Blessed Mother

Recently I spoke to a woman’s retreat titled “Called to Love: Mary Our Mother” and spent a while watching the women from the back of the room before I went up for the talk. They amazed me, many of them balancing small babies in all sorts of positions, gently handling the child with one hand while deftly maneuevering books, toys, bottles, blankets, and baby gear with the other. All in silence and all while they were clearly paying loving attention to their child but also rapt attention to the priest who gave a meditation before I spoke.

There’s a special giftedness in motherhood, I thought, that finds its greatest expression in spending and giving oneself for others. Some of the women there that day were older mothers, some may have been grandmothers, and they all reflected to me the various aspects of the life of Mary. I was taking some of the references for the talk that day from one of Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s books, in which he wrote:

 “She existed in the Divine Mind as an Eternal Thought before there were any mothers. She is the Mother of mothers — she is the world’s first love.”

That’s the name of the book, “The World’s First Love”. With the full awareness of the modern world of his day, Sheen made remarks here and there in this book about folks who don’t understand Mary’s role.

Let those who think that the Church pays too much attention to Mary give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord Himself gave ten times as much of His life to her as He gave to His Apostles.

So there, he’s saying.

The Apostles had the advantage of only three years’ teaching to prepare themselves for the establishment of His Kingdom, but the Blessed Mother had the advantage of thirty years.

Sheen knew all the objections.

It may be objected: “Our Lord is enough for me. I have no need of her.” But He needed her, whether we do or not…We did not make her different; we found her different. We did not choose Mary; He did.

My copy of Pope John Paul’s Mulieris Dignitatem (see post below) is still opened here by the computer, because there was another point I wanted to bring up earlier but didn’t get to. John Paul wrote that the biblical exemplar of the “woman” in the Old Testament “finds its culmination in the motherhood of the Mother of God.” She had a precise role, he wrote, in salvation history as Mother of the Redeemer.

Motherhood has been introduced into the order of the Covenant that God made with humanity in Jesus Christ. Each and every time that motherhood is repeated in human history, it is always related to the Covenant which God established with the human race through the motherhood of the Mother of God.

Today is not only the day we honor Mothers. It is the Feast of Fatima, the day the Church recognizes the importance of Mary’s appearance on this day in history to the children in Fatima, Portugal, and the importance of her message.

Mary’s message has always been the same, and she lived it – in Nazareth, Cana, wherever she appeared. Pray, sacrifice for others, and “Do whatever He tells you.”