Other books

from Sophia Institute Press

by John A. Kane:

How to Make a Good Confession

Transforming Your Life

Through the Eucharist

John A. Kane
Help of All Christians
Editor's note: The biblical references in the following pages are based on
the Douay-Rheims edition of the Old and New Testaments. Where
applicable, quotations have been cross-referenced with the differing names
and numeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following
symbol:
Foreword • xiii

Chapter One

Mary is our heavenly mother • 3

Chapter Two

Mary is full of grace • 13

Chapter Three

Mary is fully devoted to God • 19

Chapter Four

Mary shows us the rewards of humility • 25

Chapter Five

Mary helps us to walk by the light of divine faith • 31

Chapter Six

Mary teaches us to turn away from pride - 37

Chapter Seven

Mary's gifts draw her closer to God • 43

Chapter Eight

Mary shows us that nothing is impossible with God • 49

Chapter Nine

Mary helps us accept the difficulties that come with our vocation • 55

Chapter Ten

Mary is an example of contemplation - 61

Chapter Eleven

Mary teaches us how to attain union with God - 67

Chapter Twelve

Mary brings Christ to others • 73

Chapter Thirteen

Mary shows the power of strong faith • 79

Chapter Fourteen

Mary offers God perfect praise - 85

Chapter Fifteen

Mary is an example of charity toward others - 91

Chapter Sixteen

Mary shows us how to respond when others misunderstand us • 97

Chapter Seventeen

Mary encourages us to be patient in suffering • 101

Chapter Eighteen

Mary teaches us to serve God in our everyday circumstances - 107

Chapter Nineteen

Mary loves God for His own sake - 113

Chapter Twenty

Mary teaches us detachment • 119

Chapter Twenty-One

Mary strengthens us to embrace the Cross • 127

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mary encourages us to give ourselves to God • 133

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mary shows how God illumines and guides our soul • 139
Chapter Twenty-Four

Mary proves that God's promises are trustworthy • 145

Chapter Twenty-Five

Mary seeks glory for God alone • 151

Chapter Twenty-Six

Mary teaches us to rely on God's Providence • 157

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Mary shows us how to find Christ • 163

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Mary teaches us to practice humility in commanding and in obeying • 171

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Mary teaches us to offer our daily work to God • 177

Chapter Thirty

Mary leads us to pattern our life on Christ's • 183

Chapter Thirty-One

Mary intercedes for us • 189

Chapter Thirty-Two
Mary conforms her will to God's will • 195

Chapter Thirty-Three

Mary encourages us to accept God's will even amid suffering • 201

Chapter Thirty-Four

Mary is Christ's gift to us • 207

Chapter Thirty-Five

Mary cares for our soul • 213

Chapter Thirty-Six

Mary teaches us to die to self • 219

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Mary leads us to long for eternal union with Christ - 225

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Mary teaches us to let the Holy Spirit pray within us • 231

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Mary encourages us to strive to advance in perfection • 237

Chapter Forty
Mary is exalted in Heaven • 243

Biographical note

John A. Kane - 249

The claim of our Blessed Lady to an essential place in the universal religion
is unquestionable, inalienable. The consciousness of that fact was curiously
manifested when, in 1865, Catholic missionaries entered Nagasaki, Japan,
where no priest had been for more than two hundred years. A little group of
hereditary Christians who lived there asked three questions of the
newcomers, to determine whether or not they were really priests of that
same ancient Faith which the edict of the shogun had suppressed in 1614:
Did they obey the Bishop of Rome? Did they observe celibacy? Did they
venerate the Mother of God? The sure instinct of Catholic faith thus hit
upon the three central points of dogma, Catholic discipline, and Catholic
devotion.

It would be dishonest for Catholics to deny the superficial differences in

the sentiments with which Christians of all ages have exercised the right to
look upon Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as their mother also. Likewise, it
would be unpardonable for Protestants to ignore the substantial identity of
those sentiments. In so exercising that right, they are but claiming the
legacy bequeathed to them on Calvary, when St. John stood there - a sort of
Adam - as our representative and heard the words "Behold thy mother." To
be sure, from race to race, from age to age, from man to man, Catholic
devotion does make its way along an amazing variety of approaches, but it
remains ever the same in essential faith and love and loyalty. The shining of
the same light is reflected in the all but tacit assumptions of the Gospel, in
the rich rhetoric of the early Fathers, in the prose and poetry of Asiatic and
European, Greek and Latin, Italian and Celt and Saxon.

Here in this book, another voice is lifted up. The author has joined that
long procession which includes Ephraim and Chrysostom, Ambrose,
Augustine and Jerome, Bernard and Thomas, Alphonsus and Newman and
Faber and Claudel. Again we hear that sonorous, never-ending chant which
marvelously - like the apostolic sermon on the first Pentecost - is
understood by every people and tribe and nation and tongue.' Here, in
America in our day, the soul of a priest is focused in meditation on the
Mother of Jesus - her relationship to God, her relationship to us. And the
result of his thinking, offered in this book, is simple and reverent enough to
be fittingly offered to her whom all generations call blessed. It is solid and
balanced and luminous enough to support, reassure, and enlighten
thousands of her children.

Joseph McSorley, C.S.P.

The end of all devotion is Christ. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning
and the end."' Christ is the cornerstone of our salvation, for "this is eternal
life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
Thou bast sent."' "There is no other name under Heaven given to men,
whereby we must be saved."'

If Christ is not the rock upon which rests the spiritual edifice of our
sanctification, then the edifice is doomed, and great will be the fall thereof.
But if the edifice is founded upon Christ, then the winds of the tempter may
blow and the rains of his temptations may fall and the floods of passion
may rise and beat upon that house, and it will not fall, because it is founded
upon a rock.'

We must be one with Christ according to His words: "Abide in me, and I
in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine,
so neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you the branches.
He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for
without me you can do nothing. If anyone abide not in me, he shall be cast
forth as a branch and shall wither; and they shall gather him up and cast him
into the fire, and he burneth.i6 We must be one with Christ because, Christ
being our Mediator with His eternal Father, it is only "by Him and in Him
and through Him that we can render all honor and glory" to the Father in
the unity of the Holy Spirit. It is only through Christ that we can be holy
ourselves and radiate holiness around us.
 Now, devotion to Mary is devotion to Christ, because Mary has given us
Christ. The humble Virgin was chosen by the eternal Father to shed upon a
sinful world, without lesion to her glorious virginity, its eternal light: Jesus
Christ, our Lord, the Savior of men.

But union with God was essential in order for Mary to accomplish this,
the most wondrous work ever given to a mortal to perform. And Mary was
most intimately united with God, for the angelic ambassador said to her,
"Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women."'
Mary's union with God has been most tersely and accurately expressed by a
child of genius. "Mary's fullness of grace," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "was
so great that it brought her to a most intimate union with the Author of
grace; that this fitted her to receive into her holy womb the One who
contained all graces; and that thus, in conceiving Him, she became, in some
sort, the source of that grace which He was to pour forth over all mankind,
and so concurred in giving the human race its Deliverer."'

Mary's intimate union with her divine Son is the reason for her power
with Him. "He that shall find me shall find life, and shall have salvation
from the Lord."') "For God," says St. Bernard,10 "who has given us His Son
through Mary, has willed that we should obtain the graces He has merited
for us by the intercession of Mary."

God, all-powerful though He is, could not bestow upon a creature a

degree of honor higher than that conferred on His mother. He could not
make her divine by nature, but He has, through the grace that He so freely
lavished on her in virtue of the divine maternity, made her inseparable from
Him in the salvation of souls. The heart of Christ and the heart of Mary beat
in unison. When we love and honor the mother, we must necessarily love
and honor the Son. The closer the union with Mary, the more intimate the
association with Christ. He who will not have Mary for his mother, cannot
have Christ for his Brother. The indissoluble union of Jesus and Mary
established by the eternal Father and the Holy Spirit is the best proof of
Mary's love for Christ and, consequently, for souls redeemed by the blood
of Christ. Mary loves Christ because she is His mother, and she loves us
because she is our mother. From the revelations of our Lord to St. Ger
trude," Christ is Mary's firstborn according to the flesh, and we are her
second-born according to the spirit. Through the oblation of her divine Son
on Calvary, Mary, with a sorrow "great as the sea," ` brought us forth to a
life of grace and thus became our spiritual mother.

Mary, our spiritual mother, heard the dying legacy of Jesus Christ:
"Woman, behold thy son." After that, He said to the disciple John, "Behold
thy mother.""

In His death agony, the infinite Lover of immortal souls ratified on

Calvary the oblation that Mary makes for them, by giving them His mother
to be their mother; for since all Christians form one body with Christ and
are morally one person with Christ, St. John represented them on the mount
of crucifixion.
 Mary's love for us is the sum and soul of her powerful intercession for us
with Christ. Hence, absolute trust in Mary's help is a necessary part of the
virtue of hope. "I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge,
and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth; in me is all
hope of life and of virtue."" The hope of grace from God, the source of
grace, however, will yield fruit and redound to our spiritual welfare only
through our free cooperation. And the true Christian does all he can so that
grace may benefit him.

But how high is the standard, how lofty the ideal, that is set for the true
Christian! Never does human nature, with its myriad frailties, measure up to
the standard; never does it realize the ideal. Impelled by the law of his own
impotence, man can only soar upward on the wings of constant endeavor.
Unaided, he can accomplish little; he is a social being, and since he lives,
moves, and fulfills his destiny only in society, he is therefore dependent
upon his neighbor. In the natural order, then, mutual assistance is a
necessary consequence of man's mutual dependence, and in the supernatural
order, it accords perfectly with Christian hope for one member of Christ's
Mystical Body, the Church, to intercede for another.

The unbeliever sits in defiant judgment upon this truth and boldly
proclaims, with all the assertiveness of error, that Catholics offer the Virgin
Mother of God and the other saints divine worship. If praying to Mary and
the other saints is identical with divine worship, the unbeliever must, by the
force of his own false premises, arrive at a decidedly erroneous conclusion.
The acceptance of such premises would fill the world with idolaters: when I
solicit the aid of my neighbor, or when I beg his intercession for me, I am
an idolater in the strict sense of the term.

This false reasoning ramifies in many directions, making devastating

inroads upon man's nature as a social being and upon the domain of faith;
for to state that men do not intercede for one another is to deny a very
obvious fact of experience - to proclaim that man is not a social being. Such
reasoning is, moreover, rebellion against Christ, the infallible Truth, who
with His own lips taught us this mutual intercession. Such reasoning
falsifies not only the Our Father, but also the admonition of the apostle:
"Pray one for another, that you may be saved";'' and therefore it is
destructive of the unity of Christ's divine organism, since it divorces the
Church Militant from the Church Triumphant in Heaven and the Church
Suffering in Purgatory.16 It is wrong to suppose that our brethren who have
fallen asleep in the Lord do not intercede for us so that we, too, may obtain
the incorruptible crown, because the beatitude of the saints consists in the
possession of God, and therefore in loving all that God loves.

How consoling, how comforting, is this doctrine taught by the infallibly

constituted exponent of truth, the Church - this doctrine that links earth with
Heaven! It is inspiring to know that we have Christ, our elder Brother,
"always living to make intercession for us"" and the saints whose names we
bear, and Mary, the Queen of Saints, ever pleading for us before the throne
of mercy in God's eternal kingdom. And oh, the power of Mary's
intercession - Mary, loved by the Father as the mother of His Son, loved by
the Son as His own mother, and loved by the Holy Spirit as His most pure
spouse! "He that shall find me shall find life, and shall have salvation from
the Lord."

Human eloquence, poetry, and art all fail to describe Mary's power, the
true genesis of which is her great love for us. That love we can never
question when we consider the sacrifices that she made, in union with her
divine Son, for our salvation. In our redemption, according to the eternal
plans of an all-merciful God, Mary was morally indispensable. Fatal, then,
is the delusion that we can progress spiritually without the help of our
mother.

In the natural order, there is something abnormal in the physical

development of a child who loses his mother in his earliest and tenderest
years. The same truth holds in the supernatural order. Without our spiritual
mother's unfailing love and fostering care from our very birth, progress in
virtue is impossible. But to establish our claim to Mary's help, we must
imitate her virtues, especially her humility, her purity, and her love of God.

The practice of these virtues will shelter us under the protecting folds of
her maternal mantle. With Mary's aid, we will be ever on our guard against
the treacherous cunning of all the enemies of our soul. We will meet their
full assaults with intrepid determination and their hostile charges with
fearless courage. We will be devoted to the service of God.
It is an article of Faith that the Blessed Virgin, eternally predestined to be
the Mother of Christ, was from the first instant of her conception preserved
free from the guilt of Original Sin. This singular privilege is called her
Immaculate Conception.

"It was meet," says St. Irenaeus,18 "that the God of all purity should
spring from the greatest purity, from the most pure bosom."

"Such a privilege," St. Anselm19 tells us, "was suitable to her dignity. It
was possible for God to confer it; hence He conferred it." So also does
Origen20 say, "She was not contaminated by the breath of the serpent." And
finally, St. John Damascene' declares, "To her the serpent had no

Alone of all the children of Adam, Mary was gifted with the fullness of
sanctifying grace, which made her the object of a distinct, transcendent love
on the part of the Most High. We may indeed imagine the beatified hosts
exclaiming, upon beholding her incomparable holiness, "Who is she that
cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun,
terrible as an army set in array?"" She had the use of reason, and began to
advance to the most sublime perfection, from the very moment her body
and soul were united. Immeasurably beyond the power of the human mind
to conceive - much less understand - are the workings of divine
Omnipotence to render Mary a fitting habitation for the Redeemer of the
world.
 With no tendency to evil - with, on the contrary, a most marked
propensity to the highest virtue - she glorified God more than all His other
creatures did. Never did she yield to the least imperfection, let alone sin. At
the very instant of her conception, her intellect was illumined with the light
of God, and her will was wholly conformed to the divine will. She was
without ignorance and concupiscence, the fountainheads from which flow
the sin and suffering of men. Ever subjecting them to the commands of
reason and the influence of grace, she maintained her empire over her mind
and heart, regulating her thoughts, desires, and deeds by the wondrous
actual graces of which she was the loving recipient. She had no conflict
with vice from within or from without. Her extreme hatred and horror of sin
was the measure of her supreme love of virtue. Singular purity of intention,
by which she surrendered herself entirely to God in the minutest details of
her life, and absolute forgetfulness of herself, by which she was most
intimately united with God - that was the impregnable foundation of Mary's
sanctity.

Is it possible to imitate such sanctity? We must imitate Christ, the God of

infinite sanctity, who became man not only to redeem us, but also to
propose Himself as a model for our imitation. The fact that we are frail
mortals does not excuse us from failing to copy His example. Now, if the
Gospel enjoins upon us the imitation of Christ, we can by no means
dispense ourselves from striving after the perfection of Mary.

But our imitation of both Jesus and Mary depends upon and is measured
by our response to the amount of grace that God sees fit to give us. We must
always bear in mind that the holiness of the Blessed Virgin was not the
result of the marvelous gratuitous privilege of her Immaculate Conception
nor of the inestimable degree of sanctifying grace that God had conferred
on her. Mary's surpassing sanctity flowed from the permanent dedication of
herself to God at the moment of reason and her constant correspondence
with actual grace thereafter.

We, too, can, however imperfectly, consecrate ourselves irrevocably to

the service of God by steadfast fidelity to the degree of grace that He
condescends to bestow upon us. And should we have the misfortune of
revoking this, our free oblation of ourselves to our Lord and Master, we can
- for God is love - regain by contrition what we have lost by sin. God
demands of us only a reasonable service. He does not reap where He has
not sown. He asks us only to be generous with Him by turning to good
account the graces that He ever lavishes on us, by humbling ourselves at the
sight of our myriad sins and multiple imperfections, and by rising promptly
when we fall, with renewed confidence in His mercy.

Every being acts according to his nature. God, because He is perfect,

could propose only perfect models for our imitation. But although perfect,
they are nevertheless suitable for our imitation. Were not grace always at
our disposal, we should be able to accuse God of injustice for asking us to
do what human nature without divine help could never accomplish. But
aided from on high, especially by Mary, who, of all the saints (since she is
their queen), has the most influence with her divine Son, we shall, as true
children of our heavenly mother, grow daily into her likeness.
On November 21, the Church celebrates the feast of the Presentation of the
Blessed Virgin in the Temple. This feast is entirely different from the feast
of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, when Mary submitted to the law
of the purification.'

From her earliest days, the Mother of God dedicated herself to His love
and service. She was led by divine inspiration to His house; her dispositions
corresponded to the degree of grace that was hers and merited for her an
increase of grace prolific of her marvelous progress in the science of the
saints. In silence and solitude, and with her entire preoccupation with her
God, which the ceremonies of the Temple greatly facilitated, she gradually
prepared herself for her sublime dignity. Although the designs of God were
unknown to her, she nevertheless attuned the ears of her soul to catch the
faintest whisper of His voice, and strove, by deepening her appreciation of
her own nothingness and by absolute and decisive detachment from the
world, for the closest possible union with Him.

In silence and obscurity, the voice of God is most articulate. True piety
shuns publicity. Obedient to Christ's command - "So let your light shine
before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who
is in Heaven"24 - the deeply religious soul seeks to be known only when
the glory of God is at stake. Great souls who live for God alone are usually
silent and solitary even in the midst of the madding crowd's ignoble strife.
They are in the world, but not of the world. Fully dedicated to the service of
God, they are dead to the world and dead to themselves.

So we can picture Mary alone with her God, a stranger to all others, even
to those who dwelt with her in the enclosure of the Temple. Angelically
modest and absorbingly recollected, rapt in silent prayer with God, who was
the be-all and the end-all of her life, and therefore utterly forgetful of
herself, she made no show of her interior ineffable sanctity as she followed,
without singularity and with rare devotion and exactitude, the life led in
common by the virgins of God's house. Although deeply earnest about her
duties and wholly intent on their performance, she gave her companions no
occasion to divine the marvelous fullness of grace with which God had
dowered her virginal soul. But although she concealed her unique and truly
remarkable spiritual gifts, the odor of virtue that she diffused around her
was all the more redolent.

Words are, however, impotent to describe the heavenly beauty that

adorned her finely sensitive soul as she was being prepared by the eternal
Father to be the mother of His divine Son and the spouse of His Holy Spirit.
Wisdom was building itself a house;" the omnipotence of God was
constructing a living temple for the Savior of mankind.

The soul of man has been formed and fashioned by God to be His
temple. "You are the temple of the living God; as God saith: I will dwell in
them.i26 Are we the temple of the living God? Not if our souls are
enamored of "the earth and the fullness thereof. ,21 If our souls enthrone an
idol - be that idol pride, avarice, lust, or love of the good things of the world
- far from being the temple of the living God, they are the sinful abode of
the demons of Hell. "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the
world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For
all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the
concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.... The world passeth away
and the concupiscence thereof, but he that doth the will of God abideth
forever."28

No matter what our calling, reason itself, not to mention revelation,

dictates the undivided consecration of ourselves to the love and service of
God. We cannot follow simultaneously principles that are mutually
exclusive and hence essentially contradictory. What reason teaches, Christ
enforces when He states very explicitly, "No man can serve two masters.
For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will sustain the one
and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."29 "Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and
with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. ,31
"The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou

The love of God above all things, inspired by the conscious recognition
of His infinite greatness and our utter nothingness, and energized by our
complete, unequivocal, permanent detachment from the world and its
unsatisfactory pleasures, will make our souls, as it made the soul of Mary,
the temple of the living God. "If anyone love me, he will keep my word.
And my Father will love him, and we will come to him and will make our
abode with him."" To be known to God and unknown to men, to possess
God and to be forgotten by creatures - this, after the example of Mary,
should be the consuming yearning of our souls. God will dwell in us, and
we will live to Him alone only through persevering prayer and habitual
recollection, which, making God the beginning and the end of our thoughts,
words, and actions, will direct our entire lives to His greater honor and
glory.
How old the Blessed Mother was when she vowed her virginity to God, we
do not know. We do know that her consecration was inspired by the Holy
Spirit and was preceded by a perfect prevision of its consequences.

Marriage and motherhood were the cherished ideals of every Jewish

maiden. Even the daughters of the tribe of Levi, dedicated to the service of
the priests or indeed of the high priest, all married without exception,
because Jewish women, with their intense love for maternity, reprobated
sterility. Thus was Mary's vow truly unique, and it branded her with a kind
of stigma, opposing as it did the honored traditions of the Jews.

As the Blessed Virgin was full of grace and thereby absolutely free from
the sting of the flesh, her vow accorded completely with her natural desires,
and consequently the sacrifices associated with it are in no way to be
measured by the voluntary surrender of the joys of married life. Mary's
body was on earth, but her soul was in Heaven. The Lord being her
portion,33 she renounced all else - honors, dignities, the pleasures and
rewards of marriage - and joyously chose the life of a virgin; she chose, that
is, to be entirely disengaged from the world, and hidden.

In order to appreciate Mary's oblation of herself by her vow of virginity,

we must look higher. None knew better than she the meaning of the
prophecy: "And thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among the
thousands of Juda: out of thee shall He come forth unto me that is to be the
Ruler in Israel; and His going forth is from the beginning, from the days of
eternity."" She understood that Christ was to be born at the time in which
she lived and was to descend from David's family, which was her own.

Jews and Gentiles both were expecting the Messiah, but they had lost
sight of the prophecy of Isaiah: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a
Son, and His name shall be called Emmanuel."" They had not grasped the
truth that the birth of Christ was to be accompanied by a miracle that would
never be repeated: a virgin would become a mother.

It would seem, then, that Mary, in consecrating her virginity to God, had
given up all hope of becoming the mother of Christ, because her vow, being
a free act, was made with the clear foreknowledge of its consequences. It
was the product of her profound humility and of a deep, settled conviction
that she was not worthy of the supreme honor of the divine maternity; and
hence, a jealous thought of her who would be the favored recipient of so
signal and surpassing a dignity could not even shadow, much less enter, her
mind.

Such humility God will reward munificently. Mary's self-extinction

prepared her for the reception of the unspeakable gift of the divine
motherhood - actually made her the Mother of God: "He hath regarded the
humility of His handmaid."36 "Mary," says St. Bernard, "pleased God by
her virginity, but she conceived Him by her humility."

How unsearchable are the ways of God! He often chooses means that,
humanly speaking, are inadequate to accomplish their ends. What a
luminous illustration of this truth is the fact that He demanded, although the
Jews lacked all sympathy with it, the state of virginity in her who was to be
the mother of His divine Son, and made the renunciation of the divine
maternity the price of its possession.

Like our mother Mary, we should never desire to be great before God or
even before our fellowman. "Every proud man is an abomination to the
Lord."" "He hath had regard to the prayer of the humble, and He hath not
despised their petition."" "Nor from the beginning have the proud been
acceptable to Thee, but the prayer of the humble and the meek hath always
pleased Thee.""

God loves to build on nothing. "What hast thou that thou hast not
received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst
not received it?i40

Once we realize our nothingness, and consequently our unprofitableness,

God will work such miracles of grace within us as will raise the edifice of
our sanctity to supreme heights. We should not anticipate the designs of
God, but should wait patiently until He decides to use us as instruments to
advance His interests on earth. Nor should we be surprised if He adopts
means wholly repugnant to flesh and blood.

The greater glory of God through total forgetfulness of ourselves must be

the aim of our lives. This is only keeping the greatest and first
commandment of the Law, only giving to God what is His by divine right.
Humility, then, is our sorest need. If we seek the glory of God in everything
and entirely forego ourselves, we will travel the surest and the swiftest road
to Heaven. Who, after Christ, was humbler than Mary? Yet who, after
Christ, gave God greater glory? Far from contravening the designs of divine
wisdom, Mary's humility only served to expedite the most eventful
manifestation of God's infinite mercy to fallen man.
Mary's vow of virginity was without precedent, and a secret between her
and her God. It is hardly likely that her parents, if they were still alive, had
the least inkling of it, for the obvious reason that, conditioned by the Jews'
love of motherhood, they would indubitably have opposed it.

To conceal the miraculous conception and birth of His divine Son, the
eternal Father inspired Joseph, who, like Mary, was of the tribe of Juda and
the family of David, to marry this specially favored child of Heaven. Her
parents consented, and Mary and Joseph were not only betrothed but
probably married before the Annunciation by the archangel Gabriel.

Before entering upon her new state of life, the Blessed Virgin was forced
to reveal to Joseph her consecration to God, and to ask him to respect it.
Being a just man, and thus given to the practice of virtue in its most
comprehensive sense, Joseph espoused Mary and lived with her a life of
spotless virginity.

In this critical circumstance of her life, in order that she might be without
misgiving as to the keeping of her vow, and might at the same time manifest
to Joseph an attitude that was gracious, cordial, and symbolic of the marital
relationship, the Blessed Mother did not trust to the fidelity of a mortal, but
abandoned herself to Divine Providence. Her love of the virtue that makes
man like an angel was the measure of her abandonment. With absolute
confidence in the protection of God - for "he that dwelleth in the aid of the
Most High shall abide under the protection of the God of Heaven"41- and
absorbed by the concentrated contemplation of Him, she implicitly
entrusted herself to her chaste spouse as to God Himself, supremely
confident that the Holy Spirit, who had inspired the consecration of her
virginity to God, would, with the invigorating power of His grace, enable
her to preserve her purity in all its brilliant splendor.

What an example for us! Like Mary, we must never question the will of
God, no matter how trying the test, but must make that will the pivot of our
lives. How slow we are to realize that nothing happens except through
God's ordination or permission. Knowing what is best for us, since He is
infinitely wise, and loving us with an everlasting love, He ever takes into
account our dearest interests.

A life of strong, living faith is a life of unwavering submission to

Divine Providence. Convinced of this truth, we will never permit the
dictates of human prudence to enter into the equation of our conformity
to the divine will. The inspiration of grace, confirmed by lawful authority,
will be our only guide.

Had Mary yielded to self-will, she would not have espoused Joseph. Had
she listened to fallible reason, she would have necessarily concluded that
such a union would mean the breaking of her vow, and so she would have
rebelled against the divine will. With the future shrouded in mystery, and
being herself utterly unable to forecast the outcome of her espousal with
Joseph, powerless even to fancy by what conjuncture of circumstances God
would accomplish His will in her regard, she stifled all thought of herself,
sacrificed reason to faith, and commended herself with childlike trust to
Him who "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things
sweetly.""

In doing the will of God, which is for us the goal of life, we must, after
the example of our mother Mary, be enlightened, not by human wisdom, but
by divine faith. The supernatural life of the soul, created by Baptism, is as
real as the natural life of the body. This truth, which we are very prone to
forget, St. Paul emphasizes when he writes to the Romans: "We are debtors,
not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to
the flesh, you shall die, but if, by the Spirit, you mortify the deeds of the
flesh, you shall live. For whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are
the sons of God."43 Again, he says, "They that are Christ's have crucified
their flesh, with the vices and concupiscences."44

Unlike the light of weak, finite reason, which of itself cannot further our
progress in virtue, the light of divine faith, if we live in its reflected
splendor, will enable us to conquer the cravings of the flesh and to escape
life's pitfalls. It will conduct us safely to the God who has made us for
Himself.
Within a humble home in an obscure corner of the earth - Nazareth in
Galilee, the poorest and most insignificant part of Judea - the Holy Spirit
will perform a miracle that will be the masterpiece of infinite power: the
Incarnation of the Son of God. It is by one of His glorious archangels that
God sends this most momentous message ever delivered to man,
announcing the advent of the Savior of the world and the selection of the
Virgin Mary, the humblest of all creatures, to be His mother. Thus is
fulfilled the promise that Christ will be born of the family of David, but not
until that family is impoverished and has sunk into utter insignificance. A
poor artisan is chosen to be the spouse of Mary and the foster father of the
Redeemer of men.

How striking the contrast between the circumstances surrounding the

birth of the Messiah and the glowing pictures heralding the glory of His
reign! Isaiah had prophesied, "A Child is born to us, and a Son is given to
us, and the government is upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called
Wonderful, Counselor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the
Prince of Peace. His empire shall be multiplied, and there shall be no end of
peace. He shall sit upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, to
establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from
henceforth and for ever."45 "Rejoice and praise, 0 thou habitation of Sion,
for great is He that is in the midst of thee, the Holy One of Israel."46 The
glory and the grandeur, the might and the magnificence of His reign shall
spring, not from earth, but from Heaven, for His kingdom will not be of this
world. The contempt of men will show His greatness before God. His
parents must be unhonored and unknown, and their humility must be even
greater than their poverty.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit and therefore with heavenly homage, the
angelic ambassador salutes Mary with the divinely eloquent words: "Hail,
full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.i47
Never before this did angel greet man with the word hail, but unlike the rest
of mortals, Mary has a pre-eminent humility that is immune to the least
suggestion of pride arising from such a salutation. She is declared by the
mouthpiece of God to be "full of grace." But she is far from puffed up by
this unheard-of praise; on the contrary, her humility sinks to immeasurable
depths, for, while admitting the truth of the words, she attributes it to God
alone working wondrously within her.

"The Lord is with thee," continues the heavenly herald. Yes, He is with
her by His grace, and soon He will be with her by His corporeal presence,
for He will be bone of her bones, and flesh of her flesh.48

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Gabriel waxes still more
eloquent: "Blessed art thou among women." Mary's blessedness is due to
her supreme sanctity. She will be hailed by all generations as blessed above
all other women because she is the Mother of God and at the same time a
spotless virgin. With the most precious gift of Heaven, God will reward the
love of virginity that urges her not to accept the proffered dignity.
 Her humility was so profound that Mary could hardly believe the
commendation of the angelic envoy. And oh, how pleasing was her humility
to God! He read her heart. He saw that she would not yield to the subtle and
very strong temptation to pride flowing from the bestowal of His praise by
His delegated messenger. The more her humility was tried, the more lowly
she became in her own estimation.

Never must we yearn for the special graces given to the saints as a
reward for their virtue. We should never aspire to nor anticipate them, but,
like the Blessed Mother, we should render ourselves as worthy of them as
possible by a humility that will make us realize that, as far as God is
concerned, when we have done all things well, we are only unprofitable
servants.49

It is the most cogent proof of our overweening pride to think that God
gives us His best gifts just because we hanker after them. Humility is the
price of God's most precious favors. "Every proud man is an abomination to
the Lord .,,51 "God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble .,,51
"The Lord will destroy the house of the proud. ,12 "God hath overturned the
thrones of proud princes, and hath set up the meek in their stead .,,51
"Before destruction, the heart of a man is exalted; and before he be
glorified, it is humbled. ,51 "God hath abolished the memory of the proud,
and hath preserved the memory of them that are humble in mind. 65

How unworthy of divine benevolence is the mortal who, through his

ambition for God's most signal blessings, perverts them into an obstacle
to salvation.
How marvelously great was the message of the archangel! "Behold," said
Gabriel, "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a Son, and
thou shalt call His name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son
of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of
David His father; and He shall reign in the house of Jacob forever. And of
His kingdom there shall be no end."" How well calculated was this message
to inspire with excessive pride any child of Adam except Mary, whose self-
extinction so endeared her to God!

How sublimely magnificent the promise: the Son of God shall be the
Son of Mary. He shall sit, not on the material throne of David His father,
but on a spiritual throne of which David's was but the poorest symbol.
Not merely shall He rule over the temporal interests of men, but His
sovereign sway shall extend into regions where earthly monarchs dare not
enter; His jurisdiction shall be over immortal souls made to the image and
likeness of the Triune God. He shall change the face of the earth and be
the Founder of Christian civilization. His kingdom shall witness the
destruction of empire after empire; it shall behold dynasty after dynasty
prostrate in the dust, because, like Him, its divine Founder, His kingdom
shall be eternal: "Of His kingdom there shall be no end."
 He shall reign over His true followers and shall lead them in the way of
justice, holiness, and truth. He shall not teach the varying, unstable opinions
of men, but shall herald forth to the whole earth the eternal truths of God's
word. Under the energizing power of His teaching, men dreaming on in the
world's slumber shall awake and be alive unto God.

"He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High."
Immeasurably inferior will be the human, temporal grandeur of the kings
of this world when compared with the divine, eternal glory of Him, the
omnipotent Ruler of Heaven and earth, the King of kings and the Lord of
lords.

Such was the burden of the mightiest message ever sent by God to man.
The delicately sensitive and unspeakably humble Virgin, rapt in silent
communion with her God, trembled at the words of the heavenly
messenger. But Gabriel comforted her: "Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found
grace with God.i57 Grace so great did she find with God by her humility
that she was chosen to cooperate with His divine Son in restoring man to a
dignity far superior to what he had lost by sin.

Her exaltation above all other creatures, described by the angel, failed to
awaken within her impassioned thoughts, high aspirations, or sublime
imaginings. She indulged no such luxury of feeling. Inwardly distressed and
outwardly agitated by a message so mysterious, she was under the spell of
the urgent persuasions of excited fear. She could not reconcile motherhood
with virginity.
 "How," she exclaims to the angelic envoy, "shall this be done, because I
know not man?i58 Mary's pertinent question betrayed no distrust of the
omnipotence of God. She was anxious, not indeed to pry into the secrets of
God, but to reveal the human inconsistency that surprised and shocked her,
the difficulty of squaring the observance of her vow with the divine
maternity. The preservation of her virginity was her deep concern.

Severed as she was from the world of sense, her heart all impressed with
a heavenly character, Mary - in her thoughts and her words - was
completely under the influence of the supernatural, because of her constant,
unswerving fidelity to grace. Her question was inspired by the Holy Spirit,
and led the way to His further revelation when Gabriel apprised her of how
her stupendous vocation would be accomplished. Full of grace as she was,
her words did not proceed from any tendency to separate God's favors from
His divine will, and to dwell on the former at the expense of the latter.

It is indeed a lesson we can never learn too well that it is not the most
lavishly generous tokens of divine munificence, but the virtue issuing from
our loving correspondence with His grace, that will enable us to give glory
to our Creator and, thus, by making us ring true to the purpose of our
creation, render our souls eternally precious in His sight.

The sacraments, for example, those masterpieces of divine ingenuity,

were instituted not only to dower our souls with the riches of Heaven, but
also to smooth for us the path of Christian righteousness so that we might
run the way of God's commandments with enlarged hearts and with a joy
that earth knows not. If they fail to detach us from the world, if they do not
make us "labor for the meat which endureth unto life everlasting,"" if they
do not annihilate our natural selves and make us ardent lovers of Christ
crucified, they will be for us the means of our eternal condemnation.

But Mary did not need this lesson. Her esteem of virginity was not
grounded in self-love but was the work of God Himself. And had she been
wholly preoccupied with the contemplation of her ineffable prerogative, and
forgetful of her earlier obligations as a result of her vow of virginity, God
would not have selected her for the part that she played in the most
memorable manifestation of love and mercy ever witnessed on earth.
The heavenly legate relieved Mary's distress of mind and directed her
disturbed feelings into another channel with the comforting words: "The
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall
overshadow thee."" The Holy Spirit, he tells her, shall work in her the
greatest work of His omnipotence. He shall depart from nature's laws and
perform a prodigy that shall make even the angels mute with bewildered
wonder. By His almighty power, He shall form and fashion the body of the
Savior of the world, and the divine Son will unite it to Himself forever.

What an astounding manifestation of God's omnipotence is the

accomplishment of this marvelous miracle! All rational speculation on the
overpowering mystery would necessarily range off into the twilight and
darkness of the unknowable. Finite reason cannot explore the realm of this
transcendental truth, so completely hidden from the limited eye and mind of
man. Even the simple things of nature, enveloped as they are in divine
mystery, baffle and confound human understanding. The more a mind
trained to careful thinking tries to know the universe, the more conscious it
becomes of its limitations and the more it realizes the mystery shrouded in
darkness behind the phenomena, no matter how luminous, that reveal its
existence.
 Incomprehensible to men and angels, belief in so wondrous an exhibition
of God's power demands of Mary an act of the most sublime faith. She
naturally inquires into the achievement of the impenetrable mystery, and
although Gabriel's answer is beyond her grasp, she opens her reason to the
flooding light of faith and humbly submits to the power of Him who cannot
be limited in His works by man's constricted mental horizon.

And oh, how God rewards the humble submission of her deep, living
faith! "And therefore also," continues the archangel, "the Holy which shall
be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."" He who shall be born of
her shall be holy with the unutterable holiness of God, for His flesh shall be
the flesh of the Son of God. His human soul and His human body will be
substantially and indissolubly united to His divine nature so as to form one
person, His soul and body being respectively the soul and body of God
incarnate.

How becoming, then, it was that the Mother of the God-Man should
have been immaculate from the first instant of her conception.

And wishing to demonstrate the consummate ease with which the Holy
Spirit can perform this overwhelming miracle, the celestial messenger
exclaims, "Behold thy cousin Elizabeth. She also bath conceived a son in
her old age, and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren,
because no word shall be impossible with God.i62 The Holy Spirit, who is
God and hence the Author of nature and of nature's laws, can and shall,
without changing these laws, suspend them by a single act of His all-
powerful will.
 The lesson is self-evident. If God should choose a soul in which to
accomplish an extraordinary work, He is in no way bound to enlighten the
soul so that it may understand the means whereby the work will be
accomplished. But He does condescend to ask that soul's generous
correspondence with Him on grounds that, although incomprehensible, do
not contravene finite reason and that must be accepted, because the motive
of their credibility is the truthfulness and the infinite power of God.

It is, then, futile for us to try to forecast the crosses that God, in His
wisdom and love, may see fit to send us; for, "Oh, the depth of the riches of
the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His
judgments and how unsearchable His ways! For who bath known the mind
of the Lord? Or who bath been His counselor?""

Vain, too, it is for us to strive curiously to divine how He will enable us

to bear them with absolute surrender of ourselves and thus to advance in the
science of the saints and glorify Him whom all creation is bound to serve.
"The just man liveth by faith."64 "They that fear the Lord will not be
incredulous to His word."65

Despite our senses and our arrogant reason, we must never doubt Him
who cannot deceive and whose power is incomprehensible because it is
infinite. When the exterior voice of the Church coincides with the interior
voice of conscience, we are certain that God has spoken. We must, then,
believe and obey.
Without any excitement or agitation - rather, with that lightness of spirit and
activity of mind attending any release from suffering and constraint - and
although not knowing the meaning of the archangel's inspired words,
soothed by them to tranquillity and peace, Mary serenely submits to the will
of God. In so doing, she utters the most gracious act of humility that ever
fell from human lips: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me
according to thy

Truths worthy of our absorbing study lie lurking under the Virgin's
wholehearted conformity to the divine will.

First of all, God sent one of the highest ministers of His heavenly court
to solicit the consent of her whom He had chosen to be the mother of His
divine Son. What courteous consideration of the creature! What divine
deference to the will of man! God rules His rational creatures by love. He
does not coerce them. On the contrary, He not only asks them to concur
with Him in the accomplishment of His designs, but lovingly listens to their
objections.

The ineffable dignity conferred on Mary demanded of her the greatest

sanctity. Now, sanctity is only another name for suffering. "If any man will
follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."" The
divine motherhood meant for Mary sheer self-extinction through total
abandonment to the will of God. It implied her acceptance of the bitterest
suffering. It forecast mental pain that would almost consume her, its victim.
To become the Mother of God augured for Mary a knowledge of and a
share in the Passion of Christ that would plunge her into the depths of a sea
of lonely desolation for souls and make the tempest overwhelm her.

Suffering being the measure and the very law of love, we cannot
adequately conceive the height and depth, the length and breadth of her love
for us, her children. By becoming the Mother of God and our mother, Mary
became a holocaust to the divine will, the Queen of Martyrs, the most
perfect imitator of Him whom Lacordaire68 has called "a Victim to be
destroyed for sin, but a living and a dying Victim whose sacrifice was never
interrupted, Jesus Christ."

To suffer so much, the Blessed Virgin supremely needed help from on

high. This truth, worthy of our most serious thought, we are apt to overlook.
It is peculiarly and essentially human to stress the sublimity of Mary's
exaltation and forego entirely any reckoning of its awful price. To give to
the world its Savior, it was imperative for Mary to exemplify, in
magnificent terms, a supernatural heroism manifested by a spirit of self-
sacrifice to which a careless, sensual, or unbelieving mind is alien. A mind
destitute of the love and fear of God, with narrow views and earthly aims, a
low standard of duty and a benighted conscience, a mind contented with
itself and unresigned to God's will might be fascinated with the
incomparable dignity of the Mother of God; but fascination with her dignity
could not keep even such an obtuse soul from pained apprehension of the
withering sorrow associated with her acceptance of that dignity. To become
the Mother of Christ, Mary had to drain with Him the bitter chalice of His
Passion to its very dregs. It meant for her virtually the annihilation of
nature.

For Mary to endure such suffering, her virtue had to be built on the rock
of humility. The immeasurable humility of the Mother of God is a truth
whose content is inexhaustible.

The very moment of her exaltation, the highest to which God could raise
a creature, finds her sunk in the abyss of her own nothingness and
exclaiming to the archangel, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." Thus fully
acknowledging her unworthiness to be the Mother of Christ, she accepts the
inestimable privilege only in obedience to the divine will: "Be it done to me
according to thy word." At the very apex of her glory, not her elevation
above all other creatures, but her own nothingness, absorbs her. She calls
herself the servant of Him who for thirty years will be subject to her. She
receives God's greatest gift in perfect accord with the mind of the divine
Donor.

What a lesson in humility Mary teaches us! Too often the reception of
God's gifts ministers to our self-love and vanity, whereas the abiding
conviction of our unworthiness to receive them - and this alone - constitutes
our true greatness in His sight.
In the simplest language, St. John announces the most important fact of
history. "The Word was made flesh," says the Apostle of Love, "and dwelt
among us."" The instant that Mary gave her consent to the archangel, the
Holy Spirit overshadowed her and wrought in her most chaste womb the
Incarnation of the Son of God.

The humble Virgin is absolutely silent on the subject of this stupendous

miracle wrought within her by the divine power, this mystery
incomprehensible even to the angels. Nor does she speak of the rapturous
heavenly joy that floods her pure soul.

Such silence, born of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the conviction
of one's own nothingness, and appealing to us with the eloquence of God,
should be the divine principle of our conduct when God favors us with His
extraordinary graces. When conscious of these wondrous communications,
we should reveal them only to our spiritual director. He will tell us whether
they have any ecclesiastical or scriptural warrant or whether they are the
work of the foul enemy of souls. Christ warns us to "beware of false
prophets and St. John says to us, "Believe not every spirit, but try the
spirits, if they be of God."

As we are not sufficient of ourselves, we should not even reflect on these

rare revelations, much less analyze their effect. We are so permeated with
self-love that we unfortunately yearn for whatever will foster it. Thus,
instead of gaining power over ourselves by allowing these unique graces to
flow freely into our souls without curious investigation of their reason, we
neutralize, through pride, their divine influence and willingly succumb to
temptations to vanity. Under the spell of this insidious vice, we compare
ourselves to others much more advanced than we in the way of God. We put
ourselves on a level even with the saints and fruitlessly try to understand
their close relationship with God, or we peruse authors who undertake to
expound mysteries that demand adoration rather than discussion.

Holy Scripture does far otherwise, and in this respect, as in all others, it
is our best teacher. Of the Fall, for example, the sacred writer only states,
"She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband, who did
eat.i72 Of the death eternal in its consequences, the volume of inspiration
merely records, "They crucified Him.""

Vain curiosity springing from intellectual pride so contracts the mind and
soul as to render them incapable even of investigating, not to speak of
maintaining, divine truth. God's revelation is not meant to pander to our
selflove and our self-conceit. Here, we live by faith; hereafter, God will lift
the veil and we shall know even as we are known.74 Too meticulous an
examination of what we must believe on the authority of God argues a
woeful lack of faith. For the just man, it is enough that God has spoken,
because "the just man liveth by faith."" The saints raised themselves to their
high estate of holiness, not by the searching scrutiny of God's truth, but by
squaring their lives with it. They were "wise unto sobriety.""
 If we are to follow in their footsteps, we must not delve into the secrets
of Divine Revelation, but must practice what it teaches. To do this, we must
mortify ourselves. The Devil, who is a consummate strategist, knows with
the intelligence of an angel how powerful an ally he has in our loathsome
self-love. At times he beguiles a person with the fatal delusion that, to
become a saint, he must do the extraordinary. Once he has indoctrinated the
person with this falsehood, he inspires him to read authors who present their
own false notions instead of the true doctrine of the masters of the spiritual
life. And so they blind him with vanity in order that the beauty of holiness
may no longer attract him, and, in a moment of petulance and despondency,
yielding to discouragement, he convinces himself that the pursuit of sanctity
is wearisome, the yoke of the Lord galling, and His burden intolerable.

Mary teaches us how to overcome this subtle temptation. Her wisdom

kept pace with her humility. She could truthfully say, "I make doctrine to
shine forth to all as the morning light, and I will declare it afar off. I will
penetrate to all the lower parts of the earth, and will behold all that sleep,
and will enlighten all that hope in the Lord. I will yet pour out doctrine as
prophecy, and will leave it to them that seek wisdom, and will not cease to
instruct their offspring even to the holy age."" Mary surpassed all others in
wisdom, because her intimate union with Christ was the measure and sum
of her enlightenment. She is truly the Seat of Wisdom, because she was the
living tabernacle of the God of infinite wisdom.

"But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart."" And oh,
how impressive and efficacious was her eloquence of silence! By her
remarkable and reverent reserve, she did more to "make doctrine shine forth
to all as the morning light" than she could have done by the most vivid
revelation of the wonders that God had wrought within her and of the
treasures of wisdom with which He had enriched her.
Conscious, after having received Christ, of being rooted in her God, Mary
possessed a sanctity characterized by a heavenly sublimity beyond
understanding. She was not only full of grace, but she bore the Author of
grace. She was wholly under the influence of Christ's divinity. In return
for the natural strength that Mary gave Him, He invigorated her with His
divine strength.

Marvelous interchange! Closest of all unions both naturally and

supernaturally! Oh, the divine impress of Christ upon Mary, for both mother
and Child are physically one! And they are morally one. Mary's thoughts
and desires, then, are those of her divine Son. Her heart beats in unison with
His heart.

So hardly won is every step in our Christian course, so supine and

sluggish is our correspondence with grace, that we can form but a very
vague and imperfect idea of the interior spirit of the mother of the incarnate
Word during the period in which she physically possessed her God.
Suffering the varying circumstances of every day to sway us, we would
have to be entirely detached from the world to appreciate with any degree
of accuracy her gift of prayer, both mental and vocal, while she was the
living tabernacle of the eternal Word.
 He who had become bone of her bones and flesh of her flesh was the
divine principle of her life. In order to pray, she had no need of frequenting
the Temple made with hands. The temple not made with hands - that is, her
soul - was the most marvelous house of prayer ever created by God's
omnipotence. The efficacy of Mary's prayer can be fully understood only
through a complete comprehension of the intimacy of her union with her
divine Son. Her prayer was the prayer of Christ.

Transported with love, joy, and gratitude, St. Epiphanius79

exclaims, "Hail, full of grace, thou who art the golden urn containing
the manna from Heaven!"

We cannot rise to the lofty heights of Mary's holiness, because we cannot

grasp the intimacy of her union with Christ when she became His mother.
But we can discover the reason her sanctity soared higher and higher during
the time Christ dwelt within her.

Mary had conceived Christ by her humility: "He hath regarded the
humility of His handmaid."" On becoming the Mother of the God-Man, she
stifled all thought of herself, for she was so absorbed with the
contemplation of her God that she could think only of Him. Now that He
had taken up His abode within her, He enlightened her to understand, as she
never had or could heretofore, the greatness of God and the nothingness of
man. He taught her that the eternal Father could be adequately adored and
praised, propitiated and thanked, only by the inconceivable humiliations of
a God made man. With her mind thus illumined with divine light, she
realized that her homage was of itself valueless, not even worthy of
acceptance.

Having learned the lesson of humility perfectly, Mary disappeared from

her own eyes and glorified God through her divine Son. She was lost in the
ocean of infinity within her. Bearing the Savior annihilated for sinners, she
effaced herself entirely. As we cannot measure the depths of her humility,
we can have no true notion of her spiritual exaltation.

Self-knowledge is at the root of all real growth in holiness. We can no

more advance in the path of sanctity without humility than we can live
without air.

Humility is the heart and soul of virtue. It is humility that gives power
and efficacy to all we do for God. The fact that Christ became "a worm, and
no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people"" in order to
teach us humility impressively proves the absolute necessity of this
fundamental virtue in the divine economy of salvation. To imbibe in the
largest measure the power and fullness of God's Spirit, we must imitate
Christ, who, "to seek and to save that which was lost,i82 "emptied
Himself."83 Without humility, we cannot bring ourselves into the remotest
resemblance to our Savior or even to Mary, whose humility not only
merited for her the surpassing dignity of Mother of God, but actually made
her His mother.

If, through pride, we become destitute of every element of attractiveness

that wins the acceptance of men, what objects of detestation pride must
make us in the sight of God, who, to inculcate - even more, to make us
ardently love - humility, the indispensable virtue, took "the form of a
servanti84 by clothing Himself with our frail flesh, becoming like us in all
things but sin and dying in our fallen nature.

O wondrous, incomparable humility! Without thee, we live only under

the shadow and enjoy merely the name of Christian, and we will never
partake of its future blessedness.

Proud preference of self is uncompromising opposition to God. Pride

puts us out of the pale of God's mercy, for "God resisteth the proud."85
Therefore, let us, like Mary, realize our nothingness. Then God will flood
our souls with grace here and will exalt them eternally hereafter.
Informed by the archangel that St. Elizabeth would soon become a mother,
Mary, with her mind enlightened, her sympathies quickened, and her heart
on fire with divine charity, hastened to visit her cousin in order to
congratulate and serve her. But God's ultimate purpose, although unknown
to the humble Virgin, was to sanctify, by the visit of His mother, His great
precursor and thus to prepare him for his unique mission.

Most fruitful of salutary lessons is this long, fatiguing journey of the

Mother of God. With what consummate grandeur does Mary thereby hold
mirrored before us her distinctive virtue: humility! Had she followed the
persuasions of human reason, she would have tendered both her
congratulations and her services through an intermediary, because, although
much younger than her cousin, she was inestimably superior to her in
dignity. Impelled by natural inclinations, Mary, realizing her pre-eminence
among men and angels, would have considered such a visit at variance with
the majesty and sublimity of her high estate. But she was too thoroughly
grounded in humility to entertain so proud a thought. This virtue, her chief
glory, made the visit her duty.

It was the archangel, not Elizabeth, who informed her of her cousin's
condition. Yet Mary was not influenced by human motives, which, in view
of this fact, would have rightly concluded that her cousin would not be
offended by her failure to visit her. Nor, on the other hand, was she in the
least disturbed because Elizabeth had not told her that she was an expectant
mother. Mary's visit, like every other act of her life, was inspired by the
supernatural. Her humility, rising above the natural, made the long, hard
journey a mission of love.

If we profess to be true children of our heavenly mother, we will not

yield to our natural desires, but will ever follow the promptings of grace.
We will then discharge every duty, no matter how insignificant, to our
neighbor. To be negligent in this respect is to have a distorted notion of
piety. While true religion forbids idle gossip with the world, it commands
us to pay due regard to the ties of relationship and to the canons of civility.
Devotion suffers only by forgetfulness of God and of our neighbor. Mary,
during her difficult and painful journey, forgot herself entirely and thought
only of God and of her cousin, the image of God.

In our following the inspirations of grace, purity of intention, which

makes God the beginning and the end of all our activity, is bound to
animate us. Divine Providence often uses our human contacts for a
supernatural end. For the soul wholly under the dominion of the spiritual,
every slightest task and duty is of notable import even though the designs of
God are completely hidden.

To the superficial observer, the visit of Mary to her cousin may seem a
very ordinary event in her life. But how momentous it was to God the
Father, who, through the presence of His most favored daughter, wished to
sanctify the precursor of His divine Son! Although not knowing the mind of
God in this eventful visit, Mary, under the quickening power of grace, was a
most willing instrument in the execution of His designs. Had she not
followed the urgings of grace, she would have frustrated the divine plan.

This truth has a practical bearing. An apparently commonplace

circumstance in our lives may be the means of the salvation of our
neighbor. Although, for the moment, we cannot see the connection between
our conduct and this effect, we should at least divine its possibility. We
must therefore make our social interchanges something more than the
satisfaction of the forms prescribed by polite society.

Limitless are our opportunities for doing good in this world's wilderness
of sin. In our daily relationships, we are unconsciously influencing our
fellowmen. This is a fearful responsibility and one we cannot escape. We
can change the course of a life by a kind word or a generous deed; by our
example, we can lead souls either to Heaven or to Hell. We profess to be
followers of Christ, but the test of our discipleship is practical charity - that
is, the diffusion of the good odor of Christ in our daily dealings with others.

Although frail, dependent mortals, weak vessels of clay, what mighty

moral powers we are! How unspeakable in magnitude, how far-reaching,
and how lasting, under the guidance of grace, is our influence for good!
What food we can, by the power of our example, furnish to souls spiritually
starving! If we live what we believe, if we labor solely for the honor and
glory of God, if, in short, we are God's devoted creatures, we will enrich
and ennoble with our heavenly store every mortal whose life we touch.
How telling was the meeting of the Mother of God and the mother of St.
John! What prodigies Christ wrought through Mary's colloquy with
Elizabeth! With no visible disclosure of His divine action, He freed His
precursor from Original Sin, enriched him with grace, and made him leap
with joy at the sound of Mary's voice: "And it came to pass that when
Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb.""

The mother of His herald He simultaneously filled with His Holy Spirit
and made her understand the reason for her child's ecstasy. In the veiled
presence of her God, Elizabeth confessed that Mary was the Mother of
Christ: "And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. And she cried out
with a loud voice and said, `Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is
the fruit of thy womb.'"" She declared Mary blessed among women because
Mary was the most holy dwelling of the eternal God, Christ our Lord. All
this Elizabeth had learned from the child she was bearing, who, in turn, was
taught by the Word incarnate in the womb of Mary.

What tremendous significance, then, God attached to what appeared to

be an ordinary visit demanded by the laws of propriety and courtesy!

Lovingly docile to God's will, Mary was the victim not of pained but of
joyous surprise when she discovered that the Holy Spirit had revealed to
Elizabeth what she had resolved to keep a secret between herself and God.
Not knowing that the divine Child within her had illumined St. John, the
Blessed Mother was at a loss to discover how her cousin had acquired her
information. Elizabeth's open profession of faith followed when, inspired by
the Holy Spirit, she exclaimed, "Whence is this to me, that the Mother of
my Lord should come to me?"88 Thus did she establish the reality of the
amazing favor that God had conferred on Mary. The humble Virgin did not
ask for its confirmation, but God gave it to her when she had least expected
it.

Full of meaning is this phase of Mary's life for the one whom God directs
in an extraordinary way. Often diffidence of self issuing from doubt about
his interior state follows or even coexists with such a person's abandonment
to Divine Providence. This is due either to a gradual weakening of his first
fervor or to the wiles of Satan, who throws his soul into a turmoil by
focusing its vision too inordinately on its internal condition. In his
perplexity, the person should not ask for a sign from Heaven, but, with filial
trust in God, should await the divine comfort with which God will allay his
fears and dispel his anxiety at the time best suited to further his spiritual
progress.

God will never forsake one who needs His help. In the person's distress,
God will initiate him by degrees into a clear understanding of the workings
of grace within his soul. When God does not condescend to satisfy his
yearning to hear His voice, that person must intensify his faith and blindly
obey his spiritual director. Were God to speak whenever he desired, He
would only accentuate his own self-sufficiency and thus drive him far from
Him. Mary, being dead to herself, never longed for God to speak to her until
He deemed it necessary for the accomplishment of His designs in her
regard.

It is Mary's intense faith that Elizabeth blesses, for she says to her, "And
blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be
accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord.i89 How she would be a
mother and at the same time remain a virgin did not enter into the equation
of Mary's faith. She implicitly believed the word of God as announced to
her by His messenger.

God always rewards strong faith lavishly. It is the sign of the highest
virtue to retain belief unshaken when agonizing doubts strive to weaken its
initial strength. But it is the most convincing evidence of the faith that
moves mountains to continue to believe most firmly when God appears to
work for the frustration of His plans or when difficulties arise apparently
contradicting His original revelation.

A comparison between the message of Gabriel predicting the greatness

and the glory of Christ, and the life of the Redeemer Himself, categorically
proves the strength of Mary's faith. The Savior was the poorest of the
children of men. He was born into His own world homeless. In the
workshop of an unknown and humble carpenter, He toiled in obscurity for
thirty years. In His public life, He had nothing - neither money nor even a
place to lay His head.90 He depended for support on the uncertain charity
of those to whom He ministered so graciously. "I am poor," He tells us,
"and in labors from my youth.i91
 He was the object of ridicule, scorn, and contempt. He was treated as a
fool, branded as one who worked by the power of the Devil, and
stigmatized as one possessed by the Devil. He was blindfolded, mocked,
scourged, and spat upon. So relentless was the opposition, so implacable the
hatred of His own people, that they released a public malefactor rather than
Him, their God, while instead they crucified Him between two thieves.

How can we harmonize the hidden life and the public life of Christ with
the glorious declaration of the archangel? The one seems to be a flat
contradiction of the other. And yet Mary firmly believed the words of the
heavenly messenger. How inconceivably strong her faith! And how
munificently the eternal Father rewarded it by His divine Son's marvelous
Resurrection and His eternal triumph over sin and death and all the powers
of Hell!
Mary answers her cousin with a heavenly lyric. Divinely eloquent, the
humble Virgin exclaims, "My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit
hath rejoiced in God my Savior."" The rapturous joy that fills her heart
throws her into an ecstasy. We can have but a vague notion of her
happiness, the effect of the presence of the incarnate God within her, which
is for her a foretaste of the bliss of the blessed. She is transported beyond
herself. Yet she extols the greatness of God and emphasizes her own
nothingness; although glorified immeasurably beyond the angels, because
of her fidelity to grace, it is not her own but God's glory for which her
immaculate soul yearns.

Oh, how pleasing to God is this, His favored child! The more He favors
her, the more she praises His mercy and disregards her own personal
exaltation! How unlike us is Mary!

So self-centered are we that we seek and esteem virtue for its own sake,
and not for the honor and glory of God. The virus of our self-seeking
poisons the wellsprings of our spiritual life. How few of us can free
ourselves from the Satanic tyranny of our self-love! We desire God's favors
for our own individual gain, and not for our advancement in virtue and the
consequent glorification of their divine Donor. Mary's self-renunciation
should teach us how to overcome this deadly vice, even though the price of
victory is for us, as it was for her, moral crucifixion.
 The fact that God has condescended to regard her is the sole reason for
her overwhelming joy: "My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior, because
He bath regarded the humility of His handmaid."" She fully realizes that she
is God's debtor, because she is wholly convinced of her own nothingness.
Although she is the Mother of Christ, she calls herself His handmaid.
Because we fail to recognize our nothingness and indulge pride, God turns
from us. Were He to look on us, His divine glance would serve only to
deepen in us the worst of all vices.

Mary lays claim to greatness only through God's mercy. In divine

accents, she pours out her soul: "From henceforth all generations shall call
me blessed."" It is only because God has regarded her that all generations
shall call her blessed. There is in her most pure soul not even a lingering
suspicion of self-love.

Her humility is genuine because she praises God's favors with the
conscious conviction of their greatness and of her unworthiness to receive
them. "He that is mighty hath done great things to me; and holy is His
name.i95 She lauds the omnipotence of God, who has but to command and
nature obeys. It is His almighty power that evokes her tribute to His
holiness: "Holy is His name." Only the good are supernaturally powerful.
God being infinitely good, His power is necessarily unlimited. His works,
therefore, are essentially good, and they are done for one end alone: the
promotion of His glory. "Thou art worthy, 0 Lord, our God, to receive glory
and honor and power because Thou hast created all things."" Convinced of
the obligation of gratitude, from which God cannot dispense His creatures,
Mary returns the glory of His gifts to Him, their primal source, and keeps
nothing for herself. Her dominant desire is to extol His power by glorifying
His name and burying herself in her own nothingness. But God will raise
her higher and higher in proportion to her self-effacement.

Only the humble seek the glory of God and thus render to Him what is
His by divine right. It is a truth demonstrated by reason that all creation is
bound to serve and thereby glorify the Creator. The law of service is the
basic law of creation.

It is through serving God faithfully that man becomes the beneficiary of

his Creator's mercy. How logical, then, is Mary when, continuing the
sublime strains of her inspired lyric, she cries out: "His mercy is from
generation unto generations to them that fear Him.i97 Those who love God
fear Him, and hence do not offend Him.

Now, the greatest offense against God is to rob Him of the glory that is
essentially His. This we do when we seek our own glory. Pride is therefore
the worst of sins. God so punishes this cursed vice, the source of all evil,
that He deprives the proud of His mercies. The proud travel the broad
highway to Hell.

Let us observe Mary's hatred of pride. How trenchant is her language

when speaking of this detestable vice that created Hell! "He hath showed
might in His arm; He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their
heart."98 Only the eternal pains of Hell can indemnify God for the honor
and glory of which the proud so unjustly rob Him.
 With the greatest lucidity, Mary declares the dispensations of God's
Providence in the punishment of the proud. "He hath put down the mighty
from their seat and hath exalted the humble."" Nearest to God in Heaven are
the humble; farthest from Him are the proud in Hell.

The realization of this startling truth will make us saints. Those who
hunger for justice - that is, the humble who "render to God the things that
are God'si10° and thus practice virtue in its broadest sense - are, both in
time and in eternity, the objects of His predilection. The rich - that is, those
who appropriate God's gifts to subserve their pride - will be impoverished
forever.

As a reward for Mary's unfathomable humility, the ineffably significant

promises made to Abraham and to his children will be verified by the
coming of Christ, but only through her free cooperation. By the Incarnation
of the Son of God, Abraham will become the father of the Christians of all
nations, and together with them will be of the chosen race of the Redeemer:
"He bath received Israel, His servant, being mindful of His mercy. As He
spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed

Mary's Magnificat, inspired by Christ incarnate within her and spoken

by her with all the heavenly magnificence of consummate artistry, is the
most eloquent sermon ever preached on the fundamental virtue of
Christianity. May we learn its lesson: the greatness of God and the
nothingness of man!
It is very likely that the Blessed Virgin did not leave Elizabeth and return
to Nazareth until after the birth of St. John the Baptist. Having fulfilled
her mission to her cousin, her fine sense of delicacy impelled her to depart
for home.

But what marvels she saw and heard during the three months she abode
with the mother of the great precursor! She joyously listened to the spirited
discussion about the name to be given to the Baptist; she heard the account
of the vision vouchsafed to Zachary and of his punishment for doubting the
angel who had informed him that his wife, although advanced in years,
would give birth to a son. She witnessed the miraculous restoration of the
patriarch's speech and heard his eloquent panegyric on the mercy of God
and on the supreme dignity of his child, the herald of the Redeemer.102
Thus she received, although unsolicited, a very remarkable confirmation of
her own exalted state.

Who can estimate the degree of grace conferred on Elizabeth through

daily contact with the Mother of God? Fraternal charity alone actuated
Mary's visit. Bearing in her chaste womb the Creator of men and the Lord
of angels, she infused blessings of the highest spiritual order into the soul of
her virtuous relative, not only by her words and actions, but, by her mere
presence. The house of Elizabeth, under the blessed influence of Mary,
became a school of perfect sanctity in which everything was said and done
from religious principle, thus enabling the mother of the Baptist to progress
in holiness and allowing the virtues of Christ's precursor to develop to an
extent that would verify the words of the Redeemer: "Amongst those that
are born of women, there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist.""'

Nor did Mary's recollectedness suffer under her cousin's roof. True, she
could not devote as much time to formal prayer as she did in the solitude of
her home in Nazareth; but this did not interrupt her interior communion
with her divine Son or change the tenor of her conversation, which always
turned to God or the things of God. And so the house of Zachary and
Elizabeth was, through the sanctifying presence of Mary, a house of prayer.
By her exquisite, thoughtful charity, by the angelic sweetness of her
manner, she fascinated them with the radiant beauty of her virtues, and
thereby deepened and purified their own holiness, making the home of her
honored relatives a veritable paradise of spiritual delights.

Far too often in our social dealings, we forego the duties while retaining
the privileges of our Christian profession. From Mary's example, we should
learn to value solitude, but when duties prescribed by custom and courtesy,
indicating the will of God to us, reveal the opportune moment to serve our
neighbor, we should willingly tender our services in a spirit of brotherly
love.

Mutual edification characterized the interview of the Queen of Saints

with her devout cousin. This teaches us ever to seek the company of the
virtuous so that both we and they may advance in the way of perfection by
the reciprocal diffusion of the good odor of Christ. Since man is a social
being, fraternal charity is unquestionably the touchstone of his moral worth.
Man is veritably his brother's keeper. Time is best spent, then, when it is
devoted to the spiritual welfare of our fellowmen.

Brotherly love must always be the inexorable law of our relations with
others. In our dealings with our neighbor, we are at best only pagans if we
dispense with the claims of Christian charity: `By this shall all men know
that you are my disciples: if you have love one for another.""' Love of
neighbor should always motivate even our visits of courtesy, and we should
not prolong them after we have satisfied the demands of charity. Nor should
we mingle with others just to banish dissatisfaction with ourselves. Such
visits will only increase our dissipation of mind.

We love God above all things only when charity is the peremptory law of
our social dealings. "Most saints avoided as much as possible the company
of men, and chose to serve God in retirement. A pagan master has said, `As
often as I have gone among men, I have returned home less a man.i105 This
same thing we experience only too often when we have spent a long time in
talking. It is easier to be altogether silent than not to exceed in words. It is
easier to remain at home than to keep sufficient guard over oneself abroad.
Whoever wishes to lead an interior life and to become spiritual must, with
Jesus, keep aloof from the crowd." 106

In this respect, what a perfect model for our imitation is the conduct of
Mary. It would have been inconsiderate on her part to have left the house of
Elizabeth before the birth of St. John the Baptist. To have prolonged her
visit after his birth would have been equally out of place. As soon as she
had fully discharged the duty of Christian charity to her cousin, she
departed. Thereby she clearly taught us how to make our social life
contribute to the sanctification of both ourselves and our neighbor.
Mary's visit to Elizabeth occupied almost four months. On her return to
Nazareth, her condition was very manifest to Joseph and naturally roused
his suspicions. Ignorant of the message of the archangel and the succeeding
miracles, he could not know that in permitting these very suspicions on his,
Joseph's, part, the incarnate God was subjecting His Virgin Mother to one
of the many pangs of her earthly martyrdom. Knowing that Mary had
dedicated herself unreservedly to God by her vow of virginity and would
not have espoused him unless he had solemnly pledged himself to respect it,
and knowing his own fidelity in keeping his pledge, Joseph could not help
but suspect, with the visible evidence before him, that she had sinned. His
suffering was equal to the intensity of his affection for her whom he loved
so ardently. Tortured by agonizing doubt, he knew not what to do nor where
to turn.

While he maintained a holy silence, his countenance mirrored the

anguish that inwardly convulsed him. The conviction that she was the
blameless cause of his sharp suffering oppressed the Immaculate Heart of
Mary beyond words. What a painful trial for these two favored creatures of
God! Mary could have dispelled Joseph's doubts and stilled the storm of his
sensitive soul. Had she informed him of the miracle wrought within her, had
she narrated to him the wonders worked in the house of Elizabeth, he would
have fallen down before her, the living tabernacle of the eternal God.

But regardless of the consequences of silence, although death might have

been its penalty, she did not speak. Her lips were sealed with a divine seal,
because she was guarding a divine secret. According to the law, Joseph
could have disgraced her before priests and people both, by consigning her
to an ignominious death for the crime of which she seemed guilty.

Had Mary yielded to her natural inclination, she would have spoken, to
vindicate her character, to pacify Joseph, and to defend the honor of God,
which was so inextricably bound up with her own. But she did not utter a
word. Wholly under the influence of the supernatural, she stifled all thought
of self and kept an inviolate silence, fully realizing in her profound humility
that God would reveal His own secret in His own time.

Oftentimes God's favors to us awaken the studied hatred and cruel

persecution of others. And frequently we yearn to justify ourselves, almost
entirely losing sight of the eternal truth that "through many tribulations we
must enter into the kingdom of God.""' In all such distressing trials, if we
obey the promptings of self-love, we seek to exonerate ourselves, at least in
order to conciliate our tormentors. We reason that it is unjust to leave our
neighbor under a false impression and perhaps therefore to scandalize him
by allowing him to indulge his wrong notions about God's goodness to us.
This, we convince ourselves, we are bound to avoid doing, not only to
defend, but also to increase, the honor and glory of God. All such false
reasoning is born of our worst enemy in the warfare for salvation: our self-
love.

What a rebuke to this arch-enemy of our souls is found in the conduct of

Mary! She kept a holy silence and calmly awaited her justification by God.
In the stress of searching anguish, her soul was at peace. She used her trial
to intensify her humility by extinguishing all thought of herself. No one
knew better than Mary God's estimate of the fundamental virtue of
Christianity. She thoroughly understood that, by dying to herself, she would
contribute most to the honor and glory of God.

What a lesson for us! When, through the reception of God's favors, we
are placed in a false light, we should rejoice that God has enabled us to
overturn the idol of our self-love and thus to love Him above all things for
His own love-worthy sake. In the trials most repugnant to our natural
selves, when we are misunderstood, misrepresented, or calumniated, let us
be silent and, like Jesus and Mary, make no attempt at justification. Perfect
imitation of Christ and His Blessed Mother means only one thing: death to
ourselves. The soul that is dead to itself has mastered the fine art of living.
Joseph's distress, which Mary felt keenly, did not rob her of her peace of
soul. Nor was she in any way disturbed because God did not immediately
vindicate her innocence. Far from resorting to legal measures against her,
Joseph treated her with the utmost kindness. Although suspicion clouded
his mind, Mary's virtue was too evident to justify him in invoking upon her
the full penalty of the law. He still revered the angelic sanctity of his
singular spouse, and following the inspiration of grace, he refrained from
exposing her publicly. But in order to protect her reputation, as well as his
own, he decided to put her away secretly.

Fully determined not to tarnish her good name and, at the same time, to
defend himself from the imputation of complicity in her apparent guilt, he
was about to proceed with his plan. But God, having tried and proved
Joseph's virtue, came to his assistance in his hour of sorest need and
changed his bitter sorrow into thrilling happiness. "While he thought on
these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep,
saying, `Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for
that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she shall bring
forth a Son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people
from their sins.' 11108
 This overpowering disclosure dispelled with immeasurable joy the
sorrow that had crushed the heart of Joseph. What a revelation to him that
he was the spouse of her who was at once a spotless virgin and the Mother
of God! He had schooled his mind, under the influence of grace, into a
charitable and forbearing temper, and oh, how God rewarded him!
Speechless gratitude welled up spontaneously from every fiber of his
acutely sensitive nature. The depths of his holy feelings cannot be fathomed
by human intelligence. He obeyed the command of the angel with
unquestioning promptitude, for we are told, "Joseph, rising up from sleep,
did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took unto him his
wife.""' We may infer, although Holy Scripture does not state it, that Joseph
informed Mary of his vision in order to comfort her who had suffered
desolation untold because, although supernaturally sympathetic with him in
his blighting grief, she was unable to calm the agitation of his afflicted soul.

These two magnanimous saints, shaping their actions by God's will

rather than by the rule of the world, had tasted the full bitterness of the most
corroding sorrow. But how quickly the God of all consolation changed their
anguish into the holiest supernal joy! Joseph's love for Mary now knew no
bounds. Mary now revered Joseph's virtue more than ever, and the trial that
would have hopelessly severed their union, had she preferred man's fallible
judgment to God's unerring will, only served to strengthen it.

Our lives are filled with alternating joy and sorrow. Both contribute to
the greater glory of God and the sanctification of our souls. In every painful
circumstance of life's hard journey, if we are fully resigned to His will, He
cannot forsake us, because of our union with Him, but He will, with divine
generosity, lighten our burden. Conformity to the divine will is the supreme
goal of life. But, alas, through fear of the world's judgment or expectation
of worldly advantage, we often do, not God's will, but our own.

What a rebuke to our disloyalty, to our trampling underfoot the substance

and real excellence of religion, is the conduct of Mary and Joseph!
Abandonment to the divine will was their one distinct rule of action. In
accordance with this truly Christian principle, Mary would not reveal her
divine secret to Joseph even though the revelation would have completely
banished his suspicions; and rather than contravene this principle, Joseph
did not question his saintly spouse. Thus did they glorify God by
resignation to His will, and He, in turn, made their virtue shine forth with
heavenly luster.

We cannot choose between joy and sorrow. We must suffer because we

are sinners. If, after the example of Mary and Joseph, we are patient under
trial, if we accept it in the true Christian spirit by not longing to prevent or
curtail it, God will not fail to comfort us. "According to the multitude of my
sorrows in my heart, Thy comforts have given joy to my soul.""' "If I shall
walk in the midst of tribulation, Thou wilt quicken me; and Thou bast
stretched forth Thy hand against the wrath of my enemies; and Thy right
hand bath saved me.""'

The way of the Cross is the only pathway to peace of mind here and to
eternal peace hereafter. The realization of this truth will help us to
overcome our natural antipathy to life's sufferings. Only in the school of the
Cross can we learn the truest wisdom, the knowledge of Jesus Christ and
Him crucified: and "this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou bast sent."". Now, to know Christ is
to suffer with Christ, and to suffer with Christ is to reign with Him forever.

"Why, then, do you fear? Take up the cross which opens to you the way
to the kingdom! In the Cross is salvation; in the Cross is life; in the Cross is
protection against the enemy. In the Cross is infusion of heavenly
sweetness; in the Cross is strength of heart; in the Cross is joy of spirit. In
the Cross is the treasure of virtues; in the Cross is perfection and holiness.
There is no salvation of soul nor hope of eternal life, except in the Cross.
Take up, therefore, your cross and follow Jesus, and you will enter into life
To accomplish the prophecy that the Messiah would be born in
Bethlehem, the city of David, God did not work a miracle, but made use
of the edict of a pagan emperor.

Caesar Augustus, in order to apportion the taxation of his subjects justly,

had determined that the whole world should be enrolled. The decree
ordered every family to journey to the city or town of its ancestors. Judea
being under the vast jurisdiction of Rome, "Joseph went up from Galilee,
out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called
Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled
with Mary, his espoused wife, who was with

From a human angle, the edict of a pagan emperor and the birth of Christ
were as far apart as the earth's two poles. But from God's point of view,
they were very closely connected, because Divine Providence, through the
decree of Caesar, brought about the birth of the divine Babe in Bethlehem
and thus verified the words of the prophet: "And thou, Bethlehem Ephrata,
art a little one among the thousands of Juda: out of thee shall He come forth
unto me that is to be the Ruler in Israel; and His going forth is from the
beginning, from the days of eternity.""5 What looked to be the mere whim
of chance was the accomplishment of the infallible will of God. Following
the inspiration of grace, Mary and Joseph, in obeying the emperor,
indirectly obeyed God.

The conscious conviction of the Blessed Virgin and her chaste spouse
that the decree of an idolatrous prince was the revelation of God's will,
teaches us a very fundamental truth. Because we cannot understand the
infinite action of God on His world, we often wrongly associate the element
of chance with the designs of the Creator. But if we knew the mind of the
Lord, if we were able to unravel the perplexing and puzzling interlacings of
the manifold lines of His Providence, we would live by knowledge, not by
faith.

In trying to understand so deep a mystery, then, we only waste time and

impede our normal growth in holiness. Rather, let us conform to the divine
will, which is the purpose of life. Human events are not due to chance. God
either ordains or permits them. Although we cannot comprehend the
working of God's will in the government of His creation, we are not
therefore to divorce ourselves from Him by doing only our own will. Blind
submission to the divine will in all things is unquestionably the touchstone
of strong, living faith. Harmony is the great, universal law of creation.

Every circumstance of our lives, no matter how trivial, is connected with

our salvation. The society in which we move, our earthly schemes, sickness
and health, joy and sorrow - all promote or retard our progress in virtue. To
convince ourselves of this ignored truth, we have but to look back over our
lives. How often has good or evil followed from what we falsely considered
an insignificant event in our worldly lot?
 Accordingly, it is self-evident that God's will must be the compass of our
lives in temporal no less than in spiritual concerns; otherwise we will never
die to ourselves and live solely to God. We belong to Him absolutely and
entirely. Upon our submission to His will, therefore, depends our salvation,
and He will further our dearest interests only if we totally abandon
ourselves to Him.

How important, then, is the lesson that Mary and Joseph inculcate by
their obedience to the command of an earthly sovereign. Nazareth, where
they dwelt, was, in the natural course of events, the town in which Christ
should have been born. But they did not demand of God a miracle as
indisputable proof that Bethlehem was the divinely chosen birthplace of the
Messiah. They saw God's will in the ordinance of the emperor.

When we ask God to accomplish His will in our regard by extraordinary

means, we are but gratifying our pride. In executing His will, God rarely
deviates from the natural order. Hence, what presumption it is on our part to
expect Him to do for us what He did for His Blessed Mother and St. Joseph
only in extreme urgency.

After Christ, no one has taught as eloquently as Mary how we must act
when God wills us to bear the Cross. She was in destitute circumstances,
and in her critical condition, to travel to a distant and strange land, in
winter, and without even the necessities of life for herself or her Child,
required an act of the highest moral courage. But she murmured neither
against God nor against the edict of Caesar Augustus, although the divine
will as manifested by the decree of the civil ruler entailed for her
distressingly bitter suffering. She did not question the designs of
Providence, but hastened to accomplish them. Nor did she complain
because God had sent her a cross entirely at variance with her wondrous
dignity as Mother of Christ. Her confidence in God matched her love of
Him, and she departed calmly to seek a home among strangers for the
Creator of the world, her soul enraptured with the peace of God.
The narrative of Christ's birth, inexhaustible in its meaning, is sublime in its
simplicity. "While all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the
midst of her course, Thy almighty Word leapt down from ... Thy royal
throne .i16 The Son of God, born miraculously of the Virgin Mary, is
enthroned among the brute cattle. Only the faith of Mary could fully
appreciate the utter destitution, the homelessness, of that eternally
significant birth.

We can picture her lovingly embracing her Child and adoring Him as her
God. We can visualize her wrapping Him in swaddling clothes and gently
laying Him on the straw in the manger.

When we ponder the extreme poverty of the Child and the fact that, at
His birth, there were only two spectators, we cannot but marvel at the
faith of His mother. Is this the God who "laid the foundations of the earth,
when the morning stars praised Him together, and all the sons of God
made a joyful melody"?"' Cribbed and confined in the narrow manger, is
this the God whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain? How can we
reconcile the poverty and humility of His birth with the prophecy of the
archangel that He would be great and would be called the Son of the
Most High?

Reason, powerless before this overwhelming mystery, can only wonder

and adore. The God "with whom there is no change nor shadow of
alterationi1' is now subject to the suffering of frail mortals. The God of
infinite power is now a helpless Infant. Externally, He is like every other
child. He knows all things, since He is God; but He cannot even speak, let
alone communicate His knowledge intelligently. His inarticulate cries prove
His helplessness.

How severely the eternal Father tried the faith of the mother of His
divine Son! We cannot comprehend Mary's thoughts as she gazed on her
Child with wondering awe. How conflicting her feelings when she
contemplated her own nothingness and the infinite greatness of the God
miraculously born of her! Who can conceive the fervor of her prayer, the
depths of her love, or the tenderness of her motherly solicitude?

Nor can we form a true idea of the peace and joy that Christ, with
boundless beneficence, bestowed upon His mother. It was for Mary Heaven
by anticipation when she lifted Him from the manger, cradled Him in her
arms, or folded Him to her heart. Her happiness was indescribable when the
body of her Child touched her body. That same body touches ours in Holy
Communion. The love that Christ lavished upon His mother was not the
love of an ordinary child. It was the product of reason and grace; it was
divine love, not instinctive human love. And Mary received it with the
utmost humility, never for a moment deeming herself worthy of it, but
returning the glory of a favor so precious to her divine Benefactor.

Such love set her heart on fire with love of her infant Son. Not merely as
her Son, but as her God, as her unique Savior, since she had shared
anticipatively in the merits of His Passion and death, did the Blessed
Mother love her divine Child. She fully appreciated that she could not love
Him too much, because, as God, He was worthy of infinite love. Her love,
actuated by grace, was purely supernatural. Its action, its fervor, and its
progress could be neither diminished nor restrained, because Mary loved
her Child and her God according to the measure of the grace with which she
was full. We have but a very faint notion of the deluge of delight that
overflowed unimpeded in her immaculate soul.

The love of her divine Child, which was the reason for Mary's
indefinable joy, was also the cause of her bitter sorrow. The sword of
sorrow that transfixed the heart of Christ likewise pierced her own heart.
Mary's suffering equaled her love. But although both gripped her soul
simultaneously, neither the one nor the other could disturb her peace of
mind or victimize her with any inordinate thought of self. Her joy did not
transport her, nor did her sorrow and suffering depress her. She received
both with perfect resignation to the divine will.

Like Mary, we should strive with every power within us to love Christ
for His own sake. Purity of intention will then characterize our thoughts,
words, and actions. Our Lord will be their principle and term. "He who is
perfect in charity," says St. Clement of Alexandria, "does not go through
the motive of the love of God: God is the most important, nay, the only
end of all the works of the lover.i119

Love of God for His own sake is not mercenary. "It does not," to use the
words of St. Bernard, "seek its own interests. True love suffices to itself; it
is its own reward: it seeks nothing but the object beloved.""' Again, like
Mary, we should not long for divine comfort, but should willingly accept
and bear the Cross in the spirit of true followers of our crucified Master.
The views of worldly wisdom and the Providence of God are entirely
incompatible.

In announcing the momentous fact of Christ's birth, the angel told the
humble shepherds that they would recognize the Savior of the world by His
poverty: "This day is born to you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord, in the
city of David. And this shall be a sign unto you: You shall find the Infant
wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in i121 a manger.

The eternal Father tested the faith of these illiterate men, but only to
strengthen it; for immediately after the angel had conveyed his remarkable
news to them, the celestial choirs chanted the most sublime symphony of
the sweetest song that man ever heard: "Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace to men of good will.i122

The shepherds proceeded at once to verify the heavenly revelation. With

the disappearance of the vision, unable to restrain their feelings, they said to
one another, " `Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is
come to pass, which the Lord bath showed to us.' And they came with haste,
and they found Mary and Joseph, and the Infant lying in the manger. ,123

Simple and beautiful must have been their description of the remarkable
illumination with which they had been so specially favored. We can behold
them kneeling before the crib and adoring, praising, and thanking God, and
paying their tribute of reverent homage and deep love to His mother. They
could not but conclude that Christ had been born mysteriously, for they
found Mary, not the victim of the painful suffering usually associated with
childbirth, but in perfect health.

Her soul was doubtless stirred with sentiments of admiration for the
wondrous Providence of God when she witnessed the first adorers of her
divine Child who had been led to the crib by the message of an angel, and
her heart pulsed with gratitude for the high honor that God had conferred on
her. Never had she realized so vividly God's estimate of poverty, humility,
and simplicity; for not to Herod and his sycophants, not to the rich and
powerful, not to the learned masters in Israel, not to the proud and carnal-
minded, but to the lowly and poor of an outlying rural region was the
astounding fact of Christ's birth first revealed. In reflecting on this inspiring,
soulstirring truth, Mary fully appreciated the meaning of her own abject
poverty and the extreme destitution of her spouse.

Holy Scripture does not enlarge on the meeting of Mary and the
shepherds. It simply states, "Mary kept all these words, pondering them in
her heart.""' She was too well grounded in virtue to neglect any opportunity
of advancing in the way of God. She lived only to glorify God by her
growth in holiness. Queen of Saints that she was, she listened most
attentively to the simple and appealing message of the shepherds, which
was inspired by the God who had miraculously led these humble and
sincere men to the lowly palace of the newborn King. "Pondering them in
her heart," she used all their words for her spiritual nourishment.
 How full of instruction for us is the revelation of Christ's birth to the
poor and unassuming shepherds! Like them, we shall find Christ only if we
are simple, guileless, humble, and docile. "Amen, I say to you, unless you
be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the
kingdom of Heaven.""'

Only when the soul is innocent and artless, open and ingenuous, frank
and confiding, does it become fit soil for the growth of every virtue.
Childlike simplicity is the primeval novitiate of holiness. The searching
rays of divine grace penetrate with the utmost ease the soul of a child. By
becoming like little children in the sight of God, we will travel the path of
perfection with giant strides, because the humility of the child is the most
potent antidote against pride, whose deadening effect paralyzes our
progress.

Every phase of Christ's life is an object lesson portraying some particular

truth. The angel informed the shepherds that they would find the Child
wrapped in swaddling clothes. What could be more weak than a newborn
infant thus attired! By willingly submitting to a state of extreme feebleness
and therefore of total dependence, Christ taught us how to overcome the
degrading bondage of our self-will, which makes us the worst of slaves.
Perhaps we have learned in the school of bitter experience how prone we
are to vice and how apathetic to virtue. "All men are ruined on the side of
their natural propensities.""' We must conquer our natural impulses if we do
not wish to defeat eternally the designs of God in our regard.
 Now, the human will is disciplined and reduced to a state of spiritual
bondage by the virtue of obedience. As the infant Christ, wrapped in
swaddling clothes, was incapable either of movement or resistance, but was
wholly dependent upon His mother, so the soul, even though strong in faith,
is spiritually inert and helpless. It becomes spiritually active through prompt
obedience to lawful authority, especially to him who is for it the direct
voice of God: its spiritual guide.

The soul interiorly mortified by fidelity in obeying the divine bidding as

expressed to it by its director, finds it comparatively easy to practice the
humility, the poverty, and the self-denial that Christ preaches with magic
persuasiveness from His pulpit - the cheerless crib. How low He sank in the
estimation of men in order to teach us the virtue that we must learn and
practice before we can practice any other virtue!

In imitation of His overwhelming humility, we should never desire

worldly honor and pre-eminence. "You know that the princes of the
Gentiles lord it over them; and they that are greater exercise power upon
them. It shall not be so among you, but whosoever will be the greater
among you, let him be your minister. And he that will be first among you
shall be your servant. "127

Although the poorest of God's poor, if we are truly humble, we will not
complain about the adverse conditions of our earthly lot. If rich, we will not
glory in our abundance and make of it a dangerous, even fatal, gift,
prompting us to indulge habits of luxury and indolence. On the contrary, we
will be perpetually astir to alleviate human suffering and to improve the
estate of God's favored children, the poor. By our spirit of detachment from
riches, we will glorify God for His bounty and thus render ourselves
impervious to the alluring appeal of sensuality. Disengagement from the
perishable goods of earth will enable us to live mortified lives conformable
to the doctrine and example of Jesus Christ. If we learn the lesson taught so
forcefully by the eternal God from His comfortless crib, we cannot be
delicate members of a crucified Head.
Incarnate, Christ was not bound by human or positive law. The lawgiver is
not subject to his own laws, and Christ, the God-Man, was the Lawgiver of
both the old and the new dispensations. But with a humility that shocks and
confounds our detestable pride, He freely submitted to the rigorous and
abasing ceremony of circumcision. Mary beheld her Child, in subjecting
Himself to this law,128 sign Himself with the sign of sinners and willingly
accept the punishment of their sin. She thus witnessed her divine Son bind
Himself to obey perfectly every ordinance of the Old Law and offer
Himself to His eternal Father as the Victim of the New Testament for the
sins of mankind.

The first shedding of His blood was but the sorrowful prelude to its full
outpouring on the heights of Calvary. Today, the storm is threatening, "for
the sky is red and lowering.""' On Golgotha, it will break with full force,
when Christ will redeem man "from the curse of the Law, being made a
curse for us, for it is written: Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree.""'

If we could sound the depths of Mary's love for her Child, only then
would we understand the anguish of her sorrow as she minutely observed
the knife cutting his virginal flesh and the blood flowing from His sacred
body.

But she docilely underwent this trial, the ominous foreboding of far
greater pain, when she would, with her divine Son, drain the chalice of His
Passion. With unshaken faith, she adored the decrees of Heaven, suffering
as no other mother ever suffered or ever will. Through a common bond of
sympathy born of most intense love for her Child, she became a holocaust
with Him for the innumerable sins of men. Although her foresight of
suffering, which began when she consented to be the Mother of Christ,
intensified during this initial shedding of His blood, with the generosity
characteristic of supernatural sacrificial love, she united her offering of
herself with that of her divine Son. Her faith, which was her love in action,
enabled her to surrender herself to a life of perennial suffering with loving
resignation to the will of God.

The name Jesus signifies "God is salvation, the Savior." Mary's

foreknowledge of the Passion and death of Christ, consequent upon her free
acceptance of the divine motherhood, enlightened her to understand the full
meaning of this name, which her Child was called both at His circumcision
and also by the angel before He was conceived in the womb. Of all mortals,
she could best appreciate the sorrow and desolation identified with the
name of her divine Son. Every time she uttered it, she felt, with a sorrow
"great as the seai131 the agony and dereliction of His bitter Passion and His
brutal Crucifixion; she realized that, although she was exalted to the highest
heavens as Mother of God, her very exaltation would be the reason and the
measure of her suffering. Christ, by His baptism of blood, became the King
of martyrs; Mary, by sharing in spirit His Passion, became the Queen of
Martyrs.

Can we claim Jesus as our blood Brother and Mary as our mother if we
shrink from sorrow and pain? The Cross is inescapable. There is no
salvation of soul nor hope of eternal life except in the Cross.

Take up your cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, and you will enter into
life everlasting. He has gone before you carrying His Cross, and has died
for you on the Cross, so that you also might carry your cross and desire to
die on the cross. "If we be dead with Christ ... we shall live also together
with Christ.""' "As you are partakers of the sufferings, so shall you be also
of the consolation.""'

"Behold, all depends on the Cross and dying on the Cross; and there is
no other way to life and to true interior peace than the way of the holy
Cross.... Go where you will, seek what you will, and you shall not find a
higher way above, nor a safer way below, than the way of the holy Cross.
Arrange all things to your liking, yet you shall always find something to
suffer, whether you will it or not; and thus you will always find the

The patient endurance of life's hardships, in imitation of Jesus and Mary,

is the price of eternal life. "Dearly beloved, think not strange the burning
heat which is to try you, as if some new thing happened to you. But if you
partake of the sufferings of Christ, rejoice that, when His glory shall be
revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy."135

We must, then, appropriate the lesson of Christ's physical circumcision

by the moral circumcision of our hearts, "the circumcision not made by
hand in despoiling of the body of the flesh.""' This is indispensable if we
wish to resemble Christ and His Blessed Mother. Our yearning to become
like to them will soften the pain of our earthly martyrdom, will make us
gladly tread with them the winepress of anguish and sorrow, and will
transmute the bitterest desolation of life's warfare into the sweetest joy,
which shall be only the anticipation of the joy to be eternally ours when the
God of all consolation shall wipe away all tears from our eyes.137
Like every other Jewish mother, Mary submitted to the law of the
purification."' She was not bound by the law, because she was a virgin as
well as a mother. But she obeyed it, hiding her divine motherhood and her
miraculous virginity under the mantle of humility. In this mystery, her
humility shines forth in all its radiant splendor. Like Mary, we must never
affect singularity, but should willingly comply with the common usages of
society, even those from which we might justly dispense ourselves.

Great as was her wondrous prerogative, greater still was the humility that
led her to conceal it. Abidingly conscious of our nothingness, we must
realize that God's favors are not to pander to our pride. Even if our virtue
should exalt us to the spiritual level of him of whom Christ said, "Amongst
those that are born of women, there is not a greater prophet than John the
Baptist,""' we must never glorify ourselves by courting the admiration and
the esteem of others; rather, after the example of our mother, we must use
our exaltation to deepen our humility. Holiness is indispensable for us as
God's creatures, but let us not forget that the beginning and the end of
holiness is humility. The higher the building, the deeper the foundation
must be. The spiritual edifice of our sanctity will tower into the heavens
only if it is built on the deep, constant conviction of our nothingness. Pride
converts the highest virtue into the deadliest vice.
 Mary offered her divine Son to the eternal Father and united her own
oblation to the offering that Christ made of Himself. With a humility
fascinating to the angels, absolute self-extinction vitalizing the sacrifice
both of the Child and of His mother, Mary's offering was distinguished by a
generosity born of her conscious recognition of her lowliness. An intense
yearning to do God's will in all things was its inspiration.

In the dedication of herself to the divine will, our Immaculate Mother

teaches us our first and most important duty. God has made us for Himself.
We belong solely to Him. If we grasped this truth, the wellspring of our
spiritual lives would be to glorify God through perfect conformity to His
will. Ever appreciating His sovereign dominion over us, we would
unhesitatingly make every sacrifice demanded of us and, by the right use of
His gifts, return the glory of them to Him who, with infinite liberality, gives
them to us for His own greater honor and glory. If we were convinced that
we exist not for ourselves, but for God, we would so burn with religious
fervor that we would set the souls of our brethren on fire.

The eternal Father gave the most precious treasure that Heaven
possessed, His own divine Son, to Mary. In the Temple, Mary returned to
the Father His munificent gift by consecrating to His honor and glory her
Child, and, for her generosity, the eternal Father made her, through Christ,
the dispensatrix of the riches of the Godhead.

Since everything we have is from God, He can recall His gifts from us,
their stewards. When He takes back what He has given, it is to make us love
Him, the divine Donor, more than His gifts. The supreme and consuming
longing to do God's will, which is the same as loving Him above all things,
inspired Mary to offer to the eternal Father His and her divine Son. The
greatness and grandeur of her reward - her meriting to become with Christ
the channel of grace to souls - proves how pleasing to the eternal Father
was her detachment when she offered to Him her dearest possession. Let us
imitate Mary's generosity, and God will reward us according to the measure
of our self-sacrifice in parting with His gifts.

A mother was not obliged by the law of Moses to present and to ransom
her firstborn son. In order, however, to free herself from legal uncleanness,
she had to submit to the ceremony of purification by presenting herself in
the Temple not earlier than the fortieth day after the birth of her first child
and by making the offering incumbent upon the poor: two pigeons or
turtledoves.

God appraised, not Mary's gift, but the love that inspired it. What we
offer to God is valueless in His sight unless the offering is prompted by
love. The gift means nothing to Him; the love motivating it means
everything. If we love God above all things, we can refuse Him nothing. If
we have nothing to offer to Him, we can offer ourselves, and such an
oblation will fully compensate for our poverty. No one could have been
poorer than Mary, but her love made her gift the richest that was ever
offered to God by a creature.

Man considers the external offering. He cannot penetrate beyond it. Man
beholds only the face. God looks at the heart. Our self-renunciation is
precious in His eyes only when love is at its core.
Emphasizing the truth of Mary's rare privileges, the saintly Simeon
enlightens her more clearly on the destiny of her divine Child. "Now," he
exclaims, "Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, 0 Lord, according to Thy word,
in peace, because my eyes have seen Thy salvation which Thou hast
prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to the revelation of the
Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.i14o

How many proofs of His paternal love and care did the eternal Father
give to the mother of His only-begotten Son! He does the same for the one
whom He would lead to the heights of perfection. With divine light, He
illumines his mind, thus dispelling his doubts about God's designs upon
him, and braces his faith to undergo the trials associated with their
accomplishment. Mary was too humble to ask of God a grace so great, but
He gave it to her at the very moment when and because, in her glorious
humility, she least expected it.

Simeon entered the Temple at the moment when the divine Infant was
brought in by Mary and Joseph. The holy old man, under the influence of
grace, took Christ in his arms and, with the most ardent love, folded Him to
his heart. Then, after having gazed on the Expectation of the Nations, the
Glory of Israel, and the Redeemer of the World, he asked God to end his
earthly sojourn, for he knew that its loftiest moment had been reached.

Mary heard Simeon's words as if they had been spoken to her by God
Himself. She meditated on them reverently, kept all of them in her heart,
and used them as spiritual food to increase still more her love of God.
Indeed, she cherished every word that had been addressed to her about her
divine Son. With her soul thrilling to inward bliss and overflowing with the
holiest gratitude, the horizon of her knowledge gradually developed in the
splendor of divine light. It had begun to shine on her in the house of her
cousin Elizabeth, had become more brilliant in her meeting with the
shepherds, and was now approaching its meridian glory in her interview
with Simeon. In each of these notable events of her life, her confidence in
God waxed ever stronger and more secure.

Holy Scripture states very explicitly the frame of mind of both Mary and
Joseph on hearing the prophecy of Simeon concerning the Savior of men:
"And His father and mother were wondering at those things which were
spoken concerning Him.i141

The soul over whom God has peculiar designs wonders just as much
when it discovers how, through the use of human agents, He strengthens
its faith in the inspirations with which He has blessed it. In a manner that
the soul never dreamed of, God confirms its state, but only when,
corresponding with grace, the soul banishes its doubts and refrains from
vainly prying into His secrets.
 The lesson is unmistakable. We must submit wholly to God, with
unwavering faith, serenely confident that He will give us the necessary light
and strength to cooperate with Him in the realization of His designs for us.
The Devil will tempt us to use reason, so prone to error and illusion, to
unravel the mystery of the workings of the Spirit of God within us. But by
flattering our pride, he will close the eyes of our soul, and because we fail
to conform in artless simplicity to the divine will, we will be enveloped in
the darkness of earth instead of being illumined with the light of Heaven.

Once the will of God is made clear to us, we should stifle our natural
inclinations and patiently wait until God sees fit to lead us step by step
along the path of perfection. Only the soul that humbly does God's bidding -
only the soul that, because of its wholehearted conformity to the divine will,
has absolute trust in Him who feeds the birds of the air - only such a soul
will God rid of anxious fears and gloomy misgivings by gradually
penetrating it with His divine light. Its full supernatural splendor He will
reveal when He shall have accomplished his designs in the soul.

In so doing, God acts for His own glory and the sanctification of His
creatures. How merciful is God in not unfolding to the soul that He selects
for the accomplishment of an extraordinary work, all His designs in the
soul's regard. If such a soul saw at once the full scope of those designs, with
the foreknowledge of the happy issue of its trials, the soul would lose the
reward that God has promised to those who blindly obey Him, and the
sacrifices made with the conscious recognition of their happy issue would
rob God of the glory that the creature is bound to give the Creator.
 Exalted above all other creatures by her eminently unique destiny, Mary
never inquired into the manner of its accomplishment. She lived solely by
faith. Directed by its heavenly light, she followed it wherever it led her; but
such was her self-surrender to God that, had He so willed, she would have
been content to remain in darkness.

How divinely eloquent the lesson! Too often, alas, we become dispirited,
distressed, or disconsolate when God seems to withdraw from us. The price
of our imitation of Mary's abandonment to God is daily self-extinction. We
will live wholly to God only when we are wholly dead to ourselves.
The profound and comprehensive prophecy of holy Simeon reveals a fact of
startling significance. It foretells that Christ, from His advent into the world
until the end of time, shall be a "sign of contradiction,i142 the occasion of
eternal misery for the wicked and of eternal bliss for the just, manifesting
thereby the secret thoughts of hearts. What a strange picture of infinite
power and infinite weakness, of supernal glory and worldly ignominy, of
heavenly light and earthly darkness does Christ present to mortal eyes! He
shall test, and by so doing shall strengthen, the faith of some, and they will
follow Him. Unbelievers He shall repel, and because of their unbelief, He
shall be the instrument of their everlasting perdition.

Mary, to whom Simeon had addressed these words, realized that her
Child would be contradicted and utterly rejected by the Jews who had, for
forty centuries, unceasingly sighed for Him, their Savior. She also
understood that history would repeat itself. She knew that myriads even of
His faithful followers throughout the world would turn from Him and
through their bitter hostility to His teaching, both by word and by example,
by setting man's fallible opinion before God's infallible word, by open and
daringly profligate conduct, by fear of the world's judgment and expectation
of worldly advantage, would make His coming the occasion of their eternal
ruin.
 Simeon also convinced Mary that she would share in the suffering and
sorrow of her divine Son. "And thy own soul," he said, "a sword shall
pierce.""' How clear and explicit these words are! The sword that will
pierce Christ's body will transfix Mary's soul. Her Child, by becoming the
King of Martyrs, will make her their queen. Her sorrow will be as great as
the sea.

This ominous prophecy of future trial did not disturb Mary's peace of
mind, because her will was one with the will of God. This it was that begot
in her sensitive soul perfect union with the sufferings of her Child.

What a marked disparity between the woeful prediction of Simeon and

the joyous tidings of the archangel Gabriel announcing the unutterable
greatness, the unimaginable glory, of the Redeemer of men! Mary
undoubtedly noted the seeming contradiction; but, pondering in her heart
every word addressed to her about her divine Son, she knew, with her lively
faith, that God, who reveals His plans only gradually to His creatures,
would in due time reconcile it.

And here Mary teaches us a very fundamental lesson. In order to live,

not to ourselves, but to God, we must bear the Cross in union with Christ.
Mary was the Queen of Martyrs because she was most intimately united
with the King of Martyrs. She suffered with Christ, experiencing in her soul
what He underwent in His body. The union of their suffering was perfect.

If we are to imitate our Mother, we must never separate our sufferings

from the sufferings of Christ. This bond of sympathy between us and our
crucified God will sustain us no matter how heavy our cross. Indeed, we
will suffer with joy if we realize that Christ is suffering with us and in us,
that He sends us the cross only so that He may trace His image in our souls
by uniting us more closely with Him.

Bearing the cross in union with Christ, we will carry it, not
faintheartedly, not fretfully, but like Mary, with tranquillity, lovingly
resigned to His will. And the foreknowledge of suffering will not depress us
or make us recoil through the consciousness of our own frailty. Firmly
believing that God will support us in the hour of trial, we will not
undermine our spiritual strength by fruitlessly anticipating that hour but,
with true Christian courage, will patiently await help from on high,
implicitly confident that God will give it at the opportune moment and
according to the measure of our need of it.

But to mount to the highest spiritual level, we must do more than suffer
in union with Christ. To possess the spirit of suffering fully, we must neither
curiously investigate the designs of Divine Providence nor try to harmonize
the manifestation at one period with the apparently contradictory revelation
of God's will at a later period. In not disclosing to us His plans all at once,
in seeming to contradict Himself by His revelations, God wishes us to store
up great merit. Mary did not strive to square the words of the archangel
Gabriel with those of holy Simeon. Her faith taught her that the predictions
of both were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and she left it to God to reconcile
their apparent inconsistency. Let us imitate our Mother in this respect, and
God, in His infinite wisdom, will make all things work together unto our
good.
Despite the sacrifices entailed, the Magi, enlightened by God, corresponded
with His grace decisively, perseveringly, and with absolute confidence.

The recognition and adoration of her divine Son by the Magi was a
source of great consolation to Mary. He who had become man to die for all
men was first seen and adored by the Jews, represented by the shepherds,
and afterward by the Gentiles, in the persons of the Magi.

Interiorly illumined by grace and exteriorly guided by the striking

appearance of a star in the East, they left home and country and, directed by
"the magnificent language of Heaven," journeyed to Judea in quest of
Christ. They inquired of Herod about the birthplace of the newborn King:
"Where is He that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in
the East and are come to adore Him.""' The scribes and Pharisees told them
of the prophecy that Christ would be born in Bethlehem. As they resumed
their journey, the star that had disappeared on their entrance into Jerusalem
reappeared in all its heavenly splendor; and, "seeing the star, they rejoiced
with exceeding great joy. It went before them until it came and stood over
where the Child was. And entering into the house, they found the Child
with Mary, His mother. And falling down, they adored Him. And opening
their treasures, they offered Him gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh." 145

We can imagine these three rulers, overcome by supernatural joy,

narrating to Mary, with beautiful simplicity, their personal history and
captivating her with their eloquent account of the mysterious star that had
led them to Christ. Having adored their God, they indubitably paid their
reverent regards to her, His mother. But their tribute of veneration did not
awaken within her the slightest feeling of pride. It made her only all the
more humble. Her love of God was such that she referred their kingly
homage to Christ, with whom she was one in the redemption of souls. The
dominant thought of Mary's mind, the overpowering sentiment of her soul
while they were greeting her with cordial reverence, was one of profound
gratitude to God for having revealed His divine Son to the pagan nations of
the world, thus aiding them to free themselves from the slavery of idolatry.

How can we describe her happiness when she witnessed the adoration of
her Child by these learned kings, who would with burning enthusiasm teach
their subjects, both by word and example, the wonders of divine love that
emanated from the crib of the infant Savior? Her joy, however, was not
selfish. She rejoiced in virtue of the honor, love, and adoration that the regal
Magi, from the depths of their souls, lavished upon her divine Son. The
greatest simplicity had characterized Mary's interview with the shepherds.
Enchanting humility was its distinctive charm during the visit of the Magi.
Their adoration of Christ and their respectful homage to her only intensified
her unselfish love of her God.

Any unusual consideration, especially from the powerful ones of earth,

tends to feed the pride that is so intimately interwoven with weak human
nature. But far from contributing to Mary's self-complacency, the tribute of
veneration paid to her by the three kings only subserved her self-effacement
by increasing her humility.
 The will of God being the ruling power of her life, she beheld, with the
eyes of pure faith, the working of grace in their souls. It was grace that
moved them to come from afar. God had called them, and they obeyed His
call. It was grace that strengthened them to overcome the perils of their
long, difficult, and wearisome journey. It was grace that nerved them to
inquire fearlessly concerning the birth of Christ. It was grace that made
them beard the lion in his den, for they doubtless knew who Herod was,
how insanely jealous of those claiming equality with him. It was grace that
made them recognize Christ as King of Heaven and earth. It was grace that
drew from them their tribute of homage to the Mother of the Redeemer.

Recognizing the operation of grace in their souls, Mary, far from

hindering its supernatural action, allowed them freely to express their
sentiments of love and joy. Spiritually delighted with their gratitude to God,
she valued their veneration just insofar as it tended to His glory. Only a
great soul, only a soul most closely united with God, can relinquish the
glory given to it by returning it wholly to God.

If we are to forego ourselves entirely and make the honor and the
distinction flowing from God's gifts redound, not to our own glory, but to
that of our best Benefactor, humility like Mary's is essential. It may be
categorically stated that her fathomless humility convinced the Magi that
she was the Mother of God, for who but the Mother of God could be
exalted above men and angels and still be nothing in her own eyes?
The fear of losing his crown, born of the wild passion of jealousy, so
wrought upon the corrupt mind and depraved heart of the ruthless Herod
that he resolved to kill his infant rival. But just as it might have seemed that
his brutal scheme would succeed, "behold an angel of the Lord appeared in
sleep to Joseph, saying, `Arise, and take the Child and His mother, and fly
into Egypt; and be there until I shall tell thee. For it will come to pass that
Herod will seek the Child to destroy Him.' Who arose and took the Child
and His mother by night and retired into Egypt. And he was there until the
death of Herod.""'

Not to Mary, but to Joseph, did the angel manifest God's will. But such
was Mary's self-effacement that she did not debate with herself why God
showed His preference for her chaste spouse. From the mere viewpoint of
reason, it would seem that God should have honored her rather than Joseph,
because she was the mother of the divine Child and Joseph was only His
foster father. She was assuredly as solicitous as Joseph about protecting the
life of her Son. Had God spoken to her through His angel, or to her and
Joseph simultaneously, she would have felt greater confidence. Had Mary
been the slave of self-love, thoughts like these would naturally have crossed
her mind.
 By the self-extinction that she exhibited instead, she teaches us to receive
and execute God's will even though He speaks to us by those who are
perhaps our inferiors in virtue, and thus to conquer the insinuating and
subtle passion of pride.

Incomprehensibly exalted above Joseph because of the divine maternity,

Mary, in her great humility, considered Joseph, as head of the Holy Family,
better fitted to receive the message of Heaven than she, the mother of the
divine Child. We must try to practice this lesson taught so persuasively by
her whom God raised to the pinnacle of greatness. "Let every soul," says St.
Paul, "be subject to higher powers. For there is no power but from God; and
those that are, are ordained of God.i147 God reveals His will through the
channels of ecclesiastical or civil authority. And strange as it may seem, we
should actually rely more on this indirect communication than if He
apparently spoke to us directly, because the Devil, "a liar, and the father
thereof," is ever ready to deceive us by pretended revelations, since "truth is
not in him.i143 Moreover, we are morally certain of God's will in our
regard only when the judgment of our spiritual director concurs with the
voice of conscience. "He who tries to direct himself," exclaims St. Bernard,
"makes himself the disciple of a fool."

Mary's faith was severely tried by the command of the angel to flee into
Egypt. Her Son was the Son of the Most High; yet she, His mother, must
defend Him, the King of kings, from the vengeance of an earthly sovereign
by flight into a pagan land. Her Child was the God of infinite power. Could
He not, then, remain in Bethlehem and crush with a mere word the tyrant
who sought His life? Why must the infinite God flee from His finite
creature? Why must He subject Himself, by a precipitate flight, to the
dangers of a sojourn in a heathen country? Mary must have been severely
tried by such thoughts. Humanly speaking, the glowing prophecy of Gabriel
that of Christ's kingdom there would be no end seemed completely set at
naught by the present plight of its King.

Then, too, Mary and Joseph were without resources and knew nothing
about the land to which they were to direct their steps, except that it was
pagan. What could they expect there but persecution? As a believer in the
one true God, Joseph would find it hard to ply his trade successfully for
their support among idolaters. Nor did they know how long their painful
banishment would last. It required more than human courage to encounter
and to conquer obstacles so great.

But despite the severity of the trial, Mary's mind was at rest. Her afflicted
maternal feelings were not prejudicial to her total abandonment to God's
will. Without voluntary anxiety and fear, she obeyed immediately and
started in the darkness of the night on her long journey with her divine
Child and Joseph. She had nothing to fear for herself, for Joseph, or for her
Son, because she carried her God in her arms.

No matter how heavy our cross, provided Christ is with us through our
full submission to His will, we shall, like Mary, clothed with the strength of
God, face calmly even the fury of Hell.

The conduct of Mary and Joseph on learning the will of God is worthy of
our absorbing study and our wholehearted imitation. They did not allege as
an excuse for not obeying the command of Heaven the difficulties of the
journey or its dangers to them and their divine treasure. They were neither
tossed to and fro in a tumult of doubt and indecision, nor did they attempt
their hard task with the certainty of failing. Theirs was religion in the finest
sense of the word: blind obedience to God. Their stay in a pagan land must
have been very unpleasant; but they awaited a definite sign from Heaven
before returning to Galilee.

Once we surrender ourselves to the divine will, obedience must be our

solace and support. We must disregard the doubts with which Satan inspires
us, by acting against them in confidence that God will provide for us even
though to do so might cost Him a miracle. Absolutely secure through the
practice of loving obedience, we will distrust our own judgment, and no
unchristian anxiety for tomorrow will disturb us while we are busied in
present services. Lowly obedience will keep our minds joyously free from
vague fears and uncertain, indefinite surmises about the future. We will
view God in His tranquil Providence with the assurance that He will always
take into account our eternal interests. Thus only through complete
conformity to His will can we ensure our own peacefulness of soul and
promote the glory of our Creator.
Words cannot describe the sorrow of Mary's maternal heart when she
realized the melancholy fact that she had lost her Child, her God. Yet it was
with an entire absence of tumult and feverish emotion, with a love calm,
full, reverent, and contemplative, and a mind disciplined into submission to
God, that she and the silently sorrowful Joseph sought Him among their
kinsfolk and acquaintances.

As He withdrew from Mary and Joseph, so Jesus often withdraws

unexpectedly from souls serving Him with all possible fervor. Then sorrow
rives their hearts. In the anguish of their desolation - for what loss can be
compared to the loss of God? - they sift their consciences and, with
meticulous introspection, examine and grieve over their smallest faults.

But their fears are groundless. Christ has not abandoned them. He
hides Himself from them to prove the sincerity of their love of Him, to
divest it of selfishness and impart to it a truer tone and character. They
will gain spiritual light, as did Mary, at the price of serene surrender of
themselves to the unseen God - not by bewailing the loss of sensible
devotion, but by silently grieving over the apparent privation of their
God. In their distress of soul, they will, like Mary, glorify Him by making
the agony of their loss bind them to Him more closely than ever.
 And they must imitate the Blessed Mother in their quest of Him. With
love kindled to undying ardor, she sought Him everywhere. How pleasing
to her God was her practical maternal solicitude! If, sensing the greatness of
our loss, we seek Christ as Mary did, we will be all the more keenly and
lovingly conscious of the joy of His presence when we find Him.

Wondrously inventive are the ways of divine love. If we always felt the
delights of Christ's presence within us, we would (for such is the force of
habit) fail to appraise so inestimable a gift at its true value. Whereas if,
bereft of sensible fervor and desolate with sorrow, we love God above all
things, perceiving our great need of Him, we will redouble our efforts to
recover our lost treasure. We will pray better, be more recollected, be more
indifferent to the life that is so empty without God, and be intent on one
thing only: His immediate return.

We need not travel far. We will not find Him among worldlings, who cast
down moral excellence from its true position and enthrone in its place the
usurping empire of mere reason, who are so elated over the findings of
science, conversant as it is with experiments on material creation, as to treat
God with scorn or to forget His existence. Nor will we discover Him among
our kinsfolk and acquaintances.

Like Mary, we will find Him in His temple, in His house. There He
dwells day and night, anxiously awaiting our arrival. There we will discern
His presence, but only with the eyes of faith.

When we stagger under the protracted pressure of temptation and are

benumbed by the bleaching winds of spiritual aridity, let us approach the
fire ever burning in the tabernacle. "In a desert land, and where there is no
way and no water: so in the sanctuary have I come before Thee, to see Thy
power and Thy glory.""' Yes, we will see His veiled glory and be
strengthened with His power if we visit Him in His temple and tell Him
what affrights us, what burdens us.

The divine silence of Christ in His school of love, the tabernacle, will
breathe into our souls the peace of God and will make our burdens light.
In the presence of the eucharistic King, we will learn every phase of the
science of salvation. There we will acquire from the source of all wisdom
what books cannot impart unless they stress the knowledge of Christ, the
knowledge alone necessary.

Illumined by the light emanating from the tabernacle, we can cultivate a

graciously reverent familiarity with Christ, a privilege unknown to fear and
cold respect, a privilege issuing solely from pure love for our Lord and
Master. Like Mary, who said to her Child, "Son, why hast Thou done so to
us? Behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing,i150 we can, with
devotional freedom, ask the God of the Eucharist to enlighten us about His
Providence in our regard. We can exchange confidences, much to the
delight of our infinite Lover.

God does not stand on ceremony with His children. He does not exact of
them trembling fear and dread circumspection. He desires them to come to
Him with humble simplicity and to talk with Him with childlike candor,
telling Him in the language of the heart, rather than the measured accents of
the tongue, of the pain that His crosses inflict and the grief that saddens
their souls. But they alone who, like Mary, do God's will perfectly can
speak to Christ with such childlike familiarity.

In answering His mother's question, Christ emphasized His divinity:

"How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my
Father's business?""' It was her maternal love that prompted Mary's
interrogation. The Savior of men would, by His reply, have her rise above
the natural and focus her vision first and foremost on His divinity, veiled
from mortal eyes by His human nature. The very tone of His voice and the
majesty of His manner could not but prove to Mary and Joseph, as well as
to the doctors of the Law, that He was God as well as man. Being God and
therefore one with His heavenly Father, He put the interests of that Father
above His own. From the tenor of His answer to Mary, it is evident that He
also desired to teach her detachment and so to prepare her for her final
separation from Him at the foot of the Cross.

Holy Scripture remarks, "And they understood not the word that He
spoke unto them," 52 thus proving that it was a part of the divine plan to
unfold only gradually even to Mary and Joseph the great work the divine
Christ had come on earth to accomplish. Deaf to the suggestions of her
natural maternal love, the Virgin Mother did not inquire into the hidden
meaning of Christ's words.

How heroic her self-renunciation! What a lesson parents may learn from
her example! She loved God above all things. Thus she generously
sacrificed the ties of flesh and blood which are, alas, too often an obstacle
in doing God's will.
 Herein Mary teaches most clearly the duty of parents concerning the
vocation of their child. They may examine the nature of his calling, but they
must not frustrate, for any reason whatsoever, the will of God in his regard.
The Author of nature, since He has dowered the heart of man with human
affections, would not have His grace destroy them. Rather, He would have
it restrain them when they become inordinate, and so subject them to His
love. After the example of Jesus and Mary, both parents and children must
make their Father's business the paramount issue of their lives. This they
will do only when they submit with loving docility, and regardless of the
sacrifice, to the recognized will of God.
Obedience epitomized the life of Christ: "He went down with them and
came to Nazareth and was subject to them";153 "He humbled Himself,
becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross.""' Without
obedience, our religious ideas lie on the mere surface of our mind and have
no root within it. The chief charm of the hidden life of Christ was His lowly
subjection. It was His practice of the difficult virtue of obedience that gave
to the holy obscurity of Nazareth its sweetness, its tranquillity, and its
majesty.

Let us rest awhile in the humble dwelling of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
There we will learn the science of right living. There we will acquire the
free, unconstrained spirit of true devotion by studying the virtues that made
the home of the Holy Family a veritable paradise.

How staggering the thought that the Son of God was for thirty years
subject to His creatures Mary and Joseph! And consider their poverty. They
were satisfied with only the necessities of life and very often were without
even those. But with their minds centered on God, they enjoyed His
benefactions from the common store of nature's bounty. They did not seek
help from their neighbors. They did not rove after the goods of the world.
They indulged no visions of "the earth and the fullness thereof,"'ss because
their hearts were permanently attached to higher things; God was the point
of rest for their minds' eye. They lived in retirement and were familiar only
with God.

It never dawned on the people of Nazareth that the Son of God and His
Virgin Mother dwelt among them. While they were doubtless edified by the
conduct of the Holy Family, they did not know of the divine dignity of
Christ and the miraculous prerogatives of Mary. Neither the mother nor the
reputed father of the divine Child anticipated the designs of Heaven. They
waited patiently until it pleased God to reveal to the expectant world the
astounding mystery of the Incarnation.

With their minds composed, their wishes subdued, and their tempers ever
heavenly, profound peace reigned in the hearts of Mary and Joseph. Divine
love united them. Grace poured constantly from its source - Christ - into the
soul of His mother, and she was the channel through which it was imparted
to His foster father. What unceasing interchange of holy thought between
Christ and Mary and between her and her saintly spouse! Christ was the
object of the uninterrupted, enthralling contemplation of both. We cannot,
therefore, measure their growth in holiness. It was a source of light,
freedom, and consolation to them to have Him ever before them.

We can well imagine the character of their conversation in the presence

of their God. With what eloquence beyond the power of words they must
have thanked Him for His mercy to fallen man! While their hands were
busy, He absorbed their thoughts and affections and thrilled their hearts
with the purest love for Him. He, their Child, was ever speaking to their
souls. What food for thought was His obedience to them! How they
treasured the words that fell from His divine lips!

But although interiorly they adored their God, exteriorly they did His
will by the discreet exercise of their authority over Him. And He, their God,
obeyed them. Their commands were distinguished by considerateness, by a
most charming humility, and by a habitual sense of their immeasurable
inferiority to Him, together with a love springing from their ardent
admiration of His subjection to them who were but dust and ashes.

What glory Christ gave to His eternal Father by thus annihilating

Himself before His creatures through His loving obedience to them! We
cannot comprehend this subjection. Nor can we understand the self-
extinction wrought by grace in their souls that enabled them to command
their divine Child in full accord with His will.

How admirable is Mary because of the virtues that she thus practiced as
she imposed her wishes on her divine Son in obedience to His own desire.
Every command increased her humility and thus, by complete death of self,
contributed to the greater glory of God. She was wholly under the dominion
of grace; God's glory and her own total self-effacement were the twin
sentiments of her heart and soul.

Obedience to lawful authority is often against the current of human

feeling and opinion and the course of the world. But the end of living,
according to the world's wisdom, is utter estrangement from God - moral
ruin. Are we bound by the yoke of the world's bondage, by its inordinate
pride and its overbearing self-sufficiency? If selfwill is our lord and master,
we are not Christ's, for "they that are Christ's have crucified their flesh, with
the vices and concupiscences.i156 We cannot die to ourselves, unless we
obey. What a stimulus to obedience is the absorbing contemplation of the
spectacle of the eternal God debasing Himself to the dust by full submission
to His creatures: "He was subject to them."

Impressive beyond words is the lesson of our Lord's obedience. Equally

impressive is the lesson of Mary's exercise of her authority. A ruler, whether
ecclesiastical or civil, has not inherent but only delegated rights over his
subjects. If he realizes this truth, he will command with charity, with
meekness, with humility, and with due deference to the feelings of those
over whom he has been placed. Let him but convince himself that he is
responsible to God for the use of his authority, and he will command like
Him whom he represents. Only he who has learned to obey can rule. But for
either commanding or obeying, humility is indispensable. A ruler without
humility is a tyrant. A subject without humility is an anarchist.
Great is the power and fascination of the life of Mary at Nazareth. It was a
life of obscurity, contemplation, and labor. Singularity and distinction found
no place in this school of eminent virtue. The ordinary engaged Mary's love
and devotion. Although Heaven had honored her with revelations and
miracles beyond understanding, she gave herself heart and soul with
graceful ease to the commonplace. An enchanting simplicity beautified the
performance of each of her domestic duties. Her whole day's work was
done for God alone, because prayer, simple and sublime, permeated it. The
ardor of her piety ran its course daily without ever attracting attention. The
self-conceit of human nature, which would in others naturally flow from the
consciousness of exaltation, never darkened Mary's mind, because the
thought of God absorbed her. Accordingly, her disposition was serene and
her manner majestic in its unearthly calmness.

Without fidelity to the commonplace, our chief religious duties will

lack stability and perseverance. We should live in such a way that God,
who "searcheth the reins and the hearts, ,157 may be able to regard us
with pleasure. Mere externals are worthless in God's sight. He looks
within. We must edify our neighbor, but to do so, our conduct need in no
way be remarkable.
 In imitation of Mary, our lives must be hidden and obscure. She never
sought the circles of the elite. Her heart was in her home, and hence she
could not be carried on with the stream of the world. She took no interest in
the world's multitude of matters, because she was ever alive to the reality of
things unseen. Only through charity or necessity did she leave the precincts
of her holy dwelling. She had a deep supernatural sense of the fitness of
things. She did not, then, court the company of what the world considers
superior society. Indeed, she mingled only seldom, even with the lowly
inhabitants of Nazareth.

Grace and courtesy inspired her visits. They were noted for their charity.
She eschewed gossip. She was not voluble, because she always strove to
edify her neighbor by her conversation. Although the Mother of God, she
wished to pass as the most insignificant of His creatures. What a rebuke to
the pride that thrives on God's gifts and yearns to live in their reflected
glory! Her hidden sanctity was carefully concealed beneath the noiseless
tenor of her daily life.

To copy Mary's example in this particular respect requires virtue of no

ordinary kind. The utmost care, through constant fidelity to grace, is
necessary to hide such workings of the presence of God within us. Selflove,
our worst enemy, will ever suggest display or betray us into some
indiscretion that usually tends to sever our union with our Creator.

But we are not to suppose that the life of Mary at Nazareth was inactive
because it was wholly given to prayer. To entertain such a notion would be
to misunderstand the meaning of prayer entirely. Prayer is not mere passive
contemplation. It is action. Mary was not the victim of indolent self-
indulgence. She was too poor to be inactive. Her poverty made work a
necessity. But both her labor in discharging faithfully the duties of her
domestic life and whatever leisure she had were dedicated to uninterrupted
communion with the God whose presence she never forgot.

If we are to grow in holiness, we must labor. We cannot lead interior

lives without labor. In times of spiritual dryness, moreover, work will divert
our attention from the difficulties necessarily associated with aridity. The
Devil is most successful with idlers. He wastes no time on those who are
busily engaged. Without work, we will enjoy inordinately the delights of
sensible devotion and thus mistake an accident of sanctity for its substance.
Without work, sanctity, in all its comprehensive unity, is impossible.

Mary's holiness kept pace with her labor. Through her faithful
performance of her ordinary duties, she may be said to have attained, in the
solitude of Nazareth, her greatest sanctity.

Our piety is so superficial that we are apt to value such a life as

meaningless in the acquisition of virtue. Even in things spiritual, the
marvelous and the brilliant affect us most. We are deeply impressed by rigid
fasts and by prolific prayer. So weak is human nature that the uncommon
inevitably serves to increase our pride. The Pharisees were bent on doing
the extraordinary. They prayed long and fasted much. It was the pride
behind all this that made Christ reject them.

But as the generality of men are created to do, not the extraordinary, but
the ordinary, we must, after the example of Mary, appraise a life of
obscurity, constant labor, and daily fidelity to the commonplace as the
surest stepping-stone to sainthood.

How many saints there are in Heaven who on earth did only the
ordinary!
Christ became man not only to die for us, but also to teach us how to live, to
be our example. The practical imitation of Christ is our supreme
achievement. We can best learn to imitate Him from His mirror - Mary, our
mother - who reflects His spirit most powerfully and most faithfully.

The imitation of her divine Son was the great occupation of Mary's life.
It thrilled her with the purest joy to have so perfect a Model ever before her,
to talk freely and often with Him, and to be so close an observer of His
conduct. Being of one mind with Him, since she was His mother, she
realized that she must imitate Him perfectly. She therefore fed her mind
solely and unceasingly with His perfections. She meditated on all His words
and recorded them in her heart. The acquisition of His spirit absorbed her.
She spent herself and was spent in learning the practical knowledge of Jesus
Christ. Mary gave herself to the assiduous study of His virtues, not
curiously, as men pore over science, but with a view to perfect imitation of
Him, her God. In so doing, she became the holiest creature that ever
adorned the earth - a Vessel of Singular Devotion1i3 indeed.

If we are to be children worthy of such a mother, we must burn with the

desire to imitate our Lord and Master. Let us pursue our study earnestly and
perseveringly, as Mary did, and thus gain the practical knowledge that will
be for us eternal life; for "this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.i159 No matter what
our vocation, whether we are rich or poor, healthy or sick, socially
prominent or buried in obscurity, whether we are consecrated to God in the
religious state or live in the world, we cannot be true Christians unless we
daily strive to resemble Christ. The more we study His life, the more
fascinating it will become; the more we seek to exhaust it, the more we will
find its content inexhaustible. The usages and the persuasions of interest
must not deter us from this study, indispensable for salvation. All other
knowledge to the exclusion of this may throne us in the power of the world,
but only to annul our heavenly election.

Mary did not have to give up the kind of engrossing pursuit that
indisposes the mind to the knowledge and imitation of Christ. The study of
His words and actions, both during His mortal career and after His death,
was the chief duty of her life. She was a total stranger to the rank, station,
intelligence, and riches of worldlings. She had none of the world's
accomplishments. She was without worldly wisdom. But none ever
surpassed, none ever equaled her in the knowledge that alone is necessary.
None knew Christ as Mary knew Him.

We grossly misunderstand the meaning of sanctity if we content

ourselves with a mere fitful study of our perfect Model. No writer has ever
done justice to the life of Christ. Its eloquence, its instructiveness, its depth,
and its comprehensiveness are beyond the grasp of the human mind. The
doctrine of Christ is not and never will be fully developed. His example has
never been, nor ever will be, fully reduced to practice. If we study His
doctrine and example superficially, we waste time, insult the God who
commands us to walk in the footsteps of His divine Son, and retard our
progress on the heavenward road. We must first convince ourselves of the
necessity of the knowledge of Christ's doctrine and example, and then no
sacrifice will be too great to possess this divine science. We must read His
life with both head and heart. We must peruse authors who are filled with
His spirit. We must study Christ dwelling within us and ever speaking to
our souls.

Not to vaunt our vanity, but to further our own spiritual progress and to
help along the highways of holiness those under our care should be the
motives of the most absorbing and most fascinating of all studies, the
engrossing theme of our Lord and Master.

Our study of Christ must be, above all things, practical. It must bear
upon our conduct. A mere speculative knowledge of Him will conduce to
the service of God only insofar as His service does not interfere with the
service of the world.

As our intelligence is very feeble in all inquiries into moral and religious
truth, we must focus on this delightful study, not the dim, uncertain light of
reason, but the light of Heaven, the constant concomitant of grace. If our
imitation of Christ is proportioned to our knowledge of Him, we shall
receive greater graces in order to know Him better and follow Him more
closely. To use grace and the lights that accompany it only to foster barren
speculation on the life of Christ will quench in us all desire to imitate Him,
because the imitation of Christ is the direct result of corresponding with
grace and walking in its heavenly illumination. The intensity of our soul's
desire to follow in the footsteps of our Master is measured by our actual
imitation of Him.

We must be as reasonable in spiritual matters as in temporal. The

professed inquirer after natural truths always tries to exhaust their meaning.
We must not be less rational in our endeavors to know Christ. We must
study the inward character of His life. We must read His heart. To do this,
we must live in His heart. There and there only will we discover the hidden
springs of His teachings, the fountainhead of His example.

And if we are free from sin and yearn to imitate her divine Son, Mary,
the Queen of Saints, will enshrine us in His heart, because she is His most
perfect imitator.
What a free, unconstrained spirit of joy must have animated the guests at
the marriage feast of Cana in Galilee in virtue of the presence of Jesus and
Mary! Indeed, we cannot truly rejoice without Jesus and Mary. They are the
source of all joy, natural and supernatural. As they did for the newly
married couple, our Lord and His mother will safeguard with their presence
the joy of our social festivities against confusion, embarrassment, and sin.

"And the wine failing, the Mother of Jesus saith to Him, `They have no
wine.'""' How lovingly considerate is Mary's implied request! As if to prove
the greatness of her love for souls, she asks her Son to perform a miracle for
the distressed bride and groom. It was Christ, the God of love, who inspired
her petition. He did not have to be told that the wine had failed, because, as
God, He was omniscient. From eternity, He foreknew that He would work
the first miracle of His public life at the behest of His mother. We must
grasp these facts if we wish to understand Christ's answer.

"And Jesus saith to her, `Woman, what is that to me and to thee? My

hour is not yet come.' X161 Those who see in Christ's words a rebuke to
His Virgin Mother utterly fail to penetrate their deep, hidden meaning. It is
unthinkable that He would repulse His mother when she asked Him, her
Son and her God, to do an act of charity for souls in distress. Why should
He hurt her feelings when He had already determined to obey her? The fact
that He worked the miracle shows that He was pleased with her discreet
request.
 Christ wished, by His reply to Mary, which was consonant with His
divine dignity and most respectful to her, to demonstrate to His hearers that
He was God as well as man. Far from being disrespectful, the term woman,
in the sense in which our Lord used it, was one of reverence and love; in
Hebrew, the term means "lady." Mary's direction to the waiters,
"Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye,i162 proves beyond all doubt that
she regarded her Son's answer as a striking manifestation of His special
love for her.

It is indeed of rare significance that Christ, in strengthening the faith of

His disciples by His obedience to His mother, made the revelation of His
divinity the effect of her intercession. When our Lord changed the water to
wine, He did not pay a debt to Mary as man, since, as man, He could not
perform miracles; He did her bidding as God, through His infinite
compassion. The miracle was wholly gratuitous. Nevertheless, what a clear
manifestation it was of the mind of Christ in regard to His mother! In His
kingdom, she is to be the almoner of the King's largess.

Again, Christ wished to teach, by His answer to Mary, that He became

man to do, not His own will, but the will of His Father. His whole life had
been divinely planned. He would act only in obedience to the divine
decrees. He would not perform miracles to reveal His power or to satisfy
the curiosity of His followers; He would work them only at the time
ordained by His Father and to reward strong, living faith, like Mary's.

Above all, He was eager, before obeying His mother, to test her faith and
humility. And they stood the test, because Christ changed the water into
wine. What a significant lesson Mary teaches us by this unlimited
confidence in the power and goodness of her divine Son! Illumined by God,
she knew that Christ would grant her request. She therefore said to the
waiters, "Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye." She might have said, "All
things are possible to him that believeth.i163

This first known miracle of His public career is a magnificent

commentary on Mary's power with Christ. From her conduct we should
learn never to oppose the divine will, even though conformity to it may
mean a very severe trial of our faith, or even our profound humiliation. The
prayer of lively and persevering faith God will always answer; yes, He will
work miracles for such a prayer. "Truly I say to you, if you have faith as a
grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, `Move from here to
there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you."164 The eye
of the soul of the suppliant who prays thus is sound, because the greater
glory of God and the sanctification of his soul are his chief concern. God
has inspired his prayer; He must therefore answer it, since He ever works
for His own greater glory and the spiritual welfare of His creatures.

With the Apostles, we should ask Christ to teach us how to pray. After
the example of Mary, our petition should be persevering and pervaded by a
deep sense of our own nothingness. It will then touch our Lord's heart, and
even if He apparently refuses to hear us, our insistence and our humility
will infallibly move Him to pity, and He will answer our prayer.
The life of Mary, like her divine Son's, was a daily crucifixion and
martyrdom. She found the Cross very heavy during the three years of His
public life, for then Christ had to leave her side so that He might be "about
His Father's business ,i165 the sanctification and salvation of souls. But
although deprived of the joy of His sensible presence, she was more
intimately united with Him than ever through her sacrificial love wrought
by conformity to His will. By estranging Himself from her, Christ was
preparing His mother for her final separation from Him at the foot of the
Cross.

Very likely, nonetheless, with the other holy women, she followed Him
up and down Galilee. In these journeys, Mary was dependent upon her
saintly companions for her livelihood, because St. Joseph had been called to
his eternal reward. Free from her domestic duties, she could now give all
her time to her Son. But while she yearned with the full ardor of her saintly
soul to devote herself exclusively to Him, He, so to speak, abandoned her
entirely. The evangelists mention no word uttered by Christ to His Mother
from the time of His first miracle until just before He expired on the Cross.
More than once, He seemed not even to recognize her.

"As He was yet speaking to the multitudes," says St. Matthew, "behold,
His mother and His brethren stood without, seeking to speak to Him. And
one said to Him, `Behold, Thy mother and Thy brethren stand without,
seeking Thee.' But He, answering him that told Him, said, `Who is my
mother, and who are my brethren?' And stretching forth His hand toward
His disciples, He said, `Behold my mother and my brethren. For whosoever
shall do the will of my Father that is in Heaven, he is my brother, and sister,
and mother.' X166 With these significant words, Christ taught the multitude
that, publicly, when He was intent only on His Father's business, He
recognized not a blood relationship, but a spiritual one. He emphasized the
truth that they alone who do the will of His Father are His brethren, His
sisters, and His mother. This is the only tie that He countenances.

Thus did Christ declare to the Jews His divinity by announcing

unequivocally to them that His sole mission on earth was to make known to
men the will of His Father and to instruct them how to do it. In full logical
consonance with this, He appraised spiritual relationships as unimaginably
higher than the ties of flesh and blood. And the basis of a spiritual
relationship is complete conformity to the will of His Father, in imitation of
Him who always did the things that pleased the Father.

What eloquent praise are Christ's words on the life of Mary!

Transcendent as was her dignity as Mother of God according to the flesh,
her spiritual motherhood was incomparably more astonishing and endeared
her immeasurably more to her divine Son. We will never appreciate Mary's
supereminent sanctity unless we understand the intimacy of her union with
Christ in virtue of her spiritual maternity. "The Virgin is pronounced
blessed," says St. Augustine, "because she did the will of the Father. This it
was that our Lord extolled in her."
 We cannot imitate our mother if we fail to participate in her most exalted
dignity. But every Christian can share her spiritual motherhood, provided he
pays the price for this rare privilege. We must, like her, surrender ourselves
irrevocably to Christ; we must never shrink from suffering. The Cross is the
measure of God's love for us and the sum total of our love for God. Only
when we have understood Mary's martyrdom will we comprehend the
greatness of Christ's love for His mother and the intensity of her love for
her Son. To be willing, like Mary, to relinquish the delights of sensible
devotion and the happiness of Christ's heavenly communications, to submit
heart and soul to His apparent withdrawal from us - when we have learned
to do this, then and only then can we share in Mary's spiritual motherhood.

To do the will of God: this was the Blessed Virgin's keenest joy. Here is
the truth we must grasp before we can imitate her. It was Mary's exclusive
privilege to be Christ's mother according to the flesh. Not for this reason,
however, was she the object of His particular love. Her progress in virtue,
her humility, her detachment from earth's unsatisfactory gifts, her
willingness to suffer, her interior joy in bearing the Cross - in short, her
imitation of Christ through resignation to His will - constituted her moral
worth with God, and to this source alone can we trace Christ's special love
for her.

Our sanctity must be built on the same foundation. The one, single,
sovereign subject of our lives should be, even at the price of martyrdom,
conformity to God's will. We advance in vice rather than in virtue when we
do, not God's will, but our own.
Through freely consenting to become the Mother of God, Mary
experienced mentally all the bitterness of Christ's Passion and death. Her
mind's eye daily witnessed the sufferings of her divine Son.

At the very beginning of His public ministry, "the kings of the earth
stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against His
Christ.""' Mary observed their diabolical hatred, their hellish jealousy; she
beheld them spreading the false accusations that would compass His
Crucifixion. She was a martyr by anticipation, because she suffered in spirit
the anguish and desolation that afflicted her at the foot of the Cross. Each
event of the sorrowful drama was a sword that pierced her maternal heart.
As any other mother might have done, Mary indulged the sad pleasure of
examining each particular of the sufferings foretold for Christ, and faith
increased her melancholy joy by enabling her to view His Passion in its true
perspective: His vehement yearning to glorify His Father by His death, the
greatest proof of His love for Him and for souls.

The Apostles, who had abandoned their Master, informed Mary of her
Son's betrayal by Judas and of His brutal capture after His agony. The
Beloved Disciple narrated to her what he had seen in the houses of Annas
and Caiphas: how Christ had been branded as a blasphemer for His
assertion that He was the Son of God. She saw Christ brought first to Pilate,
then to Herod and again returned to the Roman governor. She beheld some
of the outrages to which He was subjected before each ruler; the others
were described to her. When she beheld the populace, rocked into anarchy
by passion, unable to mask its hatred of Christ, and Pilate, the pitiful victim
of his own vacillation, sitting in judgment, she concluded, with a woman's
keenness of perception, that there was no hope for her divine Son. She
suffered the humiliating embarrassment of seeing Barabbas preferred to
Him when the Roman governor showed the "Man of Sorrowsi168 to the
wildly infuriated mob. And what a spectacle met her eyes as she gazed
upon her Child with His flesh torn from His body, His head encircled with
sharp thorns, His whole form robed in the ruby raiment of His blood - a
mock King with a reed in His hand and a tattered cloak over His bleeding
shoulders.

All this was for Mary but the prelude to greater sorrows. She heard the
rabble, led by the chief priests, and intoxicated with the malice of Hell,
clamoring for Christ's Crucifixion. She saw the gigantic Cross placed on
His bent and mangled shoulders. Her heart sank lower within her each time
He fell beneath its overpowering weight. Speechless with grief, she
witnessed His virginal flesh torn from His bruised and battered body when
the soldiers pitilessly tore off His garments. Transfixed with sorrow, she
beheld His arms and feet roughly extended on the hard wood of the Cross.
But what must have been her anguish when she saw the sacred body of her
Child, every nerve vibrating with agonizing pain, twitch and convulse as the
long, knife-edged nails were driven into its most delicately sensitive parts!
She saw the Cross dragged to a hole into which the soldiers let it drop with
a rough thud that violently shocked the entire body of the transpierced
Redeemer. She heard the mob, not yet satisfied with their diabolical work,
continue to torment their dying Victim.

Who can plumb the depths of Mary's grief or gauge her supernatural
strength and her admirable resignation to God's will? Her agony beggars
description. But she had still more to suffer in order to become the Queen
of Martyrs.

Although worn and wasted with sorrow, she at once took her place at the
foot of the Cross. There she stood with heavenly fortitude, her eyes fastened
on her divine Son. How magnanimous was the sacrifice that she made of
her dearest treasure as a holocaust to the inexorable justice of His outraged
Father! How freely, how courageously she united the oblation of her own
incomprehensible suffering and grief with the offering of Christ, thus
proving herself worthy not only to share, but also to be one with Him, in the
redemption of souls. Her own death would have been for her a far cheaper
price for the salvation of sinners than the heart-sickening contemplation of
the bitter Passion and death that Christ underwent to ransom them.

In that period of life through which every child of Adam seems to pass,
whether in youth, in middle age, or in old age, when "grief ... whispers the
o'erfraught heart, and bids it break ,"169 let us stand with Mary at the foot
of the Cross and learn from her resignation to the will of God. No other,
after Christ, has taught us how to accept and bear suffering with the
eloquence of Mary, the sorrowful Mother of God, the Queen of Martyrs.
The parting with her dying divine Son was the apex of Mary's anguish.
Standing heroically at the foot of the Cross, she paid the cost of becoming
the Mother of Christ by willingly consigning Him to a death whose torture
and shame depress the mind and sicken the heart. For souls, she lovingly
drained with Christ the chalice of bitterest suffering, when, with utter self-
extinction, she exchanged the Son of God for the son of Zebedee.
"Woman," said the dying Redeemer, glancing at St. John, "behold thy
son."10

How the sorrow of separation must have wrung Mary's maternal heart!
But with the same humility with which she had conceived Him, she
consented to the supreme loss of her God.

Christ's commendation of His mother to St. John is replete with

spiritual significance.

The Savior had delivered Himself in His Passion to the will of His
Father. "My Father," He had said, "if it be possible, let this chalice pass
from me. Nevertheless, not as I wilt, but as Thou wilt.""` And before His
sacrifice for sinners could be perfect, He had to be forsaken by that Father.
In the same way, Mary, who freely delivered her Son to the cruelest of
deaths, extinguished, by parting with Christ, the light of her life for the
perfection of her own self-annihilation. Only thus could she become one
with her God in the salvation of souls. Both victims in the tragedy of
Calvary had to be wholly immolated.

Why, it may be asked, did Mary undergo so willingly and so lovingly

such overwhelming suffering? Why did she increase her sorrow when it
was already as great as the sea? In submitting to pain and desolation
indescribable, Mary wished, through correspondence with God's will, to
perfect her virtue. She yearned to be Christ's most perfect imitator and, by
so doing, to merit the title of Queen of Saints, an honor worthy only of the
Mother of God.

When God asks an extraordinary sacrifice of a soul, the object of His

special love, He would have the soul die completely to itself, and so perfect
its holocaust. Union with Jesus and Mary in their abandonment is the only
refuge for such a soul.

In His commendation of Mary to the Beloved Disciple, Christ showed

His loving solicitude for her material welfare by providing her, who was
extremely poor, with a means of support. When He said to St. John,
"Behold thy mother, ,172 He bade him to respect, revere, and love the
Blessed Virgin as his mother. Such a bequeathal did not augur for Mary a
life of ease and comfort. But it did serve partially to alleviate the bitterness
of her sorrowful existence, deprived as she would be of her divine Son. The
Apostle of Love obeyed the command of our Lord, because he took the
Virgin to his own, provided for her, and loved her as his mother.

It is the teaching of the Fathers of the Church that St. John was our
representative on Calvary and that Mary became, in his person, our mother.
What gift could Christ give us, after the gift of Himself, more precious than
that! With her heart breaking with sorrow, Mary had to die a spiritual death
in order to become our spiritual mother. No tongue can tell the magnitude
and intensity of her love for souls washed by the blood of Christ, for which
she endured pain and sorrow beyond conception. In becoming our mother,
she became the Queen of Martyrs.

What a truly marvelous privilege is ours! Mary being our mother, we

share in her love of her divine Son. Let us stand in spirit on the mount of
crucifixion and listen to the dying Christ saying to each of us, "Behold thy
mother." How stupendous is this gift! Christ gives us her whom He loved so
much that He exhausted His power, so to speak, to exalt her - His dearest
possession - above all other creatures. "Having loved His own who were in
the world, He loved them unto the end.""'

Yes, Christ exhausted His love for man. It was not enough for the infinite
Lover of souls to free us from the slavery of Hell by His passion and death
and to bestow upon us His body and blood, soul and divinity. He had to
crown the largess of His love with the munificent gift of His mother.

What is our appreciation of this priceless gift? We can best thank Christ
for His extraordinary dying bequest by striving daily to emulate St. John in
his love and veneration for Mary. But love and veneration for our Mother
means only one thing: imitating her humility, her purity, her detachment
from the world, and her unselfish resignation to the will of God in every
event of her life. It also means unlimited confidence in her maternal
intercession if we should ever have the misfortune of straying far from
Christ by sin.

Mary cannot forsake us, because she is our Mother. If we confide our
salvation to her loving care and faithfully imitate her virtues, she will fold
us to her Immaculate Heart both now and at the hour of our death.
More courageous than the martyrs, Mary stood at the foot of the Cross and
saw her divine Son bow His head and die. Her sorrow and distress of soul
are incredible as she hears Him exclaim, "My God, my God, why halt Thou
forsaken me?""' These words are but a poor expression of the desolation
that wrung the soul of Christ with heart-breaking grief as His love for
sinners soared to the summit of perfect self-extinction and reconciled the
lost world with His eternal Father. Without divine comfort, His mind
darkened with the spiritual gloom of our fallen nature, His heart laden with
the concentrated iniquities of a doomed race, Christ, solitary and desolate,
experienced the withering anguish of man's separation from His God by sin.

If we understood the strength of Mary's love for her divine Son, we could
comprehend the intensity of her sorrow as the woeful wail of the dying
Christ fell on her ears. Indeed, the suffering of Christ in His dereliction was
a mystery unintelligible even to His mother. And, without doubt, it was the
hardest test of her faith. The mutual love of the Father and Son was coeval
with Their very existence. Christ could not, then, have tried the faith of His
mother more severely than by having her behold - at the very moment
when, by His death for sinners, He was glorifying His heavenly Father most
- His abandonment by that Father with whom He was eternally one.

But were it possible for Christ's cry of uttermost desolation to have

weakened Mary's faith, His docile resignation to His eternal Father would
have deepened it beyond comprehension. Amid the ghastly horror and
chaos of the scene, how sweet to her ears were the consoling words of
Christ's act of perfect obedience to the will of His Father: "Father, into Thy
hands I commend my spirit.""' In union with her divine Son, she, too, does
the will of God perfectly. Oh, how strong was her faith when her soul was
most seared with searching sorrow!

If God, in His love for us - "for whom the Lord loveth, He

chastiseth"176 - should send us a cross in the shape of harrowing mental
pain, and we feel the heartsickening sense of desolation, let us turn to
Jesus and Mary for supernatural strength in order that we, like them, may
abandon ourselves to the divine will. Then will we die wholly to ourselves
and be able to say with the dying Christ, "It is consummated. "177

When Mary heard her divine Son utter these words and saw Him bow
His head and die, she died a spiritual death whose suffering defies
description. So poignant was the pain of her gentle, sinless soul that, when
the darkness of night swallowed up the light of day, for the reason that
nature was mourning her God, when the rocks were rent asunder, when the
earth was in the throes of terrorizing convulsions, even when the dead
appeared, she heard and saw nothing. Her only concern was her dead Child.

Gazing sorrowfully on His lifeless body, she watched Longinus drive the
spear into His heart.17' The words of Simeon were then verified: "And thy
own soul a sword shall pierce.""'

She stood motionless, observing every detail of the gruesome tragedy

that had robbed her of Him whom she loved more than her life. Mute with
grief, she witnessed His disciples remove the nails from the Redeemer's
hands and feet, extract the thorns from His head, and take Him down from
the Cross. What a sight met her tear-dimmed eyes when she beheld the
body of her Son at close range, with its gaping wounds, crimsoned with
blood, bruised and mangled, every bone numbered, the victim of inhuman
barbarity inspired by the hatred of Hell! Her soul so filled with
overpowering love and sorrow that death would have been a relief, she
embraced the once ravishingly beautiful countenance of her Child, now
haggard with the pallor of death. She accompanied His mortal remains to
the tomb and then, leaning on the arm of St. John, retired heart-broken.
 What a world of sorrow, what an inexhaustible theme, is this saddest
drama ever enacted on earth! The eternal God, Christ our Lord, crucified as
a public malefactor between two thieves! Mary, His mother, spiritually
crucified, her sorrow great as her love!

Oh, how precious are our souls to Jesus and Mary, our blood Brother and
our mother. The best expression of our gratitude for such love is the
irrevocable consecration of ourselves to them - in the gloom of uncertainty,
in the anguish of doubt, in the heart-riving loneliness of interior desolation,
when God seems to desert us, by complete abandonment to the divine will.
From a natural standpoint, the life of Christ was a categoric contradiction
of the glorious prophecy of the archangel Gabriel. Judged by worldly
standards, it was a monumental failure. But what a success, eternal in its
import, was Christ's earthly career in the light of the marvelous miracle of
His Resurrection! How fully does He realize by this amazing mystery
every promise made by the angelic messenger to Mary when he
announced to her that she was to be the Mother of God!

The embassy of Gabriel must therefore be understood only in a spiritual

sense, because Christ's kingdom was to be not of this world. His
Resurrection was to be the beginning of that kingdom which was to last
forever: "Of His kingdom there shall be no end.i180

Christ had repeatedly told His Apostles that He would rise on the third
day after His death. It is unthinkable that He would withhold this
information from His mother, whose suffering was, in proportion to the
preeminently superior supernatural texture of her faith, far greater than
theirs. Nothing could shake Mary's belief that her Son would rise again. But
her faith was purely spiritual. It proved no antidote to the bitter suffering
that she endured throughout her life, and especially during the Passion and
death of her divine Son.

There are times when Christ seems to crush souls most dear to Him. But
without diminishing the rigor of their suffering, He at the same time gives
them a glimpse of the reward for their faithful endeavor to bear the Cross as
He did. Like Mary, they understand that "the sufferings of this time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory to But such knowledge gives them no
comfort during the time of trial. Hence, like her, they experience the full
weight of the Cross.

After His Resurrection, Christ certainly did not wish to deprive His
mother of this overwhelming proof of His divinity by failing to appear to
her. Why, then, do the evangelists mention not even one apparition of the
Savior to Mary? Do they seek to convey thus that the Blessed Mother was a
mere automaton in the gigantic work of man's redemption? Does their
silence indicate that Christ thought more of His Apostles than of His own
mother? By no means!

The evangelists disclose the apparitions of the Redeemer to His Apostles

because the Apostles were called by Christ to bear witness to the truth of
His teaching by proclaiming to the utmost bounds of the earth the
irrefragable proof of their Master's divinity. Such, however, was not the
vocation of Mary. But even to doubt that Christ appeared to the Blessed
Virgin - and many times - would be equivalent to a denial of His love for
her. It was Mary's self-effacement, her unparalleled humility, that caused
her to conceal the truth of these visitations, which were divinely consoling
and comforting to her.

Since she was the most perfect follower of her divine Son, her love of
suffering was so unselfish that she never desired these apparitions.
Although to see her Son glorious and immortal gave joy indescribable to
her soul, she would have been content, had such been the will of God, to
learn from the Apostles that Christ had risen from the dead. Like Christ,
Mary never sought her own glory. Our Lord rose from the dead, not to
please Himself, but to glorify His Father. In imitation of her divine Son,
Mary's detachment, which is the essence of virtue, was without any thought
of self-gratification. The glory of God was the end and aim of her lifelong
practice of heroic holiness.

When God demands of a soul a great sacrifice, He strengthens the soul,

through the vivifying power of His grace, to overcome all obstacles. Such a
soul dies perfectly to itself, and its only desire is to remain spiritually dead
to its natural inclinations as long as God wishes. This spiritual self-
extinction is a perplexing mystery to the selfish soul. Why, it asks, should a
soul yearn to remain spiritually dead with Christ? The soul enamored of
itself fails to realize the meaning of the words "Christ died for all, that they
also who live may not now live to themselves, but unto Him who died for
them and rose again."182

Fidelity to grace made both Mary's spiritual death and her spiritual
resurrection perfect. She anticipated neither the one nor the other, but
patiently awaited God's time for the action of His grace. When He so
determined, she died to herself and rose to the highest degree of sanctity.

Such must be our dispositions if we would imitate Mary perfectly. Like

her, we must die absolutely to ourselves; otherwise we cannot rise with her
and thus lead eminently virtuous lives. Total death to our natural selves is
the price of our spiritual resurrection.
Holy Scripture does not state that Mary was present at Christ's Ascension.
But who would be so skeptical as to doubt that Christ bade farewell to His
mother and that she was present in honor when He ate for the last time with
His Apostles? She saw His sacred body, immortal and impassible, raised on
high and dazzling His disciples with its resplendent glory. Their look of
intense concentration betrayed the yearning of their hearts to ascend to
Heaven with Him, their Lord and Master. As we have but the crudest notion
of Mary's love for Christ, we have the most superficial idea of the
vehemence of her longing for eternal union with Him. With a supernatural
ardor too deep for expression, she ascended with Him spiritually.

Christ's ascension perfected Mary's understanding of the eternal meaning

of suffering. That she associated the idea of suffering with its everlasting
reward as she gazed with burning love at her divine Son returning
triumphantly to His eternal Father requires no flight of the imagination to
believe. In beholding Christ, the King of Martyrs, ascending to Heaven to
take possession of His glory, she realized that, as Queen of Martyrs, as
Christ's most perfect follower, she would one day share in His eternal
recompense.
 After the Ascension of her divine Son, the pleasures and pursuits of this
life had for Mary no attraction. Her heart was in Heaven with her Child and
her God. As she had lost Him whose presence ravished her soul, she
doubtless repeated endlessly with the royal psalmist, "What have I in
Heaven? And besides Thee, what do I desire upon earth? For Thee my flesh
and my heart hath fainted away. Thou art the God of my heart and the God
that is my portion forever.""' The eagerness of her longing for eternal union
with Christ contended with her yearning to do His will, which had
spiritually crucified her by demanding that she remain on earth, deprived in
her exile of Him, her treasure. But such was Mary's love of the divine will
that she joyously sacrificed her own happiness and gladly relinquished her
God, whom she loved beyond understanding. She who had heroically
delivered Him to the most terrible of deaths also immolated Him in Heaven
by dying to the desire to be united with Him. Her selfextinction was perfect.

To comprehend the suffering of Mary during this protracted period, we

would have to be bound to Christ as closely as she was, both naturally and
supernaturally. What a mighty conflict raged within her! Her love of Christ,
which wafted her in spirit to His side in Heaven, ever contended with her
yearning to do His will by remaining on earth, deprived of His visible
presence.

We would have to be as holy as Mary to experience such suffering.

What pain can equal the soul's supernaturally ardent, overmastering, but
nevertheless unavailing desire to possess its God forever!
 We are too carnal, our spirituality is too coarse, to undergo Mary's
agonizing sense of loss. And yet, if we are to become saints, we must be
prepared to accept and to use such a cross as the infallible means of
advancing to the highest sanctity. Indeed, unless we do this, we do not keep
perfectly the first and greatest commandment of the law. The love of God
above all things implies loving submission to His providential
dispensations, with no thought of the sacrifice He asks as the price of such
submission. We have been made for God, and He alone can satisfy the
highest and holiest aspirations of our hearts.

Oh, if the love of God burned within us, how unsatisfactory, how insipid,
and how nauseating would everything else be to us! It is strange that we do
not love with all our hearts, with all our minds, and with all our strength the
God who loved us so much that He died the most heart-rending death for
us.

But we cannot love God and ourselves simultaneously. Nor can the love
of God and the love of the world coexist in our souls. The whole scheme of
the Christian dispensation aims at only one thing: to kindle in our hearts the
fire of divine love which Christ came to cast on earth. If our prayers and our
seemingly fervent receptions of the sacraments of Penance and the Holy
Eucharist fail to do this, they are practically worthless. Union with God
through love is the supreme end of our creation. "The earth and the fullness
thereof i 184 can therefore never satisfy the human heart. In this respect,
experience does not seem to be the best teacher, because myriads try to
appease their hunger for happiness with the love of the transitory.
 The true child of Mary must be prepared to make the sacrifice necessary
to overcome the love of created things with the love of the Creator.
Our Lord had foretold to His Apostles that the Holy Spirit, whom He
promised to send them, would strengthen them with His grace and illumine
their minds with His light to enable them better to grasp all the truths that
He, their Savior, had already taught them as He walked with them as their
elder Brother.

"These things have I spoken to you, abiding with you. But the Paraclete,
the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you
all things and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to
you."i85

With Mary, the Apostles prepared for the promised "Gift of God Most
High." Prayer was the soul of their preparation. "All these were persevering
with one mind in prayer, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus,
and with His brethren .i136 For nine days, they refrained from all contact
with the external world. During this precious time, they eschewed servile
work. In silence and recollection, they occupied themselves with God alone.
Great was the efficacy of their prayer, because they were praying with
Mary. When we pray with Mary, God will always answer us.

As Mary surpassed the Apostles in virtue, their preparation for the

reception of the Holy Spirit could not be compared with hers. She was to
receive the largest and the richest outpouring of Christ's Spirit. She did not,
therefore, pray alone. The Holy Spirit prayed within her. Thoroughly
realizing that she was only a helpless, dependent creature, and so unable to
prepare her soul to be a fit dwelling for the Holy Spirit, she besought His
divine assistance with unwearying fervor. United with Him, her prayer
breathed "the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding" 187 and
the love of God that was her paradise on earth.

When we depend on our own efforts in prayer, God will not hear us,
because He "resisteth the proud.""' In communing with God, we must
surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of prayer.

Mary was the Queen of Saints; her life illustrated every phase of
sanctity; her soul was a house of perfect prayer. Holiness so notable was,
however, not the result of her own unaided exertions. It was due to the Holy
Spirit, to whose guidance she abandoned herself. Her prayer was
distinguished by the conscious knowledge of her own nothingness and the
realization of the greatness of God. She prayed under the divine influence
of the Holy Spirit and in the closest possible union with Him.

How signally different is our prayer! We pray as if the success of our

prayer depended entirely on our own efforts. Every faculty is roused to
action. Instead of controlling our imaginations, we allow them to wander
capriciously. We believe that prayer, in order to be efficacious, must be
voluble; we falsely persuade ourselves that the crowning glory of prayer
and the infallible test of its worth with God is the amount of energy that we
put into it.
 In her retreat with the Apostles, which was dedicated to unceasing
prayer, Mary was the personification of religious calmness and composure.
Her prayer came spontaneously and without mental agitation from her
heart, enamored of God alone. One not thoroughly versed in this sacred
science would conclude, from her unearthly tranquillity, that she was not
praying at all.

When we examine too closely the workings of the powers of our souls,
when we are anxious to know that our intellects, our wills, and our
imaginations are functioning to the best of their ability, we are not, as we
should be at the time of prayer, thinking of God, but of ourselves. Before
we begin to pray, let us realize, following the example of Mary, that our
own exertions when we address ourselves to God count for nothing. It is the
Holy Spirit who must pray within us. Without His help, we cannot pray.
"No man can say `the Lord Jesus' but by the Holy Spirit.""'

Realizing this truth, we will prepare for the reception of the Holy Spirit
by effacing ourselves and, with deliberate calmness, bring every power of
our souls under His divine influence. We will beg Him whom Christ
promised as the source of all spiritual knowledge and discernment to create
in us the dispositions that will delight Him to come and abide with us.

When we rely on our own efforts in prayer, when we resort to artificial

stimulation by trying to assimilate the thought of others - in a word, when
we perform this religious duty without the direction of the Holy Spirit - we
can hardly expect Him to give us the graces that will make us true followers
of Christ. Our prayer, like Mary's and the Apostles', must come from our
hearts under the absolute dominion of the Holy Spirit.

The love of God above all things, detachment from the world, and an
abiding sense of the supernatural, or recollection - these are the
prerequisites of such prayer. After all, since we do not have a lasting city
here, but seek one that is to come,'90 we should live as strangers and
pilgrims ever sighing for our eternal home, by disengagement from
creatures and by the habitual thought of God and what leads to Him. If we
pray like our heavenly Mother, the Holy Spirit will greatly facilitate our
salvation by bestowing on us His greatest graces.
That Mary could receive an increase of grace, after having been declared by
the archangel to be full of grace, involves our minds in a web, so to speak,
of mystification. But the human mind should not arrogate the power to
unravel the mystery of God's infinite action on souls. According to earthly
standards, nothing could be added to Mary's fullness of grace. According to
God's eternal standards, the sanctity proclaimed by Gabriel was only the
beginning of her unimaginable growth in holiness.

When Christ was conceived in her womb by the omnipotent power of

the Holy Spirit, Mary possessed the Author of grace, and He so adorned
her soul with the richness of His heavenly gift that she excited the
wonder and incredulity of both men and angels. After the birth of her
divine Son, the pearl of great price19. gleamed more and more lustrous
within her as it daily united her more closely with her God. The prime
purpose of Mary's earthly martyrdom was to deepen and expand her
sanctity. How many and how great, then, were the graces she received in
order to attain to the eminent virtue that was hers when, on Calvary, she
became the Queen of Martyrs.

As we cannot grasp the sublimity of Mary's sanctity, we cannot

understand the measure of her grace. The gift that God conferred on the
humble Virgin when He chose her to be the mother of His divine Son, and
the grace commensurate with that gift, are incomprehensible. All that God
could give He bestowed on Mary. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her at the
Annunciation, and on Pentecost, He made her heart a furnace of divine
love.

He did not enrich her, as He did the Apostles, with the wondrous gifts of
miracles, tongues, and prophecy. But the gift He gave her was superior to
them all: divine love. By her love of God above all things and of His
adopted sons for His sake, she was to tower above all the Apostles
combined in the spread of Christ's kingdom on earth.

Mary's labors in the extension of the Church were not, like those of each
Apostle, confined to a special field, but were to embrace the whole world.
Her work was to be effected, not by unmatched eloquence, not by the
working of miracles, but by the ardor of her maternal love, which would
make her a living holocaust for the souls of her children.

To accompany the Apostles while they fulfilled the duties of their

ministry would ill accord with Mary's humility. In silence and solitude, by
the efficacy of her prayers and the fervor of her charity, she was to be the
master worker of them all. So great indeed was her love of humility that she
did not even wish to see the tangible results of her truly miraculous power
with her divine Son in the spread of the Faith that it cost both Him and her
so much to give to mankind.

Not as fully in the hearts of the Apostles as in the heart of Mary did the
Holy Spirit kindle the fire of His infinite love. Possessing, because of her
plenitude of grace, an extraordinary capacity for divine love, she attracted
the Spirit of love immeasurably more than all the Apostles collectively -
attracted Him, as it were, irresistibly. She was now united with God more
intimately than ever.

On Pentecost, a transformation was wrought in the soul of Mary more

wondrous than the change worked in the souls of the Apostles. Their
worldly views about the kingdom of God on earth were banished by the
Spirit of God; under the influence of the Spirit, holiness of the highest order
replaced their imperfections, and the cowardice of their self-preservation
was conquered by a loving readiness to die for the spread of the Faith and
the glory of God. But no taint of the slightest sin or the least shadow of
imperfection had to be removed from Mary's virginal soul.

On the contrary, when she received the "Gift of God Most High," she
stood on the mount of sanctity. Were we to deny or even to question this
truth, we would limit God's power. We cannot constrain God's munificence
to His creatures. Man is finite in his ability to receive God's gifts, but God's
generosity to man cannot be diminished, because it is essentially infinite.
Since, as creatures, we are capable of continual growth in virtue, we can
easily understand that Mary progressed in sanctity to a degree baffling to
the intelligence of the very angels.

As our chief duty in life is the sanctification of our souls, we should

strive with all our powers to advance to that standard of perfection that God
has determined for each one of us. We should use all our efforts to grow
daily in divine love.
 This we can do by bearing in mind our total dependence upon God and
hence our urgent need of ever corresponding with His grace. We will then
accomplish God's will with a spiritual resiliency that will make the bitterest
suffering most sweet to us.

We should try unceasingly to understand something of Mary's love of

humility, and God's love of her in keeping her soul divinely beautiful with
this exquisite virtue. Without humility we will not advance, no matter how
hard we may try, in the way of God.
Even if we were gifted with the intelligence of an angel, we would not be
able to understand fully Mary's love for her divine Son. Therefore we have
no way of determining the intensity of her longing, after His Ascension, to
be united with Him forever. Mary's love for Christ was as much deeper and
more expansive than the total love of all the saints for Him as the depth and
breadth of the sea compared with the rivulets that flow into it. Her suffering
was at the same time the purest act of love.

The preamble to pain so pleasing is abandonment to God and a

willingness to submit to the greatest loss and subsequent desolation of soul.
Only when we lose all do we find all. The love of God will be perfected in
us and will purify our thoughts and desires only when we die to ourselves.
Divine love daily strove to disengage Mary's soul from her body. Gradually
undermined by its unceasing activity, her enfeebled energies were forced to
surrender to its violence. Finally breaking its fetters, her soul flew to the
eternal embrace of her infinite Lover. Like Christ, Mary died of love.

As the body of her divine Son was preserved from the corruption of the
grave, so, too, she from whom He took flesh was, unlike any other creature,
free from the dominion of earthly decay. How could Mary's body, which
was the living tabernacle of the eternal God, the temple of the Holy Trinity,
crumble into dust? Dissolution is not only a law of nature (for nothing
earthly lasts) but also a sequel of sin. Mary was sinless. She was thus
exempt from the universal law. Her virginal flesh could not suffer
contamination.

It has been the belief of the Church in all ages that Mary's body was
assumed into Heaven shortly after her death. The Church has put her
official seal on her belief by establishing the feast of the Assumption.

Mary is now enthroned in Heaven, body and soul, by the side of her
divine Son. The Savior has made the Assumption of His mother a fitting
climax to His own Incarnation. There is an essential correlation among the
mysteries of Christianity. "If Mary at one time received Christ our Savior on
earth, it was proper that the Savior, in turn, should receive Mary in Heaven.
Having deigned to come down to her, He should raise her up to Himself in
order that she should enter into glory," says Bossuet.'92

"Oh, how does the source of life," remarks St. John Damascene, "pass
through death to life? Oh, how can she obey the law of nature who, in
conceiving, surpasses the boundaries of nature? How is her spotless body
made subject to death? In order to be clothed with immortality, she must
first put off mortality, since the God of nature did not reject the penalty of
death. She dies according to the flesh, destroys death by death, and through
corruption gains incorruption, and makes her death the source of
resurrection."

What a scene of heavenly beauty, grandeur, and magnificence was

Mary's Assumption! Before this gorgeous pageant, transcending the highest
flight of fancy, human eloquence pales. Her body borne by the angels and
shining more brilliantly than the sun, all her powers transfigured to an
inconceivable degree, she is greeted by her divine Son in words that the
Sacred Scriptures may perhaps be permitted to suggest to us: "Winter is
now past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our
land.... The fig tree hath put forth her green figs; the vines in the flower
yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come. Come
from Libanus, my spouse, come from Libanus, come; thou shalt be
crowned.""'

Surely the heavenly hosts that at Christ's birth had chanted the sublime
symphony of reconciliation, ravished by her beauty, must repeat with ever-
increasing rapture the glorious refrain: "Who is this that cometh up from the
desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her Beloved? ... Who is she that
cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun,
terrible as an army set in array ?,,114 It is Mary, the Mother of Christ and
our mother!

Exalted above the nine choirs of the angels and above all the saints, and
before the assembled heavenly court, Mary is crowned their queen by the
eternal God and thus wields unlimited power with Him. This superb scene,
inferior in stately magnificence only to Christ's Ascension, wafts us above
the bourne of time into the realms of the blessed.

Not because of the superabundant gifts of God, but because she was
faithful to His grace - this was the reason for Mary's munificent reward.
And to imitate her in this is the one duty imperative on all of us. While we
shall never be as holy as our heavenly Mother, since the measure of our
grace will always be inferior to hers, we must adorn our souls with virtue
through correspondence with the degree of grace that God bestows on us.
Thus will we walk in her footsteps and, like her, grow in humility, in purity,
and in love of God.
Born in Philadelphia in 1883, John Kane attended St. Mary's Seminary in
Baltimore, Maryland, and St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook,
Pennsylvania, and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in
1912.

Known for his devotion to the Holy Eucharist, Fr. Kane was the first
pastor in his archdiocese to introduce and to receive permission to hold all-
night adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He placed great importance on
Catholic education of the young and succeeded in filling to overflowing his
parish school of St. Madeline's in Ridley Park. In addition, he actively
sought to educate adults in their Faith, and he was a pioneer in initiating a
weekly religious class for them.

Fr. Kane was known during his lifetime for his great love of prayer and
meditation, and his several books give proof of the wisdom gleaned from so
many hours of contemplation. His writings bespeak a profound love of
Christ and a warm understanding of the Catholic layman's struggle to
achieve holiness. His words offer Catholics practical insight and
encouragement to seek a deeper union and friendship with God.
Sophia Institute is a nonprofit institution that seeks to restore man's
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1 Acts 2:4-11.

2 Apoc. 1:8 (RSV = Rev. 1:8).

4 Acts 4:12.

John 17:3.

6 John 15:4-6.

s Cf. Luke 6:47-49.

10 St. Bernard (1090-1153), Abbot of Clairvaux.

Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274; Dominican philosopher

and theologian), Summa Theologica, III, Q. 27, art. 5.

Luke 1:28.

' Prov. 8:3 5.

13 John 19:26-27.

12 Lam. 2:13.

11 St. Gertrude (1256-c. 1302), German mystic.

14 Ecclus. 24:24-25.
i6 The Church Militant comprises all the members of the Church
on earth, the Church Triumphant, the members in Heaven, and
the Church Suffering, the souls in Purgatory.

17 Heb. 7:25.

15 James 5:16.

18 St. Irenaeus (c. 130-c. 200), Bishop of Lyons.

i9 St. Anselm (c. 1033-1109), Archbishop of Canterbury.

20 Origen (c. 185-c. 254), Alexandrian biblical critic, exegete,

theologian, and spiritual writer.

2i St. John Damascene (c. 675-c. 749), Greek theologian.

22 Cant. 6:9 (RSV = Song of Sol. 6:9).

23 Cf. Lev. 12:2-8.

24 Matt. 5:16.

26 2 Cor. 6:16.

28 1 John 2:15-17.

25 Cf. Prov. 9:1.

27 Ps. 23:1 (RSV = Ps. 24:1).

29 Matt. 6:24.

32 John 14:23.
3o Matt. 22:37-38.

31 Matt. 4:10.

33 Cf. Ps. 118:57 (RSV = Ps. 119:57).

sa Mic. 5:2.

3s Isa. 7:14.

36 Luke 1:48.

40 1 Cor. 4:7.

37 Prov. 16:5.

38 Ps. 101:18 (RSV = Ps. 102:17).

3" jth. 9:16.

41 Ps. 90:1 (RSV = Ps. 91:1).

43 Rom. 8:12-14.

44 Gal. 5:24.

42 Wisd. 8:1.

45 Isa. 9:6-7.

46 Isa. 12:6.

47 Luke 1:28.
48 Cf. Gen. 2:23.

49 Cf. Luke 17:10.

50 Prov. 16:5.

51 James 4:6.

52 Prov. 15:25.

53 Ecclus. 10:17.

54 Prov. 18:12.

55 Ecclus. 10:21.

56 Luke 1:31-33.

57 Luke 1:30.

58 Luke 1:34.

s9 Cf. John 6:27.

60 Luke 1:35.

62 Luke 1:36-37.

61 Luke 1:35.

63 Rom. 11:33-34.
G4 Rom. 1:17.

65 Ecclus. 2:18.

66 Luke 1:38.

68 Henri Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), French Dominican

preacher.

17 Mark 8:34.

69 John 1:14.

70 Matt. 7:15.

71 1 John 4:1.

72 Gen. 3:6.

74 Cf. 1 Cor. 13:12.

73 Mark 15:25.

75 Rom. 1:17.

76 Rom. 12:3.

77 Ecclus. 24:44-46.

78 Luke 2:19.

7y St. Epiphanius (c. 315-403), Bishop of Salamis.

80 Luke 1:48.

si Ps. 21:7 (RSV = Ps. 22:6).

82 Luke 19:10.

83 Phil. 2:7.

84 Ibid.

85 1 Pet. 5:5.

86 Luke 1:41.

88 Luke 1:43.

87 Luke 1:41-42.

89 Luke 1:45.

90 Cf. Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58.

91 Ps. 87:16 (RSV = Ps. 88:15).

92 Luke 1:46-47.

93 Luke 1:47-48.

95 Luke 1:49.

94 Luke 1:48.

96 Apoc. 4:11 (RSV = Rev. 4:11).

17 Luke 1:50.

98 Luke 1:51.

99 Luke 1:52.

'°°Cf. Matt. 22:21.

101Luke 1:54-55.

102Cf. Luke 1:5-25, 57-79.

"'Luke 7:28.

105Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.-A.D. 65; Roman

philosopher, dramatist, and statesman), Letter 7.

104John 13:35.

106St. Thomas a Kempis (c. 1380-1471; ascetical writer), Imitation

of Christ, Bk. 1, ch. 20.

"'Acts 14:21.

108Matt. 1:20-21.

"'Matt. 1:24.

10Ps. 93:19 (RSV = Ps. 94:19).

"Ps. 137:7 (RSV = Ps. 138:7).

11. John 17:3.

11. Imitation of Christ, Bk. 2, ch. 12.

114 Luke 2:4-5.

"5Mic. 5:2.

116Wisd. 18:14-15.

"'Cf. Job 38:4, 7.

118James 1:17.

119St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215; theologian), Book of

Stromata.

120 Sermon on Canticles.

12. Luke 2:11-12.

122Luke 2:14.

123Luke 2:15-16.

124Luke 2:19.

"'Matt. 18:3.

"'Cf. Edmund Burke, Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the
Regicide Directory.

"'Matt. 20:25-27.

128Gen. 17:10.
121 Matt. 16:3.

"00a1. 3:13.

13. Lam. 2:13.

132 Rom. 6:8.

1332 Cor. 1:7.

"'Imitation of Christ, Bk. 2, ch. 12.

137Cf. Isa. 25:8; Apoc. 7:17 (RSV = Rev. 7:17).

1351 Pet. 4:12-13.

136Col. 2:11.

138Cf. Lev. 12:2-8.

139 Luke 7:28.

i40Luke 2:29-32.

14'Luke 2:33.

142Cf. Luke 2:34.

143Luke 2:3 5.

144Matt. 2:2.

141Matt. 2:10-11.

146Matt. 2:13-14.
147Rom. 13:1.

148John 8:44.

'50Luke 2:48.

149Ps. 62:3 (RSV = Ps. 63:1-2).

"'Luke 2:49.

112Luke 2:50.

153Luke 2:5 1.

154Phil. 2:8.

"'Ps. 23:1 (RSV = Ps. 24:1).

156Ga1. 5:24.

157Apoc. 2:23 (RSV = Rev. 2:23).

159John 17:3.

`One of the titles given to Mary in the Litany of the Blessed

Mother.

160John 2:3.

162John 2:5.

161 John 2:4.

163Mark 9:22.
161 Matt. 17:19 (RSV translation).

165Luke 2:49.

166Matt. 12:46-50.

"'Ps. 2:2.

163Isa. 53:3.

"'William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, scene 3.

170John 19:26.

"'Matt. 26:39.

172John 19:27.

173John 13:1.

"'Matt. 27:46.

"'Luke 23:46.

176Heb. 12:6.

177John 19:30.

178John 19:34.

179Luke 2:35.

180Luke 1:33.
"'Rom. 8:18.

1"2 Cor. 5:15.

i83Ps. 72:25-26 (RSV = Ps. 73:25-26).

"'Ps. 23:1 (RSV = Ps. 24:1).

185John 14:25-26.

186Acts 1:14.

187Phil. 4:7.

"'James 4:6.

1891 Cor. 12:3.

'9OCf. Heb. 13:14.

19'Cf. Matt. 13:46.

'92Jacques Benign Bossuet (1627-1704), French preacher and

Bishop of Meaux.

'93Cant. 2:11-13, 4:8 (RSV = Song of Sol. 2:11-13, 4:8).

'94Cant. 8:5, 6:9 (RSV = Song of Sol. 8:5, 6:9).