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12.
The Blessed Mother of Us All
ADAM IN
NAMING HIS WIFE "the mother of all living" did not expect us to believe
the two of them had it in them to beget the serpent that faced her, nor
the blossoms of paradise, nor any form of life other than the first
generation of children. He spoke in a burst of admiration, overstating
her motherhood while knowing it to be restricted to their humankind. But
the mother of the human race must accept a further restriction to her
title. The woman who induced Adam to bring the curse of death on
humanity, a spiritual as well as physical death, deserves to be called
only the natural mother of mankind.
The greater title, the spiritual mother of
mankind, belongs to another. The late Vatican Council explains why
she is the more important mother. "She conceived, brought forth, and
nourished Christ; she presented him to the Father in the temple, and was
united with him by compassion as he died on the Cross. In this singular
way she co-operated by her obedience, faith, hope and burning charity in
the work of the Savior in giving back supernatural life to souls.
Wherefore she is our mother in the order of grace."
The contrast between the two mothers has in
early theology been treated at length. In the classic example from St.
Augustine, a catchy frivolity in the seesaw of words bespeaks a confident
glee over the frustration of Satan who could not retain his victory after
all: "By a woman came death, by a woman life; through Eve destruction,
through Mary salvation. The former, when tempted, followed the tempter;
the latter, immaculate, gave birth to the Savior." Let Eva keep
her distinction of being the natural mother of us all, the early
expositors of doctrine would have her understand by jingle and pun that
the turnabout Ave was not spoken to her but greeted the more
genuine mother of the race.
They were not gloating over downfallen Eve.
They were exulting over her antitype for undoing the harm. They were
happy to think and to say that, after hundreds of repentant years, Eve
died a saint. But she could not have died a saint, nor could Adam have,
if Mary had not borne the Savior. The old liturgical chant to the Mother
of God, as popular now as in the sixth century, expressed the beautiful
truth the best: "Most illustrious of virgins, exalted above the stars, you
nursed at the breast the little One who created you. Through your loving
Child you give back to us what Eve had lost for us."
To say that Mary counteracted Eve to aid our
spiritual rebirth is but another way of saying she consented to be and
became the mother of our Redeemer. By his arrangement, and her
compliance, she is also ours. And just because the infidels around the
world do not realize they are her children along with the faithful, does
not undo the truth. It does not unmake her their mother. "As such,"
writes Pope Leo XIII, "Christ proclaimed her from the cross when he
entrusted to her care and love the whole of the race of men in the person
of his disciple John."
Pope Pius XI, upholding the same truth, does it
more impressively. He particularizes: "Since on Calvary all men were
commended to her maternal affection, she loves and cherishes no less those
who do not know of the Redemption of Jesus Christ than those who happily
enjoy the benefits of the Redemption." How many souls not of the Church
depart this life in a baptism of desire because of Mary's intercession, we
can have no idea. We do have the testimony of her seers, the inferences
of her special theologians, the verdict of tradition, that the mildest
stir of good will draws her attention. Whatever does that, God respects.
The joke is told of St. Peter, the keeper of
the keys, that as quickly as he would lock the great portals of heaven
against questionable intruder, the mother of his blessed Lord would open a
window. But Pope Pius XII wasn't jesting when in the course of an
allocution he said with a tender smile: "While Peter has the keys to
heaven, Mary holds the key to God's heart." The thief who went to heaven
from Calvary did not look a likely candidate until his final act of
faith. Beneath him stood one who was praying for him, suffering for him.
His change of heart and mind could have had, did indeed have, the aid of
her influence. She is the mediatrix of all grace.
No sinner is forced to receive grace. No
infidel given an urge toward the Faith must follow it. The choice remains
his. What his spiritual mother does for him does not coerce his will.
Her influence goes only as far as divine justice allows.
Souls who do not resist but cultivate her
influence are accordingly the best off. God bestows his graces in the
measure his wisdom sees fit, but since his wisdom has appointed Mary their
dispenser, devotion to her invites them. The saints, the wealthiest
recipients, all loved her. As Pope Pius XI explains, the supply reaches
an abundance from "Mary, our advocate and mediatrix, when motherly
affection on the one hand finds response in filial devotion on the
other." It is an exchange mutually willed. The saints, desiring their
graces, praying for their graces, living worthy of their graces, get
them. They afford their heavenly mother the opportunities within the
demands of justice to oblige. And she does.
St. Leonard of Port Maurice once voiced his
gratitude in an anecdote. He told it in the pulpit (and probably out of
it as well). He compared himself to one of those shrines in which the
Madonna works miracles for her clients, who in turn bring in their votive
offerings to pin them on the wall. Always the donation has affixed to it
a note. Always the note carries the same explanation, if not exactly the
same wording, This is for a favor received from Mary. "Just so,"
comes the application, "not a benefit do I enjoy but what I could honestly
write on it. A grace to Leonard from Mary."
The universal mother of the race, given so many
opportunities by the faithful to bestow her bounties on them, may in that
sense be said to mother them above all the others. She has therefore been
called "mother of the faithful" by Pope Pius VI, "mother of all
Christians" by Pope Leo XIII, "mother of the members of Christ" by Pope
Pius X, whose very phrase was repeated by Pope Pius XII in an encyclical
on the Mystical Body. They were but using variants of the same title,
really. And Pope Paul VI had a variant of his own to add to theirs. He
availed himself of the most impressive setting on earth, that of an
ecumenical council, in which to use it. He timed his delay perfectly,
waiting till the close of the third session in St. Peter's Basilica, where
tapestries of the Madonna had been hung alongside the great altar, before
proclaiming her matrem ecclesiae, Mother of the Church. The happy
primate drew the approval of a standing ovation from the vast assemblage.
Not all in the assembly, while they listened
reverently, bore an allegiance to the Holy See. The Protestants were
there as representative observers who had been invited in the hope of an
eventual reunion of "divided Christians." The council welcomes them "as
brothers, with respect and affection. For men," its Decree on
Ecumenism proceeded to explain, "who believe in Christ and have been
truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this
communion is imperfect." Papal encyclicals had been saying as much for a
long time. But the Second Vatican Council said more.
The stirring finale to its Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church, which Pope Paul signed at St. Peter's on
November 21, 1964, is not content with the reunion of only Christians. It
appeals to the "Mother of God and Mother of men" to use her intercessory
power "until all families of people, whether they are honored with the
title of Christian or whether they still do not know the Savior, may be
happily gathered together in peace and harmony into one people of God, for
the glory of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity." The plea clearly
expresses the mind of the Church that her mother, who is particularly fond
of her members, nevertheless has as many children on earth as there are
people there. That blessed motherhood covers the world.
What the council was really praying for, Our
Lady had promised at Fatima: the eventual triumph of her immaculate heart
over the discordant forces of evil. St. Louis de Montfort, two centuries
before, predicted the same triumph. His True Devotion to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, regretful of the emerging atheism of his day, foresaw its
gradual rise in power until it had subjugated every national government to
dominate the world unmolested—and then be overthrown. It cannot achieve
the final victory. It is doomed. The Mother of God, the mediatrix of his
mercy, when an adequate percentage of the faithful intensify their
devotions and a corresponding number of sinners repent, will hasten the
recovery of sanity, while St. Michael and his angels rout the legions of
hell and their unrepentant agents on earth. The already malignant
depravity of the present, with its ridicule of all decent restraint and
the resulting subhuman atrocities, encourages the hope that when it has
reached its vilest the distraught by the thousands will turn away from it
to seek the true Source of order, the rejected Savior. When that return
to God comes after whatever chastisement, it is a bright certainty of
faith that Our Lady of Grace will be exerting her influence over the mass
conversions. The misinformed who think otherwise are strangers to their
own mother.
That the triumph over Satan has not long since
taken place, with the resultant peace, can only be ascribed to the human
refusal to obey the heavenly warnings to repent of sin, the cause of the
turmoil. Our Lady of Fatima toward the close of the First World War
announced that, unless a general repentance would follow, another and
worse war would break out. Repentance did not come. The Second World War
did. It depended on the human will. She who always speaks of sinners
with a mother's tenderness yearns for the necessary quota of sacrifice and
prayer to appease the divine Justice so that she may act.
It is a shame upon this generation, not to say
a bitter joke on it, that an insufficient quota have shown the initiative
to do penance, pray the rosary, observe the first Saturdays, so as to meet
the divine conditions for peace, while the countless millions sit down
dutifully before their TV sets to bemoan the incessant reports of its
absence. An act of contrition goes further toward removing the evils of
the day than hurling invectives at the responsible ministers of state.
Whoever commits sin shares the responsibility; whoever prays becomes a
benefactor to society; so that, if one must exclude the other, it were
better to put away the protest banner and get out the rosary. This is the
message inherent in the maternal admonitions from La Salette, Lourdes,
Fatima.
Consider for an edifying moment what happened
in countries where the people en masse did get out their rosaries. One
such country once suffered a Russian occupation. It was Austria.
Prospects looked dark. Commentators were confident that her natives were
about to be "liberated" of their freedom. But a hard core of the faithful
chose neither to panic nor passively to give up hope. They held on to it,
knowing where to turn for aid. Over a tenth of the total population
signed pledges to pray the daily rosary. They made good their promise.
And it may be assumed that, in union with those who had so promised, there
were thousands who without signing any pledges recited the familiar
decades of the Hail Mary with the same intent. The effort paid
off. On May 13, 1955, a pertinent date, the anniversary of Our Lady's
first apparition at Fatima, the Soviet troops were all withdrawn from the
country to leave it altogether "unliberated." The news media elsewhere
than in the USSR, because of the strategic centrality of Austria in
Europe, expressed surprise. But Theresa Neumann, the clairvoyant
stigmatist, did not share their surprise. She understood. She had the
answer: "It was the many rosaries of the Austrians that saved them from
Soviet domination."
That was 1955. In Holy Week of 1964 Brazil
duplicated the victory of the Austrians, again without bloodshed, except
for a stray shooting here or there. President Joao Goulart, following the
example of Castro in Cuba, had been engineering the country through a
political drift to Communism. In early March his demands for "an agrarian
reform," if not resisted, would transform Brazil into another Soviet
policy state. The plot failed. A campaign of prayer overpowered it.
Father Patrick Peyton had been conducting a
rosary crusade, which swept the country. Rallies crowded the public
squares, processions marched the streets, and when people were not praying
their beads during these demonstrations of faith they were singing hymns
or listening to homilies in honor of Christ and his mother.
Providentially, just at the time President Goulart was closing out the
final stage of preparation for the Soviet takeover, which would have
forced the country into an atheist slavery, the religious movement gained
full momentum. It shed no blood. It simply kept praying and acted on the
conviction that Brazil belonged to the Brazilians.
Groups gathered before or even surrounded the
buildings in which the Communists held their meetings, and they prayed the
rosary aloud. Pedestrians would stop to join them until there were
hundreds to a unit, the women usually outnumbering the men but not the
children. They did not tire. Upon completing the decades, they would
break into hymns at the top of their voices as if to make sure heaven
heard as well as the schemers indoors. This ingenious tit for tat during
those critical weeks in March embarrassed when it did not discourage the
conspiratorial conclaves. Finally, his patience worn thin, the politico
who strove to be another Castro addressed the nation to berate such dogged
piety and in the process demeaned the rosary as a silly and worthless
weapon in the superior conflicts of the day.
That blew the lid off the seething cauldron.
The people could take no more. Cardinal Camera of Rio de Janeiro
broadcast to the country his warning of the imminent threat. The army did
not require the warning. An alert regiment acted promptly and on March 26
overthrew the incipient dictatorship, captured Goulart, and saved Brazil
in the nick of time from the fate of Lithuania, Poland, East Berlin,
Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, et aliorum plurimorum. If the coup
had delayed but two more days, it would have come too late. Seized
documents reveal beyond a doubt, and to the humiliation of the toppled
regime, that the Communist threat had fixed March 28 as the date of
conquest.
Let it be added to her credit that Brazil,
already in the 1940's, had resisted the atheist trend when the charter for
the UN was being drafted in San Francisco. Her delegates proposed the
inclusion of the dictum, "all men are created equal," in the document on
The Rights of Men. The USSR refused that. The United States,
sorry to say, backed the refusal. A near unanimity of nations,
represented there, voted down the proposition. There was to be no
acknowledgment of the Supreme Being. Instead of the truth, the final
wording carried the fallacy that "all men are born equal."
They observably are not. Some are born into
poverty, others into wealth; some into a congenial environment, others
into a hostile; babies do not have in common the same hereditary traits,
the same degree of health, the same looks; and so on interminably, as even
the UN must know. Their equality, faith knows, lies in all of them having
been created immortal by Almighty God. None of them can die out of
existence. None of them, for all the inequalities of birth, will receive
an unjust eternity from Infinite Justice.
The UN, basing its charter on the great denial,
would not profess the Supreme Being and Source of all other being. No
invocation to him opened the proceedings. Every mention of him it
defeated. It acted consistently. It shamelessly refused membership to
certain nations who had as much right to be included as the Soviet Union
but whose delegates would have sided with Brazil. Keep them out! They
did not fit the plans. They might jeopardize the overbalance of power.
The atheist conspiracy dominated the travesty.
If the prevalent irreligion of the day has the
current of a strong river, there remain here and there and anywhere along
its steady flow eddies of resistance turning back from it. These eddies,
when Russia is converted and peace restored, will become the trend of the
future as the stream reverses its course to go with the eddies. The
turnabout, moving against the evil pull of gravity inherent in human
nature since original sin, will nonetheless move with security. The
nations that survive the chastisements of God will all convert to him,
follow the direction of his grace. Their return to the Prince of peace,
the rejected Savior, has been reliably foretold. Their spiritual mother
did not predict a lie at Fatima.
In an ardor of hope her present clients should
look forward to triumph and her reluctant children the world over will
have learnt from her a love of humanity so strong, so overflowing from
their inexhaustible love for God, that hatred and the discords of hatred
will have vanished from the earth. That a severe vengeance would first
have to befall the sinful race to condition it for the noble change, St.
John Bosco saw in vision, St. Louis Marie de Montfort without benefit of
vision predicted, and the bitter lessons of the Old Testament suggest.
Unless mankind repents, which more than half a century later it has not
done and gives no indication of doing, the message of Fatima foretells the
same. The decline of morals from bad to worse until perversities are
respected and subhuman atrocities condoned, and the widespread exchange of
God's truths for the fallacies of modernism, cry to heaven for his holy
vengeance. Come in what form it may, it will come as an act of mercy to
the amenable, an act of justice to the obdurate, but a benediction of
sheer relief to the virtuous.
Meanwhile, even in countries subject to atheist
domination, the steadfast of faith have all the better of it. They have
the incomparable satisfaction of the apostles who "left the presence of
the council rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for the
name" (Acts 5:41). The dishonor inflicted upon the faithful because of
their association with the Christ of their joy deepens their joy and
endears them the more to his mother—and theirs.
Cherishing them, Mary yet keeps a watchful eye
on her faithless children. Refuge of sinners, if she does not win them
before, she exerts her solicitude to the full at their hour of death—and
succeeds how often the world cannot know. Any chaplain, who has long
administered the last rites to penitents still conscious, is prepared to
believe that many a criminal or hitherto misguided infidel has followed
the Good Thief to heaven without receiving the latter's publicity. A
divine fascination overcomes the dying who open their souls to it. And
the mater dolorosa of Mount Calvary is in every blessed instance
the contributor of the grace.
At La Salette she wept. Not that in her
glorification she can actually suffer. But mystically she does, as Christ
does in the daily Sacrifice of the Mass, for sinners, St. John so pictured
her, in travail. Or rather the picture presented itself to him: "A woman
clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a
crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs
of birth, in anguish for delivery" (Rev. 12:1-2). Now the birth in
question cannot be that of her divine Son, which caused the virgin mother
none of the pains of parturition. No, the passage refers to the efforts
which this mother of the whole human race exerts for the salvation of
every separate person of it still on earth.
Exegetes, who have identified the woman of the
text with the Church, extend the identity to Mary. The liturgy of the
Church emphatically does, bringing it into the Mass for the feast of the
Assumption. And Pope St. Pius X outdoes even Cardinal Newman in the
clarity of his interpretation: "John saw the most holy Mother of God
already in eternal happiness, yet travailing in a mysterious childbirth.
What birth was it? Surely it was the birth of us who, still in exile, are
yet to be generated to the perfect charity of God, and to eternal
happiness. And the birth pains show the love and desire with which the
Virgin from heaven above watches over us, and strives with unwearying
prayer to bring about the completion of the elect."
The souls who have chosen not to be of the
elect cannot in hell blame her for their misery. She did all a mother
could do for them. She did not give up on them for as long as they lived
on earth. They spurned the bounties of her love. Rejecting their Savior,
they disowned the coredemptive mother he shared with them.
When Jesus instructed his followers to address
his Father in heaven "Our Father" he was acknowledging them as his adopted
brothers and sisters, which by a dictate of logic also makes his mother
theirs. It is all one great family in the order of grace. Nor does this
spiritual relationship detract from the respect proper to mothers in the
natural order. History proves the exact contrary. John Ruskin was but
pronouncing a truism when he said that wherever the spirit of Christianity
took hold, "the sanctity of womanhood worshipped in the Madonna, and the
sanctity of childhood in unity with that of Christ, became the light of
every honest hearth, and the joy of every pure and chastened soul." Only
insofar as that spirit diminishes in the world will respect for its
mothers diminish. They are a reminder of the Madonna at the crib,
receiving from her a glamour that enhances, and when the reminder goes the
respect wanes.
The mother of mankind will love us into heaven
if we let her. She needs our consent. We who know her would be fools not
to concede, not to consecrate ourselves to her maternal care, not to offer
our prayers and good works to God through her, his favorite creature. For
the magnetic appeal of her presentation will enrich a hundred times beyond
their own merit the gifts. It becomes a package of so much from her and
so little of ours. The combination ensures a grateful acceptance. It's a
bargain. |