Editorial
Mary intercedes for all her children
“To celebrate Mary is to celebrate the closeness and tenderness of God who meets his people, who does not leave us alone, who has given us a Mother who cares for us and accompanies us.” (Pope Francis)
There is a scene in Sir Water Scott’s popular novel Ivanhoe where an elderly Saxon woman who has been abused by her Norman conquerors advises a young Jewish girl to appeal to the Blessed Virgin Mary before being subjected to a similar fate. The old woman is being sarcastic. In her own bitterness, she doesn’t believe that Mary will be willing to help a “Jewess,” forgetting, of course, that the mother of our Lord was herself a young Jewish woman who suffered greatly at the hands of foreign conquerors.
Today we are rediscovering the special relationship between Mary and the Holy Spirit. St. Luke goes out of his way to tell us that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was present with the disciples praying and waiting for the Holy Spirit. Mary was present when the Church was born on Pentecost, and today she remains active, supportive and fully engaged both as the Mother of the Church and the model for how we are supposed to live as missionary disciples of her Son.
Why do Christians (and many people of other faiths) turn to Mary in moments of crisis? Mary is not a sorceress or a wonder-worker, and she is certainly not a goddess.
Mary is a woman, a strong woman, who in her earthly life was faced with every imaginable sorrow and injustice, but who persevered and never lost hope.
Mary is the first disciple of her son, Jesus. She followed in his footsteps, accompanying him in good times and in hard times, until she stood with him at the foot of the cross. In her suffering and her grief, Mary demonstrated beyond any doubt that she is a woman of faith, hope and self-sacrificing love. If anyone can help us deal with the problems we face today, it is Mary, the mother given to us by the crucified Christ.
In these turbulent times, Mary shows us how to be open to God’s will and to accept what we cannot understand. She, who is full of grace, responds: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). This stance is one of hope as well as wonder. It encourages us to trust that God has a plan for us and for our world in spite of all the chaos, darkness and despair we see all around us.
Mary’s response when confronted with any difficulty, great or small, was to trust in God’s providence. In spite of her fundamental orientation to contemplative prayer (“treasuring these things in her heart”), Mary is never indifferent or uncaring. In fact, frequently her response is to act without hesitation, trusting that the Holy Spirit will be responsible for ensuring that the outcome will conform to God’s will.
In his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), Pope Francis tells us that war is fratricide—brothers and sisters killing one another. War can never be an acceptable solution to our differences as individuals, communities or nations. Once we have accepted the fact that we are all members of God’s family—regardless of our racial, cultural, economic, social or political differences—we can never turn to violence as an appropriate way of resolving our differences no matter how serious they may be.
As Pope Francis says: For many Christians, this journey of fraternity also has a Mother, whose name is Mary. Having received this universal motherhood at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:26), she cares not only for Jesus but also for “the rest of her children” (Rev 12:17). In the power of the risen Lord, she wants to give birth to a new world, where all of us are brothers and sisters, where there is room for all those whom our societies discard, where justice and peace are resplendent. (“Fratelli Tutti,” #278)
Mary speaks of peace. She urges us, her children, to recognize that we are all members of one family and to build communities “where there is room for all” and “where justice and peace are resplendent.”
The young woman in Scott’s novel was saved by the intervention of a Christian knight, Ivanhoe, who implored the Holy Virgin to guide and assist him. No matter who we are, we are all Mary’s children.
—Daniel Conway