private revelation emphasizes. The Church teaches that true private revelations never teach us anything new, but remind us of what Jesus taught in the Gospel so that we may live it better in our own day. Whenever the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared — such as in Guadalupe in 1531, Lourdes in 1858, Fatima in 1917 and elsewhere — she has reminded us through the seers of parts of the Gospel that either we and the seers have forgotten or inadequately grasped and lived. And so we need to examine and take to our prayer the message Our Lady gave to Adele Brise, a message that calls us to the heart of the Gospel, which has no expiration date. What Mary called Adele to do in 1859 and beyond, she calls us to do in 2011.
• The first thing Our Lady indicated is the importance of praying for the conversion of sinners. Mary revealed not only was that she was praying for sinners to repent, but that she was asking Adele to join her in that act of praying for mercy. It’s noteworthy that when Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes and to the three shepherd children in Fatima, she likewise asked them to pray and do penance for sinners. This is a fundamental aspect of the Gospel. Jesus instructed us to pray, “Forgive us our sins.” He told us to be merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful. He taught us from the Cross to pray that the Father may forgive those who did not know what they were doing, a prayer imitated by St. Stephen at his stoning and so many other Christian martyrs. In a world, however, that has in many places “lost an awareness of sin,” to use Pope John Paul II’s words, many of us in the Church have lost an awareness of the importance of praying for the conversion of sinners. Since many erroneously believe that salvation is easy and practically automatic and that Hell is basically an invention of Dante’s imagination rather that a real possibility described repeatedly by Jesus himself, we can treat praying for the conversion of sinners as a superfluous vestige of earlier and less enlightened days. In her appearances to Adele, to Bernadette, and to Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia, the Blessed Virgin has been calling us back to this heart of our co-redeeming mission as Catholics, lest those who do not convert tragically perish.
• The second thing the Mother of God reveals is that it’s not enough merely for us to be in communion with God and in the state of grace. Like Adele, we “must do more.” As we see in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus calls us to more than being holy disciples; he also wants us to be zealous apostles, going out to cooperate with him in making true disciples of others, by teaching them what we have learned and introducing them into a continuous encounter with Jesus the Master. He calls us to focus not just on our salvation but on the salvation of others, loving our neighbor and desiring his salvation as much we love ourselves and desire our own.
• Thirdly, the Blessed Virgin focuses on the importance of our teaching the faith. Like at the time of 1859, there are so many children who don’t know the basics of the truths about God, themselves, and what God is asking of us. These children are found not just in forests and isolated farms, but in the center of populated cities. Adele protested initially to the Blessed Mother that she, being uneducated, was unfit to be a competent teacher of the faith. Our Lady replied that she wasn’t asking her to teach about the mystery of perichoresis (divine indwelling) but rather to teach children how to pray, to make the sign of the Cross, to prepare to receive her Son well in the sacraments — all things Adele well knew and already was doing — and help them walk along the path that leads to eternal salvation. She’s calling us by this apparition to do the same.

• 2011 is ultimately called to be a year of the Lord, a year in which we receive his love and pass that love on, when we receive his wisdom and truth and pass it on. These are perennial calls for us as Christians, but most of us generally find a way to ignore them. As we look back at 2010, can we truly say that we’ve grown in the one thing necessary, in the most important thing of all, in our relationship with the Lord? Have we brought others to the faith? Have we helped our family members, friends, colleagues, fellow students and fellow parishioners to advance on the path of sanctity? Have we helped to save some peoples lives, in this world and in the next, by praying for their conversion and helping? If we can’t answer yes to all these questions, in some ways, we’ve wasted the most important opportunities of the past year. But we’re called not just to lament, but to resolve to do better in 2011. The message of Our Lady to Adele would help us to make this upcoming year a true year of grace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: