It was 1846 as Maximin and Melanie were tending the cows when they saw the Lady weeping. She told them of a great famine which would come upon the world and that the only salvation from it was honoring God’s Name, going to Church on Sundays and prayer. Soon thereafter the great potato famine struck France and then most of Western Europe, killing more than a million people in Ireland and forcing more than twice that number to flee their homes.
Thus Mary is pictured seated upon a globe, for her message of prayer to avoid a horrible punishment was not just for a small village in Southeastern France, but for the rest of the world, as well.
135 years later, in 1981, the Blessed Virgin appeared in a small town in the south of Rwanda, named Kibeho. There she identified herself as Mother of the World and, while weeping, warned three small children that unless the world turned to repentance and prayer a great suffering would come upon the land. Thirteen years later, the Rwandan Genocide broke out in that country in which a million members of the Tutsi, Twa and Hutu tribes were slaughtered. One of the worst massacres took place in the school room where the Blessed Virgin had appeared to the children.
What do these apparitions in mid-nineteenth century France and late twentieth century Africa tell us about the Blessed Virgin Mary? Three things:
First, that the Blessed Virgin Weeps;
Second, hat she prays for us;
and third, that she is Mother of the World.
First, we learn that Mary weeps when she sees the evil men do. She who was conceived without sin also stood on Calvary Hill and witnessed the evil which nailed her Son to the Cross. We can also imagine her weeping as she fled into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath, as she stood in the Temple unable to find her child, cradled his dead body in her arms and placed his body in the tomb.
Each night every priest or religious and perhaps many of you, pray Night Prayer, including the Gospel Canticle of Simeon, who with his weary arms holds the baby Jesus in his arms and whispers to God: “Now Lord, you can let your servant go in peace, for my own eyes have the seen the salvation you have prepared, the light to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”
And after that joyous canticle, he turned to Mary and told her this baby would be the rise and fall of many, concluding with the words: “and your own heart will be pierced with a sword.”
At that moment, Saint Alphonsus Liguori tells us, “the joy which had filled Mary’s heart must have been turned to sorrow, a sorrow which would perdure and a foreshadowing of the Cross on which her Son would offer the perfect sacrifice.”
For her suffering was a participation in the Cross of her son, just as each of the Crosses God sends to us is a way of participating in the Cross of Jesus. “Whenever you suffer,” Mother Theresa once told an old woman, “it is really just Jesus loving you so much that he is holding you closer to his Cross.” “But could I ask him,” the woman responded, “not to hold me quite so close!?”
For from suffering we learn what it means to love others, as compassion grows from witnessing pain. “In [Mary’s] tears,” Pope Francis once said, “we find the strength to console those experiencing pain.”1
How many people we meet in pain every day. This morning I sat with a longtime parishioner of the Cathedral who has been undergoing chemo therapy for brain cancer for almost a year now. Her house was filled with all kinds of folks from hospice, helping her to prepare for her final days. But when I came in she sent them all into the other room. “He helps me more than all those pills” she told them firmly, “For when I receive Holy Communion, I receive Jesus, and he stays with me when it gets tough in the middle of the night.”
She knows the sorrow of the Blessed Virgin whose heart was pierced with a sword, and the Virgin Mary knows her sorrows, too. Now, and at the hour of her death.
Second, we learn from LaSalette and Kibeho that Mary prays for us, that we might be delivered from the hands of evil men, and even worse, that we might not be evil men ourselves.
That’s why we ask for Mary’s intercession through all our lives, we “poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”
“By the tears which flowed from your eyes,” the Novena to our Lady of Sorrows begins, “obtain for us, O Mother of Mercy, true contrition for our sins, persevering fervor in the divine service, and the particular favors we ask in this Novena.”
That is why you bring the sorrows and the fears of your lives to this Miraculous Medal Novena, just as I remember doing every Wednesday night when I was growing up. I remember, as a freshman in High School, coming out with old Father McCarron (to be honest, he was probably younger than I am now) and kneeling on the bottom step of the altar (yup, he was definitely younger than I am now) and praying to Mary for all the world-shattering needs I carried in my adolescent heart. And you know what? She heard my prayers.
As I know she will, all the way to the hour of my death, for that is what the Mother of God does for a living. She intercedes with her Son on our behalf. And what Son can resist his mother’s intercession, “now and at the hour of our death.”
My favorite place to pray in Washington, D.C., where I lived for many years, is the Irish Chapel in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. There’s no fancy sanctuary or big mosaic...there’s not even an altar in this chapel. Just a statue of the Blessed Virgin with the Christ child playing on her lap in the middle of a gurgling fountain.
But on the wall, not far away, is a 1200 year old Celtic Prayer that boldly states: There is no hound as fleet of foot, nor young soul so quick to win the race, nor horse to finish the course, as the Mother of God to the death bed of one who needs her intercession. It’s like the line in the Memorare: Never was it known that anyone who fled to Thy protection, implored Thy help or sought Thy intercession was left unaided.
For Mary, in the words of our beloved Pope Emeritus, watches “over us, her children: the children who turn to her in prayer, to thank her or to ask her for her motherly protection and her heavenly help, perhaps after having lost our way, or when we are oppressed by suffering or anguish because of the sorrowful and harrowing vicissitudes of life. In serenity or in life’s darkness let us address Mary, entrusting ourselves to her continuous intercession so that she may obtain for us from the Son every grace and mercy we need for our pilgrimage on the highways of the world.”2
For Finally, Mary is the Mother of the World, in LaSalette, Rwanda or Worcester she is the Mother of Mercy. A late medieval and early Renaissance devotion to the Blessed Virgin depicts her with an enormous cloak, under which she gathers all those who are in need. As a mother cradles a crying child in her arms, so Mary gathers each of us to herself with the compassion and hungering love which she learned from her divine Son.
Her Divine Son, who, in the words of our beloved Pope Emeritus, “Looking down from the Cross, from the throne of grace and salvation…gave us his mother Mary to be our mother. [For] yes indeed, in life we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son and helps us to discover the power of his divine love, and to open ourselves to that love.”3
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
__________
1 - Pope Francis, 8 October 2016.
2 - Pope Benedict XVI. 22 August 2012.
3 - Pope Benedict XVI, Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 23 September 2011.
