Category Archives: Mary

Our Lady and Temptation

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In 1926, Our Lord appeared to the last surviving Fatima visionary, Sr. Lucia, in order to ask her to spread the First Saturday Devotion.  In particular, He wanted the Faithful to fervently offer reparation for the blasphemies committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  Of special concern were blasphemies committed by those who “publicly implant in the hearts of children indifference, disrespect, and even hate against the Immaculate Mother.”  This wave of indifference and disrespect is fueled mostly by those who attempt to reduce Mary to the point that she is just like the rest of us.  We must oppose this tendency of what most aptly be called “over-naturalizing” Our Lady to the point of diminishing the transformative power of supernatural grace.

One way we can combat this is to highlight those areas of her spiritual life that were markedly different from us.  A good place to start is with Our Lady’s experience of temptations.  The reductionist says Our Lady suffered temptations just like the rest of us.  We might not know for sure whether or not she was tempted but we can say with assurance that her experience would have been profoundly different from our own.

On Being Tempted

Traditionally understood, temptations have their origin in three sources—the Devil, the World and the Flesh.  The Devil’s temptations take the form of suggestions to us.  They “arise from those things towards which each one has an inclination” (ST III q. 41, art. 4).  This means that he can “see” what we are inclined towards at a given time and then suggest to us to act upon that inclination in a disordered way.  As an example, when Our Lord was fasting in the desert we are told “He was hungry” and so Satan tempts Him first by trying to take advantage of his hunger. 

With Our Lord, the inclination towards food was natural and not disordered in any way.  For the rest of us, we have disordered inclinations that fall broadly into the categories of the World and the Flesh.  These both come about as a result of the wounding of Original Sin.  The World represents inordinate attachments to the things of this world to varying degrees.  It is a tendency to look upon the things that are made and not seeing the One Who made them.  Likewise, when we speak of the Flesh, we mean an inordinate love of sensual pleasure that manifests itself either in a horror of suffering or an insatiable desire for pleasure. 

While the Devil is active in tempting us by taking advantage of these inclinations, not all our temptations come from him.  These inclinations are “natural” in our fallen state and thus we can succumb to them without any instigation.  This is the “sin” that acts like “a law of my members” that St. Paul tells the Romans is constantly at war with his inward man (Romans 7:19-23).

Our Lady and Temptations

Our Lady then, because she was singularly privileged to be conceived without Original Sin, experienced temptations differently than we do.  She did not experience temptations from the Flesh or from the World.  In other words, she could only experience temptations that were suggested to her by the Devil.  The question then is whether she did in fact experience these temptations.

We must admit that Scripture is silent, at least explicitly, as to whether she was tempted or not.  But there is at least enough implicit data to suggest that Our Lady was in fact tempted by the Devil.

First, there is the principle of typology by which the archetype is always greater than the type.  Because the Old Eve was tempted by the Devil and fell, the New Eve must also be tempted by the Devil and overcome him. 

Second, there is the promise of the Protoevangelium (Gn 3:15) by which the New Eve, animated by a spirit of enmity, shall bruise the head of the ancient serpent.  This suggests not just a passive role, but a personal one by which she engages the Devil in a one-on-one fashion.

Our Lady’s hand-to-hand combat is described in Revelation 12:13-17.  It presents the devil as relentless in pursuit of her by which he tries to sweep her away in a flood of temptations, but God continually comes to her aid by swallowing up the waters of temptation.  Inserting temptations into the narrative may seem like a stretch until we read in verse 17 where the serpent grew angry at the Woman and went off to wage war on the rest of her children.  The devil’s primary weapon in that war is temptation.

Why This Matters

People are often annoyed by speculative questions like this because they seem too “scholastic”.  But the purpose of speculative questions in theology is to affect us in the practical realm.  St. Thomas in the already quoted question in the Summa (III q.41) on Christ’s temptation in the desert tells us that there are two kinds of temptations.  First there are those whose origin are the World and the Flesh.  These we should flee as near occasions of sin.  The other are those that come from the Devil.  Aquinas says:

“[S]uch occasions of temptation are not to be avoided. Hence Chrysostom says: ‘Not only Christ was led into the desert by the Spirit, but all God’s children that have the Holy Ghost. For it is not enough for them to sit idle; the Holy Ghost urges them to endeavor to do something great: which is for them to be in the desert from the devil’s standpoint, for no unrighteousness, in which the devil delights, is there. Again, every good work, compared to the flesh and the world, is the desert; because it is not according to the will of the flesh and of the world.’ Now, there is no danger in giving the devil such an occasion of temptation; since the help of the Holy Ghost, who is the Author of the perfect deed, is more powerful* than the assault of the envious devil.”

ST III q.41, art.2 ad.2

The point is that when the Devil tempts us, as Christian warriors we should stand our ground.  This does not mean we should or even can fight on our own, but that we must arm ourselves with the Cross and invoke the power of the Holy Spirit Who has led us into the desert of temptation and battle. 

St. Paul tells the Corinthians that if we rely on grace then we will never be tempted beyond what we can handle (1 Cor 10:13).  Our Lady’s experience confirms this as true.  If we “over-naturalize” her then our hope of winning the battle is diminished.  But we also learn that we have a powerful ally because Our Lady is undefeated in her battle against the Devil.  She will never let one of her children that turn to her fall in battle. 

Preparation for Holy Communion

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As mentioned in a previous post, the Church has long understood Sacramental Grace as operating in two dimensions.  On the objective plane we say that the Sacraments contain grace ex opere operato.  What this means is that grace is made available by the Sacrament regardless of either the faith of the recipient or the minister.  It is created “from the work performed.”  This does not mean however that the recipient of the Sacrament is a recipient of grace or even all the grace that is available.  That is because there is also a subjective plane by which the grace received is proportional to the disposition of the receiver.  In no other Sacrament is this distinction more important than in the Eucharist, not only because It contains grace, but because it contains the Author of Grace Himself.  Therefore, there is an abundance of grace available to the receiver provided that he is properly disposed to receive it.

Obviously then, preparation to receive Holy Communion ought to be the primary focus for those who desire closer communion with Christ and through Him the Holy Trinity.  But for most of us, our preparation is sorely lacking either through ignorance, neglect, or distraction.  Thankfully St. Louis de Montfort has left the Church a surefire way to prepare to receive Holy Communion that is sure to increase the graces we receive.

Our Lady of the Eucharist

To grasp the simplicity of his method we must first remove any abstractions we might have related to Our Blessed Mother.  What is meant by this is that we all too often forget that she was a real person who lived out her Christian life in the Early Church.  When Our Lord left her in St. John’s care, He wasn’t just taking care of her physical well-being.  Nor was He abandoning her to someone else’s care.  Instead, He was leaving her in the care of one of the men whom He had empowered to make Him present to her.  In other words, Jesus left Mary with St. John so that she could receive Him in the Eucharist daily.

Once we realize that Our Lady received the Eucharist regularly, we can begin to let our imagination take to flight as to what her disposition was like when she received Him.  Her heart was found worthy for her womb to house the Son of God would have daily received Him into that same Immaculate Heart with a renewed and deeper love than at the Incarnation.  Her fiat would have echoed in her Amen.  Separated from His physical presence, she would have run to the Communion rail to taste that presence once again.  She would have offered herself yet again as the Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross and renewed her commitment to be Mother of all the Elect just prior to receiving.  She would have overflowed with adoration and thanksgiving after her reception.  She would have longed to receive Him again when she wasn’t at Mass.  The love with which she received Him grew so much that upon receiving her Viaticum she was taken body and soul to Heaven.  She was and is always Our Lady of the Eucharist.

St. Louis de Montfort, Our Lady, and Holy Communion

Knowing that Our Lady’s disposition was perfect for receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist may inspire us to imitate her example, but that is not the reason why this reflection is necessary.  When Our Lord is received by one of her children, she flies to that child in order to adore His Eucharist presence.  As she draws closer to Jesus within the bosom of the believer, Jesus only draws closer to the believer.  Her act of adoration brings more glory to God than all earthly acts of adoration and He pours His pleasure of being in her presence out on this child of His Mother.

All of this may go on without our awareness or we might, following the advice of St. Louis de Montfort, actively and consciously participate in it.  The Saint says in The Secret of Mary that the best way to prepare for Holy Communion is to “implore that good Mother to lend you her heart, that you may receive her Son there with the same dispositions as her own.”  We pledge that if she will give us her heart, then we will place Jesus in it.  For those fortunate souls that who are consecrated to Jesus through Mary, the two of them during Holy Communion will lodge within our soul.  Our Lady will share with Our Lord all our needs and will glorify Him more than in our asking.  As St. Louis de Montfort puts it, “Let us allow the King and Queen to speak together. Let us not disturb their divine colloquies by our restless thoughts and unsettled desires. Let us entrust to them the care of our future and the choice of means.”

Our Lady’s Army

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Given the present turmoil, devout Christians can’t help but wonder whether the End is near.  We are probably not alone in this consideration as history is replete with Saints and Sages who thought the same thing.  Our Lord, on the other hand, sought to curb such speculation when he declared that “of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone” (Mt 24:36).  The speculation is not without its fruit however.  Wondering can lead to wakefulness—”Watch ye therefore, because ye know not what hour your Lord will come” (Mt 24:42).  While we should close the door on conjecture, Our Lord wants us to always live as if the End is right around the corner. 

Like the Apostles in the Garden, our battle is to stay awake.  The Satanic Sandman wants to lull us to sleep.  His battleplan is to make us woke so that we won’t be awake.  Knowing how he does this will enable us to enter the fray with eyes wide open.

Staying Awake

In a very real sense we could say that it is of the nature of Man to be a warrior.  When the Enemy entered the Garden and caused the Fall of Adam and Eve, the battle was begun.  It may have been the Fall of Man but it also marked the battle lines by which Satan’s downfall would occur.  Turning first to the Serpent, God said “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed” (Gn 3:15, DR translation).  Just as God in creation separated the light and the dark, He made a permanent enmity between the Serpent and his offspring and the Woman and hers.  The Woman of course is not the Eve of the Old Creation, but the Eve of the New Creation, Mary (c.f. John 2:4, 19:26-27 and this entry).  Once having set the commanders in the two armies, God set forth the foot soldiers—Satan’s demonic and human minions and the blessed angels and Jesus’ beloved disciples. 

In his True Devotion to Mary, St. Louis de Montfort offers and important reflection on what this enmity.  He says it is the only enmity that God has made; He did not merely permit it, but positively created it.  It would be total, indomitable and eternal.  The great Marian Saint says:

God has never made or formed but one enmity; but it is an irreconcilable one, which shall endure and develop even to the end. It is between Mary, His worthy Mother, and the devil—between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and instruments of Lucifer. The most terrible of all the enemies which God has set up against the devil is His holy Mother, Mary. He has inspired her, even since the days of the earthly Paradise, though she existed then only in His idea, with so much hatred against that cursed enemy of God, with so much industry in unveiling the malice of that old serpent, with so much power to conquer, to overthrow, and to crush that proud impious rebel, that he fears her not only more than all Angels and men, but in some sense more than God Himself. It is not that the anger, the hatred, and the power of God are not infinitely greater than those of the Blessed Virgin, for the perfections of Mary are limited, but it is, first, because Satan, being proud, suffers infinitely more from being beaten and punished by a little and humble handmaid of God, and her humility humbles him more than the Divine power; and, secondly, because God has given Mary such a great power against the devils, that, as they have often been obliged to confess, in spite of themselves, by the mouths of the possessed, they fear one of her sighs for a soul more than the prayers of all the Saints, and one of her menaces against them more than all other torments.   

This battle isn’t just between Mary and the Devil, “but between the race of the holy Virgin and the race of the devil; that is to say, God has set enmities, antipathies, and secret hatreds between the true children and the servants of Mary, and the children and servants of the devil. They do not love each other mutually. They have no inward correspondence with each other. The children of Belial, the slaves of Satan, the friends of the world (for it is the same thing), have always up to this time persecuted those who belong to our Blessed Lady, and will in future persecute them more than ever…”

If we are to battle on God’s side, under the Standard of the Cross, we must submit to Christ and His Battle Commander.  We must join Our Lady’s army, and because the war is total, we must do so through a total consecration.  That is the only way because God has declared it as such.  When John describes the War in Heaven (Rev 12), Our Lady once again leads her offspring into battle.  For St. Louis de Montfort, this enrollment, especially in the End Times becomes crucial.  These Apostles of the End Times will be the only ones who are able to remain faithful because “the devil, knowing that he has but little time, and now less than ever, to destroy souls, will every day redouble his efforts and his combats. He will presently raise up new persecutions, and will put terrible snares before the faithful servants and true children of Mary, whom it gives him more trouble to surmount than it does to conquer others.”

Living as if the End is Near

If we are to live then as Our Lord commanded, that is, as if the End is near, then we should live consecrated to Our Lady as part of her army.  This consecration also enables us to see the weapons that Satan uses.  Once we realize that this enmity is total, the war absolute, we realize that there can be no compromise between the two armies.  We may actively pursue defectors from the Enemy’s camp, but they must come on Our Lady’s terms.  We can make no compromises with the world or provision with the flesh (Romans 13:13-14) because those are the Enemy’s landmines.  We must take upon ourselves the yoke of Our Lord from the hands of Our Lady.

The Devil’s battleplan is always the same and we would do well to know the diabolical rhythm.  Before he unleashes hell on believers in total persecution, he denies the ontological character of the enmity.  He creates structures and systems that promise a false peace; always false because it goes against reality as God has constructed it.  “Peace” that consists in compromise with the devil, the world and the flesh.  But “Christ must be all in all”  and until His reign is complete we must continue the fight.  We must reject the false messianic hopes of things like Marxism, One World Orders, and technocracy because they are diabolical landmines.  This is his chosen tactic for now, that if we yield, will lead to total persecution.  Those in Our Lady’s Army can never compromise.  It is Our Lady sitting at Our Lord’s right hand (Ps 45:9) that will protect us and obtain for her children true wisdom that never yields to false promises. 

Devotion to the Mother of the Eucharist

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When St. Luke wrote his account of the human origins of Our Lord, he wanted to make an important connection to Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant.  Likewise, St. John saw the need to make this connection more explicit in the Book of Revelation when he describes seeing the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then describing it in terms that could only apply to Our Lady (c.f. Rev 11:19-12:5).  It was during Our Lady’s fiat at the Annunciation that she embraced her vocation as the true Ark of Covenant.  The Bread of Life, the True Bread Come Down from Heaven, was baked within her womb.  Her womb then became the first tabernacle as she embraced her title as Mother of the Eucharist.

Our Lady is Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, who took His body and blood from her, created a soul for Himself and united it to His divinity in her womb.  In this way, the title is not surprising.  For that same Divine Person in an analogous way repeats the act on the altar during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Each time Christ takes flesh on the altar, an echo of Our Lady’s fiat is heard as the Church gives birth to Our Lord in His Eucharistic presence. 

Mary, Model of the Communicant

Mary’s Annunciation then is the model for all of us in receiving the Eucharist.  With her Amen, Our Lord took flesh in her womb.  In so doing, she received an abundance of sanctifying grace.  Because she was perfectly disposed she received not just a spiritual but a physical participation in the divine life of the Trinity.  The difference is not just one of degree however.  According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ gives Himself so that we might live by Him, but in Mary He not only did this but also deemed to live by her and receive life from her. 

We ought to imitate her disposition as Christ seeks to unite His flesh with ours.  We ought to conceive in our hearts the “Son of God the most high” (Lk 1:32).  The Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55) is the template of after Communion  thanksgivings.

Mary, the Perfect Communicant

Our Lady is more than just a model Communicant through the Annunciation.  She is the perfect communicant because she received Our Lord most perfectly in the Eucharist.  We can often abstract Mary’s life so much that we forget that she lived as a Christian just as we did.  After the Ascension, she lived with a priest and would have received the Eucharist regularly from the hands of St. John.  It is her reception of the Eucharist, first prepared for by her fiat at the Annunciation, that was perfected in Ephesus with St. John.  It is this we must study and seek the grace to imitate.

Not all receptions of the Eucharist are the same.  The Eucharist contains ex opere operato sanctifying grace.  In fact, because it contains the source of all grace, Christ Himself, it contains enough grace through a single reception to perfectly sanctify the communicant.  What stops this from happening is the personal disposition of the recipient.  The more fervently one hungers for the Eucharist, the greater the infusion of Divine life through sanctifying grace. 

Having actually participated in the sacrifice on Calvary, she knew more than anyone what was being offered, even if in an unbloody manner, on the Altar.  Having made the oblation with Christ, she could continually make that same oblation in a spirit of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and thanksgiving (the 4 principal purposes of the Mass according to Pope St. Pius X).  Furthermore, as Venerable Mary Agreda tells it in Mystical City of God, after being told by Our Lord about His enduring presence in the Eucharist,

“she burned with the desire of seeing this Sacrament instituted, and if She had not been sustained by the power of the Almighty, the force of her affection would have bereft Her of natural life…Even from that time on She wished to prepare Herself for its reception, and asked Her Son to be allowed to receive Him in the holy Sacrament as soon as it should be instituted. She said to Him: ‘Supreme Lord and life of my soul, shall I, who am such an insignificant worm and the most despicable among men, be allowed to receive Thee? Shall I be so fortunate as to bear Thee once more within my body and soul? Shall my heart be thy dwelling and tabernacle, where Thou shalt take thy rest and shall I thus delight in thy close embrace and Thou, my Beloved, in mine?’  The divine Master answered: ‘My beloved Mother, many times shalt thou receive Me in the holy Sacrament, and after my Death and Ascension into heaven that shall be thy consolation; for I shall choose thy most sincere and loving heart as my most delightful and pleasant resting place.’”

In short, the Eucharistic Presence of Our Lord would have been one of those things “she held in her heart”, especially because she knew what a great consolation it would be.  You can imagine how difficult it would be for Our Lady having spent every day save three with Our Lord for 30 years, having seen Him often during His three years of public ministry, to no longer have Him present with her.  With that in mind her hunger to receive Him the Eucharist must have exceeded all the saints throughout history combined. 

Likewise when Our Lord “earnestly desired” to give the Church the Eucharistic sacrifice, He was expressing a great desire to unite Himself to each one of us individually, but none so much as His Mother.  He knew that the Eucharist would not only sustain her, but would unite Him to her in a deeper and deeper way with each fervent reception.

This is why Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says that “Each of Mary’s Communions surpassed the preceding one in fervor and, producing in her a great increase of charity, disposed her to receive her next Communion with still greater fruit. Mary’s soul moved ever more swiftly Godwards the nearer she approached to God; that was her law of spiritual gravitation. She was, as it were, a mirror which reflected back on Jesus the light and warmth which she received from Him; concentrated them also, so as to direct them towards souls” (Mother of the Savior and the Interior Life).  It is this same habit, the habit of receiving Our Lord with greater love and devotion at each Mass, that we must strive after.  Let us sit at the foot of Our Mother Mary and ask that she obtain for each one of us this most important grace.  As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange put it, “In everything she was the perfect model of Eucharistic devotion. If we turn to her she will teach us how to adore and to make reparation; she will teach us what should be our desire of the Blessed Eucharist. From here we can learn how to pray at Holy Mass for the great intentions of the Church. and how to thank God for the graces without number He has bestowed on us and on mankind.”

The Second Greatest Saint

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Over the course of 13-plus centuries, the Roman Canon (what we call Eucharistic Prayer I) remained virtually unchanged and is practically the same prayer that was written during the time of Pope Gregory I with one notable exception—the addition of the name of St. Joseph.  On November 13, 1962, Pope John XXIII inserted his name into the prayer, an act that was carried forward into the other three Eucharist Prayers of the Mass of Paul VI and officially completed by Pope Francis in 2013.  The recurrence of the number 13 conjures up October 13, 1917, the date of the last apparition at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun.  Just prior to the sun hurling towards the earth, the children, according to Lucia, “beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun. St. Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands.” The message is obvious—Jesus wants to bless the world through St. Joseph—and confirmed when he was added as a direct liturgical intercession.  We are entering period of great emphasis on reliance upon the great saint and human father of Jesus. 

Next to Our Lady, he is the greatest and most powerful saint in heaven.  The time is ripe for this great power to be unleashed upon the Church.  To receive all of the blessings that God wants to bestow upon us through the hands of St. Joseph we must first grasp his greatness.  This starts with a proper theology of St. Joseph, a Josephology if you will, that puts forth the reasons for his greatness.

There are good reasons for his pre-eminence, reasons that will be easy to grasp once we make clear an important principle.  St Thomas said that “an exceptional divine mission calls for a proportional degree of grace.”  This principle is most clearly affirmed with Our Lady.  All of her greatness, her fullness of grace, her immaculate conception, her glorious assumption and queenship, is because of her predestination to Divine Maternity.  She is great because God made her so and He made her so because she was eternally predestined to be linked to the Incarnation of the Son.   When God determined to become Incarnate, He also determined who His Mother would be.  She is most perfect then because it was God Who is infinitely wise that appointed her and equipped her for her indispensable role in the Incarnation.  Jesus could have appointed other Apostles, He could have chosen a different precursor than John the Baptist, but He could not have chosen another mother.  She is not alone among men in being tied directly to the Incarnation such that it quite literally was determined to depend upon her.  This is where St. Joseph comes in.

St. Joseph was predestined to serve as the earthly father of Jesus Christ.  Many theologians hesitate to call him “foster father” precisely because a man becomes a foster father of a child because of some accident, but St. Joseph was eternally predestined and therefore given a father’s heart despite, as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says, nature never making him a father.  It was, according to Bossuet, the same hand that gave “Joseph the heart of a father and Jesus the heart of a son.”

The Mission of St. Joseph

Joseph’s mission then is twofold.  The first is the one that has most often been attributed to him as being in support of Mary’s maternity.  It is this regard that he is often given an “also run” status as though he were merely a figurehead or just tagging along.  Probing a little deeper however we are forced to conclude that there is more than initially meets the eye.  He is, first and foremost, the protector of Mary and not just in the physical sense.  He is also the guardian of both her chastity and perpetual virginity.  St. Joseph as validly married to Our Lady had conjugal rights over her.  Nevertheless through grace he was able to not only refrain was marital relations, but to be her “most chaste spouse.”  Likewise, as head of the Holy Family, he had authority over a sinless wife.  In order to exercise that authority God would have given him the grace proper to such a high calling.

The second aspect of his mission is likewise revelatory in that he was also, not only responsible for protecting Our Lord, but also to contribute to His human formation.  This mission would have carried with it a proportional amount of grace.  He was also in a very real sense the savior of the Savior by protecting Him from harm, especially when Herod sought His life.  Like with Our Lady, St. Joseph would have exercised authority over Our Lord requiring that he be not only infallible in his commands, but impeccable in his example. 

The Privileges of St. Joseph

Given this exceptional role in the Incarnation, St. Joseph would have been given a relative fullness of grace that enabled him to carry out his mission.  This is why many saints and theologians throughout history have posited that he was completely sanctified.  When this happened however we can only speculate.  We know that it was not at his conception as Pius IX said the Immaculate Conception was a “singular grace” and utterly unique to Our Lady.  Some have said it was during the nuptials that he exchanged with Our Lady mostly because that is the last moment at which such a redemptive act on God’s part would have occurred.

In a homily given for the Feast of the Ascension, the aforementioned “Pope of St. Joseph”, John XIII, claimed that that it may be piously believed that St. Joseph was bodily assumed into heaven at the time of our Lord’s ascension.  This belief finds it foundation in Matthew’s assertion that at the resurrection of Jesus many saints came forth from their tombs and entered the holy city (c.f. Mt 27:51-53).  Reasoning that he being the highest of the saints and thus worthy of a first-fruits share in the Resurrection and Ascension saints such as Bernadine of Siena and St. Francis de Sales have claimed that Joseph indeed lives in heaven with both body and soul united.  The latter even went so far as to say that “We can never for a moment doubt that the glorious saint has great influence in heaven with Him Who raised him there in body and soul—a fact which is the more probable because we have no relic of that body left to us here below!  Indeed it seems to me that no one can doubt this as a truth, for how could He Who had been so obedient to St. Joseph, all through His life, refuse him this grace?” (quoted in Fr. Donald Calloway, Consecration to St. Joseph).

Building on the logic of St. Francis de Sales of Jesus’ obedience to St. Joseph, we can begin to see why St. Joseph is such a powerful intercessor.  That obedience did not cease but remains because Jesus remains forever his son.  This power has lain dormant for many centuries, but now is the time for the silent witness of Christ to finally be heard.

The New Eve and the Immaculate Conception

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In a previous post, we mentioned how St. John gives us all we need to make the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady explicit.  But this is not the only dogma that he gives us the foundation for.  He also helps us to ground the other controversial Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

One of the things that makes Christianity unique among all the world religions is that it is grounded in history.  Its central premise is that the eternal and transcendent God took human flesh in a specific time and place and effected our salvation.  The Incarnation is a historic event that, because it occurred in the “fullness of time”, was not some haphazardly chosen moment, but one providentially decreed from the foundation of the world.  The events leading up to the Incarnation were meant to reveal God’s plan and toe prepare the way for it.  This means that these events, especially those detailed in the Old Testament, are charged with prophetic and theological meaning.  From this emerges the principle of typology which reveals the unity of salvation by moving from “type” to fulfillment in the “antitype”.  Because the movement is from prophecy to fulfillment it is always from lesser to greater.

Typology is not a trick biblical scholars apply to the bible but instead is a principle that is applied in the Bible itself.  The New Testament abounds in examples, but one in particular, because of its relationship at hand bears special mention—Christ as the New Adam (c.f. 1 Cor 15:45, Rom 5:12-21).  St. Paul is essentially alluding to the fact that Christ is the new and greater Adam, serving as a counter-image our first father in the flesh.  Although created by the infusion of God’s breath (i.e. the Holy Spirit), the first man failed in his test and brought sin and death into the world.  The Second Adam, who also was made flesh by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit did not fail the test and defeated sin and death. 

The New Eve

In a very real sense this type-antitype relationship is the most fundamental of all because it is the first one used in the Bible.  The first thing that God does after the Fall, is to promise a New Adam, one who would crush the head of the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gn 3:15).  This promise however is not just for a New Adam, but also another “Woman” (Eve’s name given by Adam) who would serve as a New Eve.  The New Adam would be born of this woman’s seed (an allusion to the Virgin Birth since, biblically speaking, the seed always came from the man) and she and the Serpent would have a relationship of enmity.

This New Eve is revealed to us by St. John in his gospel, a theme that he makes rather explicit.  The beginning of John’s gospel would immediately evoke the beginning of Genesis as if what he is about to write about fulfills the Creation account found in Genesis.  Both open with “in the beginning” and both go on to depict days of creation and re-creation.  In John’s account we find the use of “next day” twice and then skips two days and starts again “on the third day”.  If you are counting, that gives us six days—“the beginning” (1), “the next day” (2), “the next day” (3) and “on the third day” (6).  And just like on the sixth day of creation, we are told on the sixth day of re-creation there is a marriage taking place.  We are told nothing about the bride and groom of that wedding, but only that Our Lord and His Mother are there (John 2:1).  We are then told of a conversation between the Mother and her Son in which He addresses her in a rather strange way—as “Woman”.  This address, combined with the parallels to Genesis, would call to mind both Eve and the promise of the New Eve.  This New Eve would, by her words, overturn the damage done by the words of the first Eve and set in motion the work of the New Adam in defeating the Serpent. 

This connection would already be pretty clear, but Our Lord wanted to make sure it was crystal clear when, hanging on the Cross, He once again addresses her as Woman (John 19:42).  This time He makes both the image and the vocation clear.  Just as Eve of old was the mother of all the living according to the flesh, the New Eve was to be the mother of all the living according to the Spirit.

Mary as the New Eve was not something hidden away in the Scriptures or a product of popular piety but something that dates back to the Apostolic age.  We find this as the first title that the Church Fathers gave her.  For example, St. Irenaeus whose favorite theme was re-creation or recapitulation used that title when he made account of the Apostolic preaching saying,

“And just as through a disobedient virgin man was stricken down and fell into death, so through the Virgin who was obedient to the Word of God man was reanimated and received life… For it was necessary that Adam should be recapitulated in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve recapitulated in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor,  and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin.” 


Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 33

St. Irenaeus most certainly was qualified to give account of Apostolic preaching for he was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John.

Typology and the Immaculate Conception

With the type-antitype relationship firmly established we can make the link to the Immaculate Conception more explicit.  Recall that this relationship implies that the privileges given to Eve must in no way exceed the privileges given to Mary.  Eve was conceived without the stain of Original Sin, that is, she was conceived with the gift of sanctifying grace.  Mary then too must be conceived, at the very least, with the same privilege or else the type-antitype relationship falls apart.  St. John in canonizing Mary as the New Eve also, even if only in an implicit manner, declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Using typology we can even go further when we factor in the revelation that the New Eve will be at enmity with the Serpent.  This term, enmity, means that the hatred will be so deeply seeded that she will never fall into his power.  And just as Eve received grace consonant with her mission to battle the Serpent and make her a “helper suitable” to the first Adam, so too the New Eve would receive a plentitude of grace to make her a suitable helper to the New Adam and His battle against the Serpent by making her immune to his weapon of sin.  The Hebrew term ezer kenegdo that we translate as “helpmate” or “helper suitable to him” implies both a similarity and a complementarity.  And just as God gave to Eve a share in Adam’s humanity, so God gives to the New Eve a share in His divinity, which we call sanctifying grace and a complentarity by which the New Eve gives her seed to His humanity.  She is to be a helpmate suitable to His mission as Redeemer by being like Him in a unique share in His divinity but still subject to His redemptive (or pre-demptive) act.  In short, the New Eve would need to be not only conceived in grace, but also to never have lost it through sin.

We can do no better than to conclude by quoting Saint John Henry Newman’s lucid summary of the connection between Eve and the Immaculate Conception:

“She [Mary] holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve’s endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace…Now, taking this for granted, . . . I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? …If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? …And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.”

Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching

The Heresy of Scientism

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Modern science has brought us many wonderful things, but we would be naïve to think that it has made us wonder-full.  In fact, our obsession with the empirical has left us wonder-less because we mistakenly believe that everything can be explained.  We can, of course, explain how a lot of things in nature work.  The problem comes in when we accept these merely mechanistic explanations as the only explanation.  Our forefathers may have lacked the empirical skills that we have, but they most certainly were wiser because they were able to order all things.  Like ourselves, these wise men and women were obsessed with answering the question why, but unlike us they were unsatisfied with just knowing how nature worked.  They wanted to know why it worked the way it did more than how it worked.  For all their supposed backwardness they knew that nature could have worked differently, but it worked the way it did for a reason.  They sought to discover the reason first.  To use Aristotelian language, they wanted to understand formal and final causes and not just material and formal causes.

Scientism

The overemphasis on the how without any concern for the why has led to the heresy of scientism.  Notice that I called it a heresy and not just a philosophy.  It is a heresy because it rejects the truth that there is a universe.  It looks only at objects, but never objects as they fit into the whole.  He loves the trees but knows nothing of the forest.  To borrow from Chesterton, the scientistic heretic is “moved to discuss details in art, politics, literature…He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe…Everything matters—except everything.”  It is a heresy because it ignores the religious implications of Nature.  Religious because God is its Creator and He has written into it His-story.  Implications because it is just Creation and never meant to be worshipped.  It is a sign, a sacrament if you will, that reveals to man His Creator.  In fact, creation exists for man so that He might come to know the Creator.  That is its purpose and so we must read it that way.  Just as in the Book of Scripture God has revealed Himself, so too in the Book of Creation.

Like any heresy, there is always a temptation to overcorrect and reject scientistic explanations whole cloth.  But when we do this we are creating a false opposition between the scientistic and sacramental standards.  Both creation and Scripture have the same Author telling the Truth in different forms.  Just as it is foolish to remove Scripture and only “find God in Nature”, it is likewise imprudent to diminish the story that God is telling through Creation.  Aristotle thought all four causes were necessary to come to a more complete understanding of things.  The medievalists may have been wiser because they were able to focus on the formal and final causes, but they were limited in their understanding of the material and efficient causes and therefore were not as wise as they could have been.  We, on the other hand, have at our disposal a great power to more fully plum the depths of the material and efficient causes.  In short we have an opportunity to be wiser than our predecessors, but only if we avoid the heretical pitfalls we are speaking about here.

Our Lady, the Morning Star

An example will help to illustrate what this might look like.  The Litany of Loreto describes Our Lady as the “Morning Star”.  This moniker came about because of the wedding of the book of Scripture with the book of Creation.  The Church has long interpreted a verse from the Song of Songs (6:9) as descriptive of her: “Who is She that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?”.  Turning towards creation we find that there is, in fact, a  “star” that is found in the sky just prior to the rising of the sun.  This “star” reflects the light of the sun and suggest the rising of the sun.  Our Lady, as the truest reflection of the brightness of her Son, always points to His coming (c.f. Jn 2:5). 

Some might accuse Catholics of over-spiritualizing things by doing this until we actually look at this empirically.  The planet Venus, which is named for a Roman goddess of fertility (could there be anything more fertile than a Virgin Mother?), has its orbit inside of the Earth’s orbit.  This means it is always relatively close to the sun in the sky.  When it is on one side of the sun it appears to follow the sun and brightens in our sky just after the sun sets.  When it is on the other side of the sun it precedes the sun in our sky so that it brightens the sky just before sun rise.  One can readily see how this one aspect of the book of nature perfectly describes Our Lady.  Apropos of our impending Solemnity, Our Lady is a Heavenly Body.  Nevertheless, even if she is closer to the sun, she still remains inside our orbit as one of us.  She always reflects the “Light of the World”, but especially in times of darkness.   

We could go on, but you get the point.  In fact, the more we wonder about this one particular aspect of creation, the deeper we could make of the connections.  Clinging to the complentarity of nature and Scripture enables us to see this in its fullest meaning.  If nature is nothing but the random collision of atoms, then you won’t care about why Venus is the way it is.  If you think nature something completely doomed for destruction, then you won’t care what it has to say.  But if you take the authentically Catholic both/and approach then you will be led deeper into the awareness of how close God is to us.

Co-Redemptrix?

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On the Feast of the Annunciation in 1945, a secretary from Amsterdam, Holland named Ida Peerdeman was visited with an apparition from heaven.  The visits from a woman who would identify herself as Our Lady of All Nations would continue for the next fifteen years for a total of 57 times.  It took nearly 50 years, but the apparition was deemed to be “of a supernatural origin” by Bishop Jozef Marianus Punt of Haarlem in 2002.  Although still awaiting official Vatican approval, the apparition of Our Lady of All Nations is remarkable for the content of its messages, one of which had a very specific request.   On July 2, 1951, the visionary was told “Now, look and listen. What I am going to say is an explanation of the new dogma. … From my Lord and Master, the Redeemer received his divinity. In this way the Lady became Co-Redemptrix by the will of the Father. It was necessary to begin with the dogma of the Assumption. Then the last and greatest would follow. … Tell that to your theologians. I do not come to bring any new doctrine. The doctrine already exists. Say this to your theologians: ‘Already, from the beginning, she was Co-Redemptrix.’”  The apparition had requested that the Church declare a fifth Marian dogma, Mary the Co-Redemptrix. 

Whether the apparition receives formal approval or not is still to be seen.  But it cannot be doubted that it remains controversial because of the request for the formal definition of what has become a highly controverted dogma.  At first glance it seems that declaring Mary as the co-Redemptrix takes Marian devotion too far.  There is only one Redeemer and it is Christ Himself.  His Mother may have assisted in this, but to give her such a lofty title verges on heresy.  Admittedly the title, especially in English, does suffer from a linguistical defect.  The prefix “co” in its common usage connotes an equality in the parties.  But it is meant to be a translation of the Latin term cum which means “with”.  So, when we speak of Mary as co-Redemptrix, it is meant to indicate that she is “with the Redeemer” playing an indispensable role in His salvific office.  It should not be viewed as competitive but cooperative.  Jesus Christ is the sole Redeemer of mankind.  If the doctrine of Co-Redemptrix is true, then it must be based on a more nuanced understanding.

Scripture and Co-Redemption

From the outset we must admit that in a certain sense that there are other “co-redeemers” found in Sacred Scripture.  God Himself speaks of Abraham as a co-Redeemer when, through his obedient “yes”, God promises to “bless all the nations of the earth” (Gn 22:17-18, c.f. Romans 4:16-25 where the promise is guaranteed to all who share the faith of Abraham).  Likewise, St. Paul speaks of laboring so that he might “save some by any means” (1 Cor 9:22).  We could cite other examples, but the point is that Scripture is replete with examples of men and women who freely cooperate with God in being instruments of redemption.  This cooperation is always a participation in God’s act of redemption.  It does not diminish the power of God’s redemptive work, but instead magnifies it.  It is one thing to do an activity by your own power, it is quite another, and more praiseworthy, to elevate others to work with you.

Turning to Mary herself, we see her serving as a co-Redemptrix to John the Baptist.  It is the presence of the embryonic Christ child, coupled with the sound of His Mother’s voice that sanctifies St. John the Baptist (c.f. Lk 1:39-45) within his mother’s womb.   This might lead one to think that she is just like Abraham and St. Paul, except for the promise of Genesis 3:15.  When God promises a Redeemer to Adam and Eve, He also promises the “woman” who would be instrumental in crushing the head of the Serpent.  The Woman and her seed would be linked in a single mission.  The seed would be the New Adam, Christ, and the Woman, would be the New Eve, “a helpmate fitting for Him”, Mary.  Summarizing, Pius IX in his Apostolic Constitution declaring the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, said that “God, by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom.”  Mary is, as the Second Vatican Council said, “inseparably linked to her Son’s saving work.”

If Abraham and St. Paul are co-redeemers through participation, then likewise is Mary.  But with Mary her participation is not just a difference in degree, but in kind.  She did not just co-operate with the Redeemer but cooperated in a necessary way.  She does not participate in the work of redemption in some remote way, but directly.  When God set in motion His plan of redemption He made it so that it depended upon her.  She is the only “necessary” co-operator because the body He was to offer, was given to Him by her.  Not only at the Annunciation and the Visitation, but throughout the whole course of His redemptive work, He made it depend upon her.  It was she who offered Him to the Father in the Presentation where His suffering was linked to hers, but also on Calvary.  As Pius XII put it in Mystici Coroporis Christi, “[I]t was she, the second Eve, who, free from all sin, original or personal, and always more intimately united with her Son, offered Him on Golgotha to the Eternal Father for all the children of Adam, sin-stained by his unhappy fall, and her mother’s rights and her mother’s love were included in the holocaust.”

To summarize we would say that the title Mary, co-Redemptrix, is meant to acknowledge that it is through Mary’s continual “yes” that Christ redeemed the world.  She did not redeem the world, but participated in an entirely unique and essential manner in Christ redeeming the world.  That being said, why does it matter whether we define a fifth Marian dogma or not? 

Why it Matters

First, it is a matter of justice, specifically justice towards God in the virtue of religion that we offer fitting honor and praise for the works of God.  If God really did elevate a creature to share in such an intimate way in His redemptive work, then we owe it to Him to acknowledge and glorify Him in this work.  So too with Our Lady.  If she really did play an indispensable role in each of our salvation then the debt of gratitude can be repaid by invoking her under that title.

There is a second, more practical reason as well.  This has been pointed out by many others, including theologian Josef Seifert, but it bears repeating here as well.  The weeds of Protestantism often creep into the Garden of the Church.  Specifically, the Protestant belief in salvation by grace is often professed by many Catholics.  We are saved by grace, but not without our cooperation and the cooperation of other members of the Mystical Body.  “God will not save us, without us” as Augustine said.  We are not saved by our own actions, but those actions initiated in us by grace.  We must still cooperate with them.  This free cooperation in salvation has as its greatest example in Mary, co-Redemptrix.  To define this as dogma would serve to reassert was has become a forgotten belief within the Church.

Before closing, there is one other aspect that merits mention.  Some object for ecumenical reasons thinking that the term co-Redemptrix is just too strong and confusing a term.  Perhaps they have a point and we need to be wedded specifically to that term (although the apparition did use that term specifically).  Provided the term reflects the entirely unique role Mary played and plays in redemption then there might be a more ecumenically sensitive term that could be used.  But this is a double-edged sword.  In Christian-Jewish relations this term would have some traction because it shows the Jews themselves, through both the Patriarchs and the Jewish girl Mary, as co-Redeemers.

Finding the Lost Ark

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One of the charges often leveled by Protestants against Catholics, especially when it comes to Marian doctrine and devotion, is that it has no grounding in Scripture.  The New Testament, it is argued, says very little that supports these dogmas.  There is perhaps no defined dogma that more demonstrates this than the most recent, the Assumption.  But when we look at Scripture as a whole, however, we find a completely different story.

When St. Paul goes to Ephesus, the same Ephesus where the Beloved Disciple settled would eventually settle with Our Lady, he encounters worshippers of the female fertility goddess Artemis (Roman goddess Diana).  This was hardly unique as many of the pagan religions had similar goddesses.  It is into this historical reality that the Mother of God, who was a real person that could still be touched and seen, lived.  So, the earlier New Testament writings had good reason to remain relatively silent about her role in salvation.  This helped to keep the message of the Good News focused on Christ and avoided any chance that the pagans would wrongly assume that Christianity was simply offering a new pantheon of gods (like when St. Paul speaks at the Areopagus, Acts 17:22-32).  Without great care, especially when she was alive, there would most certainly have arisen a cult that could have eclipsed or put her on par with her Son. 

How St. John Described Our Lady

If it stopped there, then perhaps the objections that Catholics merely resurrected those practices might be valid.  But it didn’t.  For after she left the earth, St. John, the man who next to her Son knew her best, left the Church all that was needed for the foundation of Marian devotion.  With surprising clarity, in what is an otherwise mystical and confusing book, John tells how he met Our Lady during his heavenly sojourn.  He found the Woman clothed with the Sun with a crown of twelve stars who gave birth to the male child who was to rule all nations of the earth (c.f. Rev 12:1-5).  Readers of John’s gospel would also know that when he uses the title “Woman” he is referring to Mary.       

To make it perfectly clear who he is talking about, he introduces this section by mentioning something that would have immediately grabbed his readers’ attention—the Ark of the Covenant.  “And the temple of God in heaven was opened, and there was seen the ark of his covenant in His temple…” (Rev, 11:19).  In other words, in John’s inspired understanding, Mary is the Ark of the Covenant.  And in calling her such, he now links everything that is said of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament to the person of Mary. 

The Ark of the New Covenant

Recall that the original Ark of the Covenant held God’s Word written on Stone in the Ten Commandments.  Now, the true Ark of the Covenant carried the Word written in Flesh.  The original Ark of the Covenant held a piece of the heavenly bread manna.  The true Ark of the Covenant carried the Bread of Life. Finally, the original Ark of the Covenant held the staff of Aaron as a sign of the Old Covenant priesthood while the true Ark of the Covenant carried the new High Priest of the New Covenant. 

This connecting of Mary to the Ark of the Covenant was not lost on the early Church either.  The great defender of Christological orthodoxy, St. Athanasius in homily passed on the traditional link between the two when he said,

“O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness.  For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word?…O [Ark of the] Covenant clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides…You carry within you the feet, the head, and the entire body of the perfect God…you are God’s place of repose.”

Once the connection with the Ark of the Covenant is made, we can link it to another key text in the New Testament: the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth.  David took the Ark of the Covenant into the hill country of Judea where he leapt for joy and the Ark remained there for three months (2 Sam 6).  After the Annunciation, Our Lady, carrying the newly-conceived Son of God, travels into the same hill country where John the Baptist leaps for joy at the sound of her voice.  She also stays there for three months.  It is clear that St. Luke is deliberately evoking images of the Ark of the Covenant to suggest that Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant.

The eventual resting place of the Ark of the Covenant has been the subject of speculation and rumor for many centuries.  According to 2 Maccabees, the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave and God would reveal its location at the appropriate time (c.f. 2 Macc 2:1-8).  When his followers despaired that he did not mark the path to it, he prophesied that “the place is to remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows them mercy.  Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will be seen…” (2 Macc 2:7-8).  During the Annunciation, Mary was “overshadowed by the Holy Spirit,” the description of which would have evoked the return the “glory cloud” that overshadowed the Tabernacle (c.f. Ex. 40).  Now this same cloud is seen and announces that God has gathered the people together and shown them mercy.  This overshadowing then marks not just the presence of God, but the presence of the New Ark of the Covenant.  The Feast of the Visitation then is a celebration of the revelation of the place where the Ark of the Covenant can be found—wherever Mary went.

The connection between the Ark of the Covenant and the Assumption of Mary is made explicit by John during his heavenly vision.  But the Old Testament also teaches that the Ark was never meant to remain on earth or, God forbid rot in a cave, but to go to its resting place with God in heaven (c.f. Ps 132:8).  This is why when St. John Damascene, when marking the Feast of the Dormition of Mary, connects Our Lady’s Assumption with the Ark of the Covenant: “Today the holy, living ark of the living God, the one who carried her own maker within herself, comes to rest in the temple of the Lord not made by hands.  David—her ancestor and God’s—leaps for joy; the angels join in the dance” (St. John Damascene, On the Dormition of Mary, II).

The quest for the Ark of the Covenant is over.  It has been found and she is Our Mother Mary who brings Jesus with her everywhere she goes.

Preparing for Martyrdom

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Very few men have changed the world as much as Francesco di Bernadone did.  While in prayer one day in a run down chapel in Assisi, Italy, he received a Divine mandate to “rebuild my Church.”    After a false start by literally rebuilding the church he was standing in, he set out to reform the crumbling Church.  In the process, St. Francis as he is better known, became one of the most beloved saints for his radical commitment to Christ and His Church.  But the rebuilding of the Portiuncula was not his only “blunder”.  He also thought he could win the martyr’s crown once by visiting the Sultan and trying to get him to convert.  He failed on both accounts, winning the Sultan’s esteem but not his soul.  Francis may have been called to be a great saint, but not a martyr, mainly because he misunderstood martyrdom.

When pressed, most of us would say that martyrdom consists in dying for the faith.  That of course is part of it, but it is not really the primary part.  The primary part is in the literal meaning of the term martyr.  A martyr is a witness.  And not just any witness, but is a certain type of witness that may end in death, but it need not per se.  That is why we refer to Our Lady as Queen of Martyrs and her spiritual son St. John the Evangelist as martyrs even though they did not die by the sword.  They both attest to the fact that death is not the end or the goal, but a means by which the martyr witnesses to Christ.  Otherwise we would not be able to differentiate it with dying for a cause.  As noble as that might be, it is not the same thing as Christian martyrdom.

Martyrs as Witnesses to What?

The key in grasping the distinction is understanding what it is that a martyr is witnessing to.  He is witnessing to the truth of the Resurrection of Christ and his own personal share in it.  His Master too was once put to death, but by His own power He destroyed death’s hold over Him and all those who are in Him.  “O death where is your victory.  O death where is your sting” (1Cor 15:55).  The Christian martyr may fear the pain leading up to death, but has no fear of death itself.  In fact, her eyes are fixed on the prize, so much so that she is willing to undergo any amount of pain to obtain it.

The hagiography of the martyrs is full of stories of incredibly painful deaths that the martyrs suffered at the hands of their persecutors.  But hardly a single story describes the pain, only the joy.  We might be tempted to think it is merely omitted for the sake of the reader.  Tempted, that is, until we realize that the descriptions of their countenance seems to suggest the exact opposite.  They seem to feel nothing.  They don’t sweat while they are being boiled alive (St. Cecilia), their bodies are riddled with arrows and spears while they continue preaching (St. Edmond), they sing Psalms for 15 days in a starvation bunker (St. Maximilian Kolbe) and they joke while being roasted alive (St. Lawrence).  You might think they felt no pain at all based on the descriptions. 

And herein lies the important truth of martyrdom—they most probably didn’t feel pain.  Or at least, if they did, it was way out of proportion to what was actually happening.  And that is because martyrdom is a gift from God so that the merits of witnessing even to the point of death are given to the martyr.  They are witnessing not to their faith in the Resurrection, but to God’s power that was made manifest through the Resurrection.  The martyr is tried so far beyond human capacities that it becomes so blatantly obvious that it is only by the power of God that a human being could endure these things.  The martyr then is both a witness and an instrument.  Martyrdom is not really about the martyr at all but about God.  It is a very public witness to His power over death as shown by how hard it is to actually kill the martyr.  The witnesses to the martyrdom are left without a doubt that something supernatural has happened, even if they later choose to deny it.

Why St. Francis was Wrong…and Right

St. Francis wasn’t wrong in thinking that martyrdom would fulfill his vocation to rebuild the Church.  He was wrong by not seeing it as the means God had chosen for him to do it.  It was a gift that he tried to seize.  But he was absolutely right in his assessment that it would rebuild the Church.  This is why Tertullian uttered his famous dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” 

God never gives up on man so that when the world goes deaf, He simply speaks in sign language using martyrs.  Trapped in paganism and hedonism, Rome was transformed by the Christian martyrs who witnessed to the power of their God over death (no other god had that) and no fear of pain and suffering.  Roman soldiers thought they were brave until they watched a young girl march to her death with a smile on her face.  After trying to kill her they knew something Divine was happening.  They saw a way out of the maze of their Godless existence.  And the Church grew at 40% per decade into the middle of the fourth century on the preaching of the martyrs.

Martyrs have been and will remain an integral part of the preaching of the Church.  In some times and places they used only words to preach and in other ages, especially those in which the world grew tone deaf to Divine invitations, the preachers were the martyrs. 

One can’t help but see the parallels between our own decadent society and the decadence of Rome that is leading to widescale deafness.  The public witness of many Catholics is falling upon deaf ears so we should expect that God will raise up a generation of martyrs soon.  Our role is to prepare ourselves and the next generation for this eventuality.  Like in all the previous persecution it will come with little warning and those who have prepared well for it will be able to respond to the gift.  Those who haven’t won’t.  But either way, we should expect that they will be coming soon.

The End Times and the Anti-Mary

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Christians of every age have wondered whether they were living in the End Times.  Each of these ages had their own reasons to believe that Our Lord’s return was imminent.  In that regard our own age is no different.  But our times are unique in a very specific way, one that is not often spoken of.  The Second Coming of Christ will be like a negative photographic image of the first.  He came in weakness, He will come in power.  He came in silence, He will come with trumpet blasts.  He came as Redeemer, He will come as Judge.  He came as Lamb, He will return as Lion.  Just as this principle of photographic negative applies to the New Adam, it also applies to the role the New Eve will play as well.  And in this, we find signs that the end is near.

Mary’s First Coming

The future Queen of Heaven and Earth was the Queen of the Hidden Life during her earthly sojourn.  She “kept all these things in her heart” rather than shouting them to the housetops.  The only time she “let loose” of both her mission and her Son’s was in the privacy of her cousin Elizabeth’s home.  And even after the Resurrection she remained in prayer, preferring not to speak and to avoid any chance that a cult were to rise up around the Mother of God.  She who was a true wonder of the world, lived in the temple of her heart in ancient Ephesus while the pagans streamed to the Temple of the virgin goddess Diana in that same city.  She was not only humble, but silent with only a single spiritual counsel—“do whatever He tells you.”

As Queen and Universal Mother she has not abandoned her children.  Throughout the ages she has left her throne in Heaven and appeared to her children to give them an urgent message.  These apparitions have been a regular part of the life of the Church over the past millennium.  In the last few centuries however, they have grown in both frequency and publicity. She is no longer the silent maiden, but the regal Mother voicing her concern for her children.  When we view this in light of the “photographic negative” principle, this makes sense.  If she played a primary, albeit silent, role in the First Coming, we should only expect that she play a more visible and vocal role in the Second Coming.  And the messages of her apparitions seem to suggest that the time is short.  We may not know how short is short, but it is safe to say that she is clearing the way for His second Advent.

Reading the signs of the times and seeing the Marian apparitions in this light means we should treat the messages, especially at Fatima where the most visible public miracle ever occurred, with the utmost seriousness.  But there is another sign that is related to this that ought to give us pause.

The Spirit of the Anti-Mary

We know that one of the signs of the Second Coming is the reign of the Antichrist.  We aren’t told when but we are told how long he will reign (42 months).  Throughout history there have been types of the Antichrist that gave us a glimpse of just how dark those days will be.  But they have all passed.  Eventually the true antichrist will rise and I would like to suggest that this eventuality is closer than we may think.

The Devil is the great ape of God, trying to “be like god” and mimic what He does.  The Antichrist will be his greatest facsimile of the true Christ, for he will dupe many people into thinking he is the real thing.  But being the great counterfeiter, we should expect that he will try to replicate the life of the true Christ is every way, but especially in a specific way—by having the anti-Mary precede him.

Who can doubt that the spirit of the anti-Mary is already rearing its ugly head among us under the guise of feminism?  But only Mary is the true feminist, receptive in everything God has to give.  Feminists reject femininity as receptivity and try to seize everything for themselves, including masculinity.  The “handmaiden of the Lord” was the most liberated woman who ever lived, finding freedom in living out her feminine calling.  The anti-Mary must liberate herself from even her own feminine nature, ending in absolute slavery.  Mary modestly hid her beauty behind a mantle and veil, anti-Mary wears little except a pink cat hat on her head.  Mary humbly “ate the bread of dependence” provided by Joseph at Nazareth and was filled, anti-Mary is gluten free and looks out only for number one.  Mary loved God and submitted to Him in her Jewish religion, anti-Mary hates God for making them a woman and sees religion only as a weapon in the hands of oppressors.  Mary prophetically whispered, “this is my body given for You,” anti-Mary shouts “my body, my choice.”  They speak only of women’s rights, but Mary speaks of a woman’s unique duties.

The diabolical fraud has been perpetrated, clearing the way for the reign of the anti-Mary.  And this is what makes our times utterly unparalleled.  Other times may have had their shadows of the Antichrist, only our age is animated by the spirit of the anti-Mary.  It is this uniqueness that suggests we may be entering into the time of the final battle.  There is a great battle being waged between Mary and the anti-Mary and we must fly to the foxhole of her mantle.  It was with this in mind that St. Louis de Montfort spoke of the Apostles of the End Times as having a particularly Marian spirit and devotion.  It is also why Our Lady has reminded us that even though the anti-Mary is seemingly everywhere, that, in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

Marriage in Heaven

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Matthew the Evangelist relays a conversation that Jesus once had with the Sadducees in which they tried to trap Jesus into admitting that the resurrection of the dead was absurd.  They present Him with a case study of a woman who was married seven times, each ending in the death of her husband.  They ask Our Lord, “Now at the resurrection, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had been married to her.”  If Our Lord said all of them, then He would be admitting there was polyandry, thus rendering the resurrection of the body a sinful state.  Instead Our Lord utters words that have shocked many Christians throughout history: “because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.  At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (c.f. Mt 22:28-33).  For some of those who are married, newlyweds and those happily married especially, these words cause much angst.  For the rest, relief.  But for all of us they are relevant because they give us a momentary glance at our promised destiny.

This ought to go without saying, but it has been uttered enough that it bears mention.  When Our Lord says that they “are like the angels” He does not mean that they become angels.  “For angels have not bodies” as St. Thomas says.  Therefore, it makes no sense to speak of resurrection, that is the re-unification of body and soul, if there is no body.  Instead Our Lord is describing the qualities of the resurrected life.  They will have the powers of the angels in thought, movement and glorification, but they will still be embodied spirits.  They will also, like the angels, not marry.

Seeing Marriage for What It Is..and Isn’t

Part of the struggle to grasp what Our Lord is saying stems from the fact that we live in an age in which the definition of marriage remains elusive.  That is, we are unclear what marriage is and what it is for and so endeavor to see how, if at all, it could fit into the scheme of eternity.  Marriage is the one flesh union of spouses tending towards the communion of their persons.  This union is of the whole person, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and not just an emotional bond as is commonly thought today.  This unbreakable personal union also is the foundation of the family which is the natural domicile for the procreating and raising of children.

As the instrument for the procreating and raising of children, obviously marriage is unnecessary in the next world.  While it served this purpose here below as the place where man lived out the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” once the harvest comes there will be no need for more fruit.

As a Sacrament marriage too will pass away in the eschaton.  In fact, all the Sacraments will pass away.  As signs, the Thing signified will be unveiled and made fully present.  Gone will be the need to see Our Lord veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine and it will pave the way to see Him face to face.  Likewise Marriage as a sign will no longer be necessary because the reality will be fully present.

Marriage as a Sign

The nature of marriage as a sign that points to a very specific reality is vitally important.  Specifically, marriage, as an earthly reality tending towards the communion of the spouses points to a parallel heavenly reality.  First, in its bond of love and fruitfulness it points to the Communion of Persons which is the Trinity.  But that is not all.

As a complete gift of self, it signifies the mutual gift of self between God and each man and woman.  As proof that this union is real, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Incarnation is the definitive marriage of mankind with God.  The Son is forever united to a human nature.  As if further proof were needed, Christ also raised Marriage to a Sacrament by which He bestows sanctifying grace.  This sanctifying grace not only cements the bonds of the spouses, but more importantly it truly unites each of the spouses to God.  In this way it becomes not just a sign, but the thing signified, “the great mystery in reference to [the bond of] Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32).

There is also a third reality that is signified in marriage and it is this one that ought to bring relief to those who despair no longer being united to their spouse.  It is this reality, says St. John Paul II, that is the reason why we are not simply “laundry listing” what we believe in the Creed but implying an intimate connection between the truths and reality.  More to the point, the Saintly Pontiff says that we link the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints in the Creed.

We are embodied creatures and our bodies too are a sign.  They are a sign that we are made for communion, not just with God, but with one another.  But these signs do not pass away because they bring about the thing signified, that is our bodies are who we are.  In this life we are limited in our capacity of self-giving to the point that we can only give of ourselves fully to one other person.  When time ceases, this limitation will be lifted so that we will be able to give of ourselves fully in all our relationships.  Put more succinctly we will participate fully in the Communion of Saints, a communion of self-giving and receiving of the entire redeemed community.  This is why, by way of anticipation, Our Lady, although only a creature, can have a personal relationship with each of the members of the Church Militant.  It is this redeemed community that is wedded to God, a communion with a communion as John Paul II said.

This is the Good News for spouses.  All in their relationship they have built upon and centered on Christ will endure.  The true intimacy, in Christ, they experienced will not be forgotten but instead will be the foundation of their relationship with each other in the Communion of Saints.  They will experience a level of intimacy beyond anything they could imagine.

And this is ultimately why Our Lord refused the Sadducees trap of treating marriage and the resurrection as some theological theory.  It is also why we shouldn’t treat this as some “pie in the sky” musings.  It ought to inform our relationships here and now.  If only those aspects of our relationship that were built on Christ will last, then we know which ones we should focus on.  If everyone did this in living out the consequence of Marriage as a Sacrament, then there would be peace in many homes.  And that, truly is the Good News.

The Roots of Feminism

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Whenever we want to understand the cause of human behavior, it is usually instructive to return to the “beginning.”  The divinely inspired words of Genesis 2 gives us a valuable glimpse of human psychology.  In this regard, the roots of modern day feminism are no different.  The reverberations from the Fall were felt not only in relation to God, but man and woman also experienced a rupture in their relationship with one another.  Rather than living in domestic bliss, man and woman are destined for conflict.  With the entrance of fig leaves, complementarity is threatened by competition as man rejects his role of protector and instead is met with the temptation to rule over woman (c.f. Gn 3:16).

Competition and Complementarity

It is important to add that while the Fall left man and woman with relational myopia, it did not doom their relationship.  It is strained, but not irreparably so.  The path to reconciliation, at least according to Our Lord, passes through “the beginning” (c.f. Mt 19:4).  Man and woman were made to live in harmony.  But this harmony was (and still is) contingent upon harmony with God.  In fact, it was meant to be a sign of it.    This helps us to grasp why we say they were cursed.  It was not because hell hath no fury like a God that has been scorned, but because God refuses to give up on mankind.  His cursing of man and woman and their relationship is meant to awaken within them an innate sense that reality is not quite what it seems.

The lie hidden within the serpent’s temptation was that God was withholding something from Adam and Eve.  Up to this point, man’s fundamental stance was one of receptivity.  They saw everything as a gift from the God Who desired nothing more than to father them.  But with satanic sophistry, the woman is tempted to change her stance to one of appropriation rather than receptivity.  Rather than receiving a gift, she is tempted to seize it.

This tension between receptivity and appropriation helps us to understand why it was woman who was tempted by the serpent.  Femininity, properly understand, was meant to be a sign of mankind’s receptivity of the gift.  In fact this receptivity is stamped into her body.  Eve, in seizing the apple, rejects not only God but her femininity.  By attacking the woman Satan is able to distort both man and woman’s signpost for their relationship to God.  Woman is now cursed to experience the consequences of the new paradigm.  She will become an object of appropriation as man no longer views her as a gift but instead as something to be seized and controlled.

With the threat of appropriation always looming over woman, she is keenly aware that something is fundamentally wrong.  She experiences desire for man, yet that desire is often met by a lust for domination.  This experience then also carries with it a temptation for her. The desire and the lust are precisely because of her femininity.  The temptation then is to reject her femininity.  Thus we find the genesis of modern feminism in Genesis.

Grasping Masculinity

This helps to explain why ersatz feminists, rather than embracing all those things associated with authentic femininity, attempt to grasp masculinity.  And because they are grasping they grasp a counterfeit version of it.  They set fake masculinity on a pedestal and then try to imitate it by taking a pill that enables them to indulge all their desire for man (even though the Pill actually robs them of that desire) and lord it over everyone they meet.  They come to loathe their own and other’s femininity and hate any man who portrays authentic masculinity, mostly because they cannot seize it on their own.

The curse may haunt the woman, but it does not have the final say.  The path out is by embracing her femininity.  Eve may have set the tone, but the New Eve gives the escape route.  Mary is the archetype of femininity.  She is totally receptive—“be it done to me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She is the archetype not just because she is the perfect wife and mother, but because she is the perfect disciple of her Son.   She is the model of receptivity, praising “the Almighty Who has done great things for me.”

The tug of the curse cannot be overcome by trying harder—that too is the appropriated masculinity revealing itself.  Instead the solution is to submit to Christ Who offers the grace to embrace her true femininity.  The true feminist is one who demands of men around them that they be authentically men.  She knows that masculinity is not something she can grasp but must come as a gift from a man who is able to give it.

Adam fell in not guarding Eve’s femininity.  The New Adam, because He “handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish empowers men to guard the femininity of woman” (Eph 5:25-27), restores man’s masculinity and empowers him to guard the femininity of woman.  Rather than seeing her as a threat to his own masculinity, he gifts himself to her.

Many of today’s feminists trace their ideological roots back to the 1960s.  If they were to dig further then they would find they extend back much further.  Failing to see this, they apply false solutions only exacerbating the problem.  Instead they should submit themselves and their femininity to Christ, the only One Who can fulfill their deepest desire.

Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs

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Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Although this liturgical celebration goes all the way back to the late 15th Century, there are still many people who do not know about the powerful intercession of Our Lady under this title.  To foster a devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, we need to begin by asking why a devotion to Mary is not enough.  Why must there be all these different titles for her and why do we have different feast days attached to the various titles?  Certainly it serves the practical purpose of introducing us to her.  But there is more to it than that.  Once the Church promotes a particular title for Our Lady, it gives the Faithful a right to call upon her under the specific title and to expect her to act.  This is why the four Marian dogmas, namely her Divine Motherhood (Mother of God), Immaculate Conception (Immaculata), perpetual virginity (Virgin of Virgins Our Mother), and Assumption (Queen of Heaven and Earth), each carry a title with them.  By invoking Our Lady under those particular titles we can expect her to act on our behalf in very specific ways.  In this regard Our Lady of Sorrows (Queen of Martyrs) is no different.  What makes her specific intercession under this title so important is the fact that living in this “valley of tears”, we are in need of her constant compassion.

There are some very important implications that flow from the Immaculate Conception and help us to know Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows more fully.  Recall that Mary in the Immaculate Conception was preserved from the stain of Original Sin.  Put another way, because of the grace Our Lord merited on the Cross, he redeemed His Mother before her birth.  One could then assume that the Immaculate Conception made Mary immune from pain and death since they are consequences of Original Sin.  Now this is partially true in that the pain and death that Our Lord and Our Lady suffered were not a result of Original Sin but stem from human nature itself.  It was only by grace that Adam was exempt from pain and death in the state of Original Innocence.  Both Jesus and Mary voluntarily accepted suffering and death—He in his vocation as Redeemer, she in order to unite herself with Him in her role as the New Eve.

The fact that suffering and death were in a sense voluntary for Our Lady is something we should not overlook.  By reflecting deeply upon this truth, we will fall more deeply in love with the Lord’s most precious gift to us.  It actually made her more sensitive to suffering than we could possibly imagine.  As fallen creatures we suffer from a darkening of our intellects, a weakening of our wills and our passions have the capacity to run wild.  By not inheriting a fallen human nature, Mary had perfect integrity of soul.  Her soul was perfectly ordered so that she had no ignorance, her will was always ordered to love of God, and her passions were always under the control of reason and will.  This means her emotions were more intense than ours, not less.  She was never ignorant of the evil of sin.  As the “handmaid of the Lord” her heart was always consumed by a love of God.  Our imperfection often makes us insensible to evil and our hearts are consumed by love of self.

Hidden in this is a great law in the spiritual life.  Suffering is always proportionate to one’s sanctity.  Being holy one naturally feels all things more acutely, including the evil of sin.  Mary, as the holiest of God’s creatures then carried a great weight of sorrow.  With such a perfect love of God as the One offended by sin and love of her Son Whom sin crucifies she suffered immensely. So too because she had no ignorance her sorrows were also proportionate to her intellectual enlightenment.  When we suffer we hardly know half our misfortune and in a sense become numb, whereas she was flooded with a light that was painful.

It is not without purpose that the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows follows liturgically upon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  Because of all we have said about Mary’s immaculate condition we can say that no one, with the exception of Our Lord could have grasped darkness of the Passion or its horrors more completely than her.  While the immensity of her suffering is virtually unimaginable, it is clear that without being given a singular grace, Mary would have died from them.  All that is required for martyrdom is the willful acceptance of suffering sufficient to cause death even if God preserves the martyr through a singular grace.  As an aside this is why the Church has revered St. John the Evangelist as a martyr even though he did not die in the caldron of boiling oil.  So too the Church considers Mary a martyr as St. Bernard says “Mary was a martyr not by the sword of the executioner, but by bitter sorrow of heart.”

This is no mere “white” martyrdom but as Queen of Martyrs her martyrdom was greater than all the “red” martyrs.  In the first place, the martyrs all had to endure sufferings of body.  Mary’s sufferings were primarily of the soul, a perfect soul whose sufferings would have spilled over into her body.  While all the martyrs suffered the torments inflicted upon them, the love of Christ made their sufferings somehow sweet.  We read in story after story of the martyrs how they were martyred in a sense of bliss.  There was none of this in Mary’s martyrdom.  She had to watch her only Son suffer—the same Son she knew to be most innocent and lovable and God incarnate.  Because of His role as Redeemer she also knew that she could do nothing to alleviate His suffering, but instead she was to suffer with Him.  We often will hide our sufferings from those we love because we do not want them to suffer watching us suffer.  This means that Mary was keenly aware that her presence on Calvary only made Jesus’ suffering worse, which in turn increased her sadness all the more.

Our Lady of Sorrows

In commenting on the anguish endured by the mother of the Maccabees who witnessed the martyrdom of her sons, St. Alphonsus Liguori says that anyone can understand that the sufferings of children are also borne by their mothers who witness it.   So Our Lady suffered all the scourges, thorns, nails and cross in her heart.  He says that “the heart of Mary became as it were a mirror of the Passion of the Son.”

Her martyrdom was also greater because it lasted the longest.  He begins not in the Passion, but in the prophecy of Simeon when he promised that a sword would pierce her soul (Lk 2:35).  From that moment on, she knew that Our Lord would be contradicted in all things.  So while Abraham suffered great anxiety for three days knowing his son was to die (Gn 22) and David for seven days (2Sam 12:14-31), Our Lady suffered in silence for 33 years knowing that her Son what to die and ignominious death.  She submitted herself to the will of God and bore all these things in the silence of her heart (Lk 2:51).  In fact when Our Lady revealed herself to St. Bridget she said there was not a moment after that point in which this knowledge did not pierce her soul—“As often as I looked at my Son, as often as I wrapped Him in His swaddling-clothes, as often as I saw His hands and feet, so often was my soul absorbed, so to say, in fresh grief; for I thought how He would be crucified. My eyes filled with tears, and my heart was tortured with grief.”

Her martyrdom did not end at the Resurrection either, but continued after as well.  Given the horrors that she witnessed she would not have wanted to see any of His Passion go to waste.  Each time she encountered someone who rejected her Son and His Church she would relive the ugliness of His Passion because the suffering for those souls would have been in vain.  This is why she is also the Mother of Mercy wanting to see the fruits of the Passion applied to as many people as possible.

Given all this, the Church gives us this day devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows so that we might show our gratitude to Our Lady by meditating upon her dolors and showing pity for her in her sorrow.  There are two principal fruits that come from this.  The first is that those who call upon Our Lady of Sorrows shall grow in true self-knowledge.  This flows directly from Simeon’s prophecy that through her sufferings “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk 2:35).  Secondly, by meditating upon her sorrows we will grow in sorrow for our own sins.  Finally through our growth in the knowledge of Our Lady’s share in the sufferings of Our Lord keeps her from being seen a mere instrument but a true Mother and co-Redemptrix.

Our Lady of Sorrows, cause of our joy, pray for us!

 

The Fatima Example

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On the morning of August 13, 1917, an enormous crowd, numbering in the thousands, gathered in the valley of Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal expecting to encounter something supernatural. The crowds had continued to grow since Our Lady had appeared to three shepherd children on the 13th day of the previous three months. This time was different however. The children never appeared and the people began to grow restless, wondering what had happened to them. They soon learned that the little visionaries had been kidnapped by the local administrator, an avowed Mason and enemy of the Church, named Arturo de Oliveira Santos. As the crowd grew angry, lightning flashed and a small white cloud floating down from the sky and settled over the same oak tree that the previous apparitions had occurred. Everything began to shimmer with the colors of the rainbow and the cloud then returned from whence it came. Despite the abbreviated supernatural visit and the children being absent, this event was more than just a mere detour on the path to the great Miracle of the Sun during the final apparition on October 13, 1917. It turns out, that once we understand the overall message of Fatima, this event is an essential part of Our Lady’s mission to the small Portuguese village.

One of the constant temptations to those who encountered Jesus was that they were more interested in being amazed by His mighty deeds than anything else. Just as those who witnessed Our Lord’s miracle of the loaves and fishes were mostly interested in simply witnessing His mighty deeds (c.f John 6:26), there is always a danger that we can get caught up in the Secret of Fatima or the Miracle of the Sun and miss the purpose of Our Lady’s visit. That is, we can forget that miracles are not just supernatural events, but signs. The miraculous events at Fatima are each meant to be signs reinforcing the overall message.

The Message

What is the overall message of Fatima?  Our Lady came to call the children (and us) to do penance and pray the Rosary for the salvation of souls. This is at the heart of each of the messages she spoke to the children and the so-called Three Secrets that had been revealed during the July 13th visit.

By all appearances the August 13th “apparition” was a false start of sorts. But viewing the events through the overall message, we can see how they helped advance Our Lady’s mission. It was the aforementioned Three Secrets that generated the interest of the anti-Catholic authorities and caused the children to be kidnapped.

When Santos kidnapped the visionaries by promising them a ride to the Cova da Iria on that August 13th, he first brought them to his house where he attempted to play “good cop” to coax the secret message from the children. While this served to relieve some of the children’s initial fear, they would not break their promise to Mary to keep the contents of the secret to themselves. Once he was convinced this approach would not work, he took the children to local prison and put them in a cell with some other prisoners. He began to interrogate them separately, threatening to boil them in oil if they did not reveal the secret. The children remained steadfast, prepared to become martyrs rather than cave in the face of the administrator’s threats. Eventually the children were released and taken home on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15.

When we apply the lens of Mary’s overall message of Fatima—penance and the Rosary—to the events of those 3 days, we can see how they fit into Mary’s plan. The harrowing events of those three days serve as a model of what it actually looks like in practice to live the message of Fatima. Our Lady wanted to make the children a model for all of us.

When Santos locked the children up in the jail with a group of prisoners, they were obviously quite afraid. According to Lucia’s memoir, it was her cousin Jacinta who was the most afraid. Her brother, Francisco, reminding her of their mission, told her “Don’t cry, we can offer this to Jesus for sinners.”  In the face of great fear and suffering, the children were faithful to the message of Fatima, looking at their suffering as a means to save souls. They were most certainly afraid, but also willing to cooperate with Our Lord and Our Lady to “lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of mercy.”

The Message Lived Out

This call for penance should resonate in our ears. God wants to bestow upon His children adopted through Baptism the graces won by His natural Son to be co-redeemers with Him (c.f. Col 1:24). While many of us will not face an ordeal as momentous as the little shepherds did, our daily trials can be a source of sanctification for ourselves, but also when borne with patience and love for souls, can be united to Christ’s. When confronted with two choices, we can always choose the one with more of the Cross in it and, like the Little Flower, strive to never miss an opportunity to offer a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.

Our Lady also wants us to use the events of those three days to remove the main obstacle we often face when doing penance for others—fear. These were mere children and there is no natural explanation as to why all three of them were able to remain steadfast when faced with the prospect of being boiled in a cauldron of oil. But they did not conquer their fear, it was grace that worked in them. The willingness to be martyred is always a grace and Our Lady wants us to know that we should not let our fear stop us. By selecting little children, Our Lady wanted to make it abundantly clear that we should not despair of the help of grace in the midst of our trials.

The children also modeled the power of prayer, specifically the Rosary in the conversion of sinners. The children began praying the Rosary in their prison cell and the other prisoners soon joined them. This changed the entire atmosphere of the prison and even one of the thieves began to pray his concertina while the others began to sing and dance with the children. Trusting in the power of the Rosary, Lucia said, “We only hope that Our Lady has had pity on his soul and converted him!”

Our Lady rescheduled her appearance to the children to the 19th of August. At about 4 0’clock on the afternoon, Lucia sensed Mary was about to appear while they were out grazing their flocks at a place called Valinhos. When Lucia asked her usual question as to what Mary wanted from her, she replied “I want you to continue going to the Cova da Iria on the 13th and continue praying the Rosary every day. In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.”  The location may have changed, but the message rang familiar. As this centenary year marking the apparition of Our Lady in Fatima nears its conclusion, the message of Fatima remains relevant. As Pope Benedict XVI when commenting on the contents of the Third Part of the Secret once said, “the exhortation to prayer as the path of ‘salvation for souls’ and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion” remains ever new. May we take this to heart and live the message of Fatima every day.

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

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With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.

The Mediatrix of All Graces?

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Since Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, Marian devotees within the Church have been championing the cause of a fifth Marian dogma. namely Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces.  Whether or not a formal declaration comes soon, Tradition up and through the Second Vatican Council supports this as a definitive belief, although the particulars still need to be worked out.  Yet most people’s response to this is that it simply goes too far.  We may be willing to concede that she intercedes for us or that she is a mediatrix of grace in some ways, but the title of Mediatrix of All Graces tips the dogmatic scales towards Mariolotry.  But before rejecting it wholesale, we might examine exactly what this doctrine means.

A mediator, in the sense we are using it here, is one who stands between God and man, taking the gifts from God and distributing them to men.  Christ as Mediator, in strict justice, is able to take as much grace as He wants and distribute it to mankind as He sees fit.  One of the ways in which He does so is through secondary mediators.  These mediators no longer act in strict justice but instead as friends of Christ.  When Christ sought to heal the paralytic who encountered Peter and John, He did so through the mediation of Peter (Act 3:1-7).  This, of course, is but one example of many throughout all of history that continues even down to our day when Christians still perform miracles and priests become mediators of grace through the Sacraments.   In this very broad sense Scripture and common sense testify that Mary is a mediatrix (Note: mediatrix is just the feminine form of mediator, like waiter and waitress) in a unique and wholly unrivaled way.  But to go any further we must first set a foundation upon which the doctrine of Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces can be built.

The One Mediator

The cornerstone of such a foundation is necessarily built upon the stone that the builders rejected—Christ—“Who is the one mediator between God and man” (1Tim 2:5).  Anything that we say from this point forward can never diminish or overshadow that truth.  Mary may have been supreme and unique in her co-operation with Christ, but it was He Who was the primary operator.  Mary’s mediation is always sub-ordinated to Christ’s and not co-ordinated.  She may be the branch from which all the fruit grows, but He is the Tree.   He is the one mediator between God and man, but through the designs of Divine Providence chose His Mother to share uniquely in His mission as the source of all grace and in a very real sense made His distribution of grace dependent upon her.  Her role as co-operator in His redeeming mission was entirely unique, for He made Himself dependent upon her “[N]ot only because she consented to make sacrifice for the salvation of men possible, but also in the fact that she accepted the mission of protecting and nourishing the Lamb of sacrifice, and when the time came led Him to the altar of immolation…” (Pope St. Pius X Ad Diem Ilium).

It is because Mary was predestined to be the Mother of God that she received a fullness of grace.  This fullness is exceeded only by Christ’s sacred humanity; hypostatically united to the second Person of the Trinity.  She who is “full of grace” is the pre-eminent beneficiary of Him from Whose “fullness we have received grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16).  Her fullness of grace and its cause, namely the divine indwelling of the Holy Spirit, makes the Spirit more operative in and through her than all the other saints combined.  We shall come back to this point shortly but it is worth noting that anything that any of the saints can do in the supernatural realm, Mary can do better.

If the source of Mary’s greatness comes from her mission as Mother of God then anything we say about her can only serve to glorify God rather than to eclipse Him.  Many object to the very idea of the Mediatrix of All Graces because it seems to turn her into a goddess.  And if we didn’t know better we might agree because it is such a supreme calling.  But in truth it is meant to reveal the greatness of God’s saving act.  So powerfully did Christ trample sin and death that He is able to elevate a mere creature to an almost full participation in the life of God.  Rather than diminishing the work of Christ, Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces, reveals it more fully.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).  Mary’s heavenly life is the realization of this promise and the Church presents her as such in order to stoke the fires of our faith, hope and charity.

All Graces?

With the necessary foundation in place, we may now begin to build the house.  When we say that Mary is the Mediatrix of All Graces what we mean is not just that Mary obtains grace from God by her prayers but that she also transmits them to us by her actions.  We must first admit its possibility based on what was mentioned above.  If angels and saints can be secondary causes of grace then Mary can do so to a greater degree.  This “greater degree” is not just some graces, but all graces.  As Pope Leo XIII, building on a line of tradition that traces all the way back to the Fathers of the Church, says, “no grace is given to us except through Mary, such being the Divine Will” (Pope Leo XIII, Octobri Mense).  We must not see this however as eliminating all other secondary causes of grace or making them “tertiary” causes of grace.  Instead what this means is, say for something like the Sacraments, that she would obtain for us the grace of a good disposition to receive them. In other words we should see her as the mother who nurtures us with the milk of docility to the grace of the present moment.  She is not the cause of our holiness, but she works behind the scenes to set us to receive its increase.  In this way we say that all graces pass through her Immaculate hands.

Before concluding there is one final objection worth examining.  If Mary truly is the Mediatrix of All Graces, then why would there be any prayers that do not invoke her?  As should be clear by now this objection does not fully grasp what it means to say that she is mediatrix of all graces.  But it also confuses our prayer to her with her prayer to God.  This doctrine does not mean that no grace is given without our asking her, only that she plays such an intimate role in our interior life that no grace is given to us without her asking God for it.  In fact, the only reason why we do ask her and not go directly to God is because she gives more glory to God in the asking than we do.  As God’s most perfect creature, whose soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, her asking is more pleasing to God and becomes an offer He can’t refuse.  This is why she is Our Lady of Mercy and never Our Lady of Justice.

A Truly Virgin Birth

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Sometimes familiarity can be a catalyst for myopia, especially when it comes to the mysteries of the faith.  Christmas is no exception in this regard and offers an excellent opportunity to expand our sights by fixing them on some of the not-so obvious mysteries hidden with of Our Lord’s nativity.

In his customary manner, St. Matthew ends his account of the birth of Our Lord with an Old Testament proof-text to show how the prophets spoke specifically about Jesus.  Quoting Isiah 7:14, the Evangelist says, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’” (Mt 1:24).  It is common for us to use this as Scriptural proof of the virgin birth of the Messiah, but unfortunately very little attention is paid to what this actually means.  More to the point, we often substitute our idea of the virginal birth with the idea of the virginal conception.  Both of course are true, but how is it that a virgin could give birth?

If we come at it from the perspective of the one who gave birth, clarity emerges.  For a belief in Our Lady’s perpetual virginity is really saying three things.  First, that she became pregnant with Our Lord without “knowing a man” (Lk 1:34).  Second, that Our Lady remained in this state after the birth of Our Lord.  These two are obvious, but it is the third that helps bring illumination—Our Lady remained a virgin “even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man” (CCC 499).  Or, as the Council of Ephesus puts it: “After giving birth, nature knows not a virgin: but grace enhances her fruitfulness, and effects her motherhood, while in no way does it injure her virginity.”

The Miracle of Christ’s Birth

In order to keep her virginity intact, Our Lord did not leave His Mother’s womb through the birth canal.  He would have been delivered in a miraculous manner, passing directly from her womb into the outside world.  Without getting overly bogged down in the biological details, we can still glean some particularly poignant aspects of the mystery.

As a first consequence of this, Tradition has always taught that Our Lady’s partus was completely devoid of pain.  This is more than an interesting fact, but carries with it a very deep corollary that Our Lord wished to establish from the beginning of His mission.  When Our Lord came into the world, He came to suffer so as to redeem us.  But He was unwilling to be the cause of any other unnecessary suffering.  As St. Thomas says, “But the mother’s pains in childbirth did not concern Christ, who came to atone for our sins. And therefore there was no need for His Mother to suffer in giving birth”(ST III, q. 35, a.6).  Our Lady would suffer because of her role as the New Eve, but only in the amount that was absolutely necessary.  Likewise, all those associated with Him (us) are guaranteed only to suffer when it is necessarily tied to His redemptive mission.  He did, and still does, refuse to “break the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick” (Is 42:3).

Remaining on the more practical level, we can also see why this miraculous intervention might be necessary.  If Our Lady’s virginity remained physically intact, there can be no doubt as to the truth of the virginal conception.  This is also why it is reasonable to believe that Our Lady remained a virgin throughout her entire life.  While we do not get overly fixated on the biological details, the virginal birth is still a biological fact.

Virginity, properly understood though, is not just a biological fact.  It is a condition of the entire person and does not simply mean someone who has never had sex.  Our Lady is ever-virgin because she is all-pure, both body and soul.  Her body is as a sacrament revealing the state of her soul.  In order to affirm this Our Lord does not destroy the physical sign of her personal virginity.

As a point of clarification, we call it a miracle because it defies the laws of nature for a human body to pass under its own power from its mother’s womb.  This should be seen as distinct from Christ, while operating under the power of His resurrected body, had the power of subtlety, that is, the power to pass through physical objects.

The Miracle as a Sign

But we also refer to it as a miracle because, like all Christ’s miracles, it has great value as a sign.  The same infant that was wrapped in swaddling clothes, that is burial cloths, had just passed from the closed womb pointing to the time when He would pass from the tomb.

His birth also was to serve as a sign revealing the fullness of Our Lord’s person as true God and true man.  As St. Thomas says, “He mingled wondrous with lowly things. Wherefore, to show that His body was real, He was born of a woman. But in order to manifest His Godhead, He was born of a virgin, for ‘such a Birth befits a God,’ as Ambrose says in the Christmas hymn” (ST III, q28, art. 2, ad. 2).

The miracle also serves as a sign of our ultimate redemption.  Living in this post-lapsarian world, it is difficult to view creation as anything other than a closed system of corruption.  By passing through Our Lady’s womb, without leaving behind the natural traces of corruption, Our Lord was pointing ahead to the redemption of creation in the New Heavens and the New Earth where corruption is no longer possible.

Finally, Our Lord wanted to point each of us to the true joy of Christmas.  By taking something that is naturally painful and filling it with gladness, He was forever instituting Christmas as a day of great joy.  Merry Christmas everyone!

The Devil in the New World

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In the battle against the Culture of Death, there is a certain gravity pulling towards two self-defeating tendencies, both of which equally plague those building a Culture of Life.  The first is to treat evil as something abstract, a mere force or darkness that looms around us.  No one ever won a battle against an abstract enemy.  The second is to treat other men as evil, that is, to literally demonize them.  It puts a face on the evil, showing it to be something that is orchestrated, but also misses the mark because it misidentifies the true enemy.  This temptation is perennial, especially since the enemies are relentless and have no real face, but instead are powerful and intelligent evil spirits, hell-bent on destroying as many human beings as possible.  “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).  The Apostle to the Gentiles wants to remind the Ephesians (and us) that a Christian, as their name suggests, does not defeat his flesh and blood enemy but instead wins him over.  When we forget this fact, more souls will be lost.  No doubt, the Devil’s plan was always self-defeating, but our goal must always be to limit the casualties.

In a gloss on St. Paul’s aforementioned spiritual combat plan, St. Thomas Aquinas paints a vivid word picture which helps us to better understand our plan of attack.   Using the analogy of a battle, he says that “evil men are horses, and the demons the riders; hence, if we kill the riders, the horses will be ours.”  We win souls by releasing them from the grips of the Devil.  This means using first and foremost spiritual weapons of the Mass, Our Lady, prayer, and fasting.  But it also means engaging the enemy head on by exposing him and his works for what they are.

The Historical Battleground

This may sound woefully abstract, until we look at a historical example that illustrates what this looks like in practice; an event whose effects are still felt today.  Not surprisingly, we will have to do some digging to uncover what actually happened because like much of Christian history, it has been overcome with the Smoke of Satan, obscuring the truth with outright lies and revisionist history.  The event that I am referring to is Hernan Cortes and the conquering of Mexico.

The wind of truth can sweep away the haze by posing a simple, almost common-sense question that challenges the conventional wisdom of the day: how could Cortes, commanding 500 men with 10 cannons, 16 horses, 13 muskets and 32 crossbows, possibly conquer an enemy who outnumbered them at least 100 to 1?  For sure, the Spaniards may have enjoyed a technological military advantage, but the Aztecs were no backward savages either.  Their advanced culture would have rivaled anything found in Europe at the time.  They had many fierce warriors skilled in hand to hand combat and had conquered most of Mexico through their military prowess.  In fact they may have been able to match the military skills of the Spaniards except for one thing—they refused to kill their vanquished enemy, insisting on carrying them off as prisoners instead.  This novel approach however was not really a military tactic but a religious one as we shall see in a moment.

The Aztecs may have had an advanced sanitation system, aqueducts and a very accurate calendar system, but they exceeded all cultures in previous history in one particular regard.  It was this regard that especially drew the interest of Cortes and his Spanish Conquistadors.  It was not their gold or their riches, but their blood lust.  They were unrivaled in their penchant for human sacrifice, sacrificing at least 50,000 men women and children every year and as many as 80,000 during a 4-day festival in 1487.

Although the Aztecs had a number of gods in their pantheon, it was their primary god Huitzilopochtli, who was called the Hummingbird Wizard or the Lover of Hearts and the Drinker of Blood who demanded the human sacrifice.  It was to sate the Hummingbird Wizard that the Aztecs would carry away their vanquished enemies in battle—offering them as human sacrifices to the Lover of Hearts and the Drinker of Blood.  But we should resist the temptation to think the Aztecs think that these were backward people caught up in superstitious practices of sacrificing human lives to imaginary idols.  This would ignore the reality and the power of the Devil.

By possessing a few people of influence (influence he was able to give them) and speaking to the people through them, he was able to enslave the entire population of Mexico.  Things would go well when his demands were met, instilling a sense of fear and loyalty in the average person.  When they failed to meet his demands, he would punish the people through a reign of terror.  Without the light of Christ to free the people of Mexico from this demonic stronghold, the people were trapped in a bloody snare.

One might be accused of “over-spiritualizing” history to view it this way, except for the truth that the Devil is the great copycat—mimicking the good that God does, to set himself up as a god.  For Huitzilopochtli was believed to have been born from the goddess Coatlicue who was an earth goddess who was depicted as a woman wearing a skirt of snakes and a necklace of hearts torn from victims.  She immaculately conceived her son when a feather fell on her apron.  When her son was born, he killed all her other children who became the stars and the moon.  The parallels to Revelation 12 are uncanny, especially given they had no contact with the Christian story.  Compound this with the fact that they viewed cannibalism as a religious ritual in which those who fed on the flesh were thought to be eating the flesh of the gods that Huitzilopochtli killed and we can see that it was a great Black Mass that Cortes encountered.

The story can only be fully understood by adding one important detail.  The Aztecs were awaiting the return of Quetzalcoatl, a god wholly unique among their pantheon because he was of light and wanted men to live and serve him, rejecting all forms of human sacrifice.  He was supposed to return in a year of 1-Reed which occurred every 52 years on the day of 9-Wind.  When Cortes arrived on Good Friday 1519, which was both a 1-Reed year and a 9-Wind day and was dressed in penitential black, the same color that Quetzalcoatl wore as a priest, the Aztecs, especially their leader Montezuma assumed it was Quetzalcoatl returning.  Cortes never said he was Quetzalcoatl, but he was vague enough to use the deception to his advantage.

Cortes was joined in his war against the Aztecs by many of the indigenous peoples in the region, who were only too eager to finally be freed from the yoke of the Hummingbird Wizard.  In order to placate the Aztecs they regularly had to supply them with victims for sacrifice.  When they refused, the Aztecs would go to war with them and carry away their warriors as sacrificial victims.  They were quite literally damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.  Cortes was hailed as a great savior of the native peoples, especially because he did so in a true Christian spirit, always with his eyes towards their conversion and the toppling of idols and human sacrifice to be replaced with churches and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Having been so recently victorious in freeing their homeland from the Muslims once and for all, the Spanish had a natural crusading spirit; a spirit that Cortes appealed to in rallying his men to fight for the freedom of the Mexicans, “The greater the King we seek, the wider the land, the more numerous the enemy, so much the greater will be our glory, for have you not heard it said, the more Moors, the greater the spoils?  Besides we are obligated to exult and increase our holy Catholic faith which we undertook to do like good Christians, uprooting idolatry, that great blasphemy to our God, abolishing sacrifices and the eating of human flesh, which is so contrary to nature and so common here.”  Surely, there can be no question as to Cortes’ primary motive in setting out to tear down the Aztecs’ altars of sacrifice and “conquer” the Aztecs.

What it Means for Us

One can’t help but wonder given the valor exercised by Cortes and his men why we are so quick to condemn him.  How many of the descendants of the indigenous people are alive today because of him?  The Aztecs were slowly but surely eliminating all the other peoples in Mexico so hungry had the Hummingbird Wizard become.  Surely any celebration of “Indigenous People’s Day” that is true to the name would be marked with gratitude for the Spanish.

The Conquest of Cortes and his companions serves as a great reminder that every cultural battle is a spiritual battle.  As soon as he arrived in Mexico City he set up icons of Our Lady and altars so that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass could be celebrated.  Everything that he did, was aimed first and foremost towards the conversion of the Mexican peoples.  He knew that a time would come when some of his fellow Spaniards would demand that the Mexican people be sacrificed in slavery to their idols—gold and that only through Baptism could this be avoided so that he always acted with a sense of urgency.  It was he and Christopher Columbus who called Our Lady down from Heaven into the New World by frequenting the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Spain because they knew the only way to squash the serpent was by becoming her heel.

Science and the Immaculate Conception

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One of the most common mistakes that Catholics make regards what is actually celebrated during this week’s feast of the Immaculate Conception.  The general consensus is that it is a feast marking the Immaculate Conception of Jesus.  They this feast with the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the miraculous manner in which the Word took flesh in the womb of the Immaculate Conception.  One thing they are not wrong about however is that, while the feast centers on the circumstances and consequences of Our Lady’s singular grace, the Feast, like all things pertaining to Our Lady really is about Christ.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 was called in response to the Monophysite heresy.  This heresy believed that the two natures of Christ were united such that they really became one, that is, the human was fully absorbed by the divine rendering only a single nature. Its backers proposed the metaphor that the divine nature was like an ocean and His human nature like a drop of water totally lost in the divinity.  This may seem to be unnecessary theological hairsplitting until we follow through to its logical conclusions.  First, with no true humanity, He would only appear to be human like some sort of vision or hologram.  Second, and more importantly, it meant that the humanity of Christ could not be a separate source of activity from the divinity.  He could not really suffer and die as a man and any appearance of those things would be only that, an appearance.

The Council, with the approval of St. Leo the Great, was quick to reject any trace of this and reaffirmed that Christ ss true God and true man, “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; ‘like us in all things but sin.’. He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God” (quoted in CCC 467).

The necessity of both powers of operation, human and divine, are necessary for Christ’s sacrifice to be efficacious.  Remove either power and atonement becomes a sham.  Mankind incurred a great debt, so great that only God could pay it.  Justice must be served for the moral order of the universe to be restored.  In mercy, God takes the debt as if it is His own.

Christology and the Immaculate Conception

What does all this have to do with the Immaculate Conception?  As true man, Christ was “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4).  That is self-evident, but it also means His mother was a true mother.  And like all mothers, she supplied to Him her flesh and it was her blood that coursed through His veins.  Put in a more scientific manner, it was her ovum that was fertilized and that ovum became the building block of the human nature that was assumed by the Person of the Son.  She was truly His mother and not merely a surrogate or a human incubator.

Furthermore, we are told that the Son of God come in the flesh is “like us in all things but sin” (Heb 4:15), that is, neither original nor actual sin touched Him.  The impossibility of actual sin we all intuitively grasp, but we may not think about the fact that the human nature He inherited must also be free from original sin and its effects.   Original sin is not sin committed, but “sin” inherited.  It is passed down from our parents.  Since Our Lord had only one human parent, and she was truly His Mother and no mere surrogate, the flesh that Mary passed down to Him had to be free from original sin and its effects.

We begin to now see the logic of the Immaculate Conception as an explanation for the purity of His blood offering and His freedom from Original Sin.  We have ruled out the possibility that by some miraculous intervention the ovum that was to become a part of Our Lord’s human nature was altered at the moment of Conception.  Mary would no longer be His true mother.  But we have not yet seen why Our Lady must be free from the stain of Original Sin from the moment of her conception.  Why could it not be that she was sanctified at some other time?

When Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, he commented on the fact that it was “wholly fitting that so wonderful a mother should be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness and so completely free from all taint of original sin.”  In other words, he thought it was not theologically necessary, only fitting.  But there may be a certain biological necessity that would help us to see why this dogma is true.

How Science Supports the Immaculate Conception

Thanks to advances in the field of human embryology, we know that the flesh of Our Lord (in Mary’s oocytes) was actually formed at her conception. Although He takes her flesh at the Annunciation, but the actual flesh He takes to Himself (in the oocyte that matured into an egg) was present in Mary at her beginning.  Just as she carried it around after His birth, Mary was, in a very real sense, carrying around the flesh of Our Lord from the moment of her conception.

For the more scientifically minded, we know that at the moment of conception, although obviously not fully formed, the human person is self-directed and thus needs no outside intervention to develop assuming the proper environment.  That means that even if oogenesis occurs at the meiosis I stage of development, everything that is to be used for the formation of those germ cells is already present.  We should make sure that we see development as a continuous process, begun in a definitive direction at conception, and not a series of independent stages.  The stages are simply mental constructs to help us understand the development itself.

Science then would help to confirm that the Immaculate Conception is necessary, even if theology can only describe its fittingness.  Science is a path not just to facts but to wonder, a sure path to the Truth.  The dust from the earth shattering landing of the Son of God has yet to settle, leaving traces of Him everywhere we look.  Science is no threat to our devotion but a means of increasing it.

This realization can also help to increase our devotion in another way.  According to Josephus, the great Jewish historian, the restoration of the Second Temple of Zerubbabel began in the year 19BC.  This is the same year that tradition also says Our Lady was born.  That is, at the same time that Herod set out to rebuild the Temple, God began construction on the true Temple.  The cornerstones of the Temple of Our Lord’s body were laid at the moment of Our Lady’s Conception, of that truth science confirms.

As Friday’s Feast Day comes around, we can be sure that there will be many Catholics confused as to who the Immaculate Conception refers to; thinking it refers to Jesus’ conception and not Our Lady’s.  But they are not entirely wrong—Our Lady, in whom the true Temple was made, carried around the building blocks with her from the moment of her own conception.

Our Lady, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!