Father's Monday, 6/01/2020 Message

Today we celebrate the Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church. On March 3, 2018, Pope Francis has decreed that the ancient devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, under the title of Mother of the Church, be inserted into the Roman Calendar to be celebrated annually as a Memorial on the day after Pentecost.  The Holy Father wishes to promote this devotion in order to “encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the Church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety.”  

The decree reflects on the history of Marian theology in the Church’s liturgical tradition and the writings of the Church Fathers.  St. Augustine says, “that Mary is the mother of the members of Christ, because with charity she cooperated in the rebirth of the faithful into the Church, thus indicating that Mary is at once Mother of Christ, the Son of God, and mother of the members of his Mystical Body, which is the Church.” Scripture, the decree says, depicts Mary at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:25).

There She became the Mother of the Church when She “accepted her Son’s testament of love and welcomed all people in the person of the beloved disciple as sons and daughters to be reborn unto life eternal.”  In 1964, the decree says, Pope Paul VI “declared the Blessed Virgin Mary as ‘Mother of the Church, that is to say of all Christian people, the faithful as well as the pastors, who call her the most loving Mother’ and established that ‘the Mother of God should be further honored and invoked by the entire Christian people by this most tender of titles.’”  As we heard, and, saw in Scripture and in Art yesterday our Blessed Mother gathered in the Upper Room, so, in Art in this day’s picture, may we truly understand that as a natural mother longs to keep her children close to herself throughout their lives, so, in various passages of Sacred Scripture we see Our Lady being here for us also.  

God bless you,
Fr. Robert