Transcript

One day in a hovel in this little nothing town of Nazareth, an angel appeared to a young Israelite girl, perhaps no more than 14 or 15, and they had a rather extraordinary conversation.

This woman is, after Jesus Himself, the most depicted figure in the history of Christian art.

This woman has beguiled the imaginations of our most gifted poets, from Dante to T.S. Eliot.

To this woman, millions come bearing the burdens of their hearts, for they believe her to be their mother.

The angel said to her.

Ave Maria, rejoice, O highly favored daughter.

The Lord is with you; blessed are you among women.

As is invariably the case with those to whom angels make their appearance, Mary was afraid.

Don't be afraid, the angel said.

You shall conceive and bear a son and give Him the name Jesus.

When she wonders how this will be possible since she's had no sexual experience, the angel explains, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, so that the holy offspring will be called Son of God.

And Mary responded, Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word.

With that, the angel left her.

What we see here is that Mary is the new Israel.

In the Old Testament, many people, when summoned, would run away from God, resisting His word.

Now Mary does what God asks.

In some ways, the essence of the biblical drama is distilled in that encounter.

We see the nature of God on display in the graceful, non-violent manner of invitations.

In story after story from the mythological tradition, when the gods intervene in human affairs, they do so violently and interruptively, in the manner of a rape.

Whatever the opposite of rape is, it’s on display in this story.

Mary is invited, even, dare I say it, courted by God’s messenger.

Her freedom, her dignity are respected, and her curiosity is encouraged.

We see a human being in full in the person of Mary.

The Church Fathers were eager to contrast Mary, the Mother of God, and Eve, the Mother of all the living.

At the decisive moment, Eve took the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, succumbing to the temptation to seize godliness.

Why had God forbidden the eating of that fruit?

Because He was jealous of human flourishing?

Hardly.

That, in fact, is precisely the suggestion of the serpent, the father of lies.

God gave our first parents practically free reign in the garden, symbolizing thereby His desire that they be fully alive.

Adam and Eve at play in the field of the Lord are evocative of the full range of human activity and achievements—from sports to politics to philosophy to art and science.

So why the prohibition?

Because God wants us to fall in love with Him.

When two young people meet and are attracted to one another, they size each other up; they analyze, study, and evaluate each other.

But their rapport will come to life only in the measure that, at the limit of this process, they fall in love.

They surrender to each other.

At the end of all of our achieving, we must let ourselves be achieved by God.

This is Mary declaring herself the handmaid of the Lord and allowing herself to become the Mother of God, though she barely glimpsed the full implications of what this would mean.

Her obedience reversed the disobedience of Eve.

Hence, the medievals imagined the Ave (A-V-E) of the angel reversing Eva.

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says that all of the forms of the Church's life spring from the Marian form—this acquiescence to the will of God, this attitude of fiat: Let it be done to me according to your word.

There's an explosion of interest in Mary in the West because of St. Bernard.

Go back to the 12th century, and in the wake of Bernard, all the great cathedrals are Notre Dame—they're all Our Lady.

Why is it?

Some say because Europe was becoming more civilized and gentle, so this feminine dimension was coming in.

But Mary has been there from the beginning; she's there in the Scriptures.

The Church Fathers are very interested in Mary as the New Eve, so she's always been there.

I think it's just the very fact that Mary is the Mother of God that always struck people as utterly fascinating—that God would become so humble as to have a human mother.

And if He has a mother, then He has cousins; He has a grandmother and a grandfather.

I think it's a way of emphasizing the reality and density of the Incarnation.

God really becomes flesh, and then Mary is associated with, as you say, mercy and gentleness, and she’s our advocate; she’s the advocate of the human race.

Mary is a pivotal figure in the history of salvation, for she’s a bridge between the Old Testament and the New.

I know of no other sacred building that better exemplifies the connection between the Old and New Covenants than the Cathedral of Chartres, dedicated to Notre Dame, Our Lady.

But dedication doesn’t capture the full meaning of it.

Consult the wonderful book of Henry Adams called Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres to grasp that the medievals saw a building like this not only as dedicated to Mary, not only as Mary’s dwelling place, but as a representation of Mary’s body.

The apse of the cathedral corresponds to Mary’s head, the transept to her arms, and the nave to her body.

The labyrinth, a winding path inscribed within a circle, is located about two-thirds of the way down the nave, at the level of the womb.

Behind me is the west rose window of Chartres Cathedral, one of the most magnificent in the world.

It’s the same size and circumference as the labyrinth on the floor of the cathedral.

When the light is right, the colors of that window shine down perfectly on the labyrinth, and so it speaks of the Incarnation—the impregnation of the womb of the Virgin by heavenly light.

This association allows us to see more deeply into another aspect of the mystery of Mary.

Mary is Zion; she is Israel.

She sums up the great figures of this holy people whom God had prepared over many centuries to receive His word.

She is the daughter of Abraham, the first one to listen to God in faith.

She’s like Sarah, Hannah, and the mother of Samson, since she gives birth against all expectations.

She’s like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the great prophets who longed for the coming of the Messiah.

She is the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple, since she becomes, in the most realistic way possible, the bearer of the divine word.

She’s like the author of the Psalms and the books of Wisdom and Proverbs, for she, as St. Luke puts it, reflects on these things in her heart.

Mary is Israel at its best.

Faithful, patient, attentive to God's word, and quick to respond to the divine promptings—how interesting that the word haste is used in connection with Mary.

St. Luke tells us that after the Annunciation, she proceeded in haste into the hill country.

Israel was often slow in responding to God, but Mary moves.

At the wedding feast of Cana, Mary turns to the servants and says, in the cadences of every prophet, teacher, and patriarch of Israel— and these are her last recorded words in the Gospels—Do whatever He tells you.

Well, I think there’s a danger within Catholic piety to express Mary in a kind of overly cloying, sentimental way, because she’s not really a sentimental figure in the Bible.

Mary receives this message; she’s a canny young woman who asks the angel this sort of provocative question: Well, how is this possible?

Her integrity and intelligence are respected, and then she knows what to do.

She proceeded in haste to the hill country to visit her cousin, and then she moves through the history of salvation with this kind of courage and simplicity.

So she’s not really a sentimental figure; she’s a strong biblical figure.

She’s the New Israel who follows the divine word.

So maybe that would be a danger as we over-sentimentalize Mary.

She’s the model disciple.

Augustine said that she’s the first disciple, and so she’s the model for all of us.

As He was dying on the cross, Jesus looked to His mother and to the disciple whom He loved and said to Mary, Woman, here is your son, and then to John, Here is your mother.

We are told that from that hour, the disciple took her into his own home.

This text supports an ancient tradition that the Apostle John would have taken Mary with him when he traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor and that both ended their days in that city.

Indeed, on the top of a high hill overlooking the Aegean Sea, just outside of Ephesus, there’s a modest dwelling that tradition holds to be the house of Mary.

I’m standing in the ruins of the ancient cathedral church at Ephesus.

A council took place here in the year 431. At issue was the articulation of the nature and person of Jesus.

Go back to that question that Jesus Himself posed at Banias: Who do people say that I am?

That question haunted the mind of the early Church, and the greatest intellects of the time strove mightily to answer it.

Progress was made at the Council of Nicaea in 325, then the Council of Constantinople in 381. But in the 420s, a new controversy arose due to the teaching of Nestorius, who was the bishop of Constantinople.

He was very influenced by the Antioch school, which placed a great stress on the humanity of Jesus.

He said that in Christ, two persons come together—divine and human—in a sort of intense moral union.

This meant that Mary, who was responsible for the human element in Jesus, could be called Christotokos, bearer of Christ, but not Theotokos, not Mother of God.

In fact, Nestorius thought it was a height of blasphemy to say that God is a mother.

Well, Cyril, who was the bishop of Alexandria, took issue with this.

He thought that Nestorius was a heretic and called for the council that met here in the summer of 431. After much deliberation, the council fathers determined that Jesus ought not to be thought of simply as a human person with an intense relationship to the person of God, for that would make Him a sort of supreme saint but not the Incarnate Son of God.

In His unique person, divinity and humanity come together, and this means, the council fathers concluded, that Nestorius was wrong to deny Mary her title Theotokos because if Jesus truly is divine and Mary is the mother of Jesus, she ought to be called the Mother of God.

When this formal declaration was made, the common people of Ephesus celebrated that night with a torch-lit parade.

This is a very good example of the general principle that whatever we say about Mary is meant not so much to draw attention to her as to Christ.

To say that Mary is the Mother of God is to defend that densely textured claim that Jesus truly is divine, that in Him God became one of us.

Fulton J. Sheen said that Mary is like the moon; hers is always a reflected light coming from a greater source.

There are two doctrines concerning Mary that were formally declared only in relatively recent years, but whose provenance is quite ancient: the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin.

Notice how physical, even disturbingly so, these teachings are; how they compel us to see God's activity in regard to the lowly human body.

In this, once again, they are Christological in purpose since they speak of the Incarnation.

In 1854, Pope Pius IX declared that Mary, through a special grace, was preserved free from original sin from the moment of her conception.

This is why the angel at the Annunciation could refer to her as full of grace.

Were she simply like the rest of us, tainted by original sin, she would have fallen almost certainly into a variety of actual sins.

But God preserved her from sin and hence filled her with grace from the first moment of her life.

And why would God do this?

Wouldn't this teaching somehow imply that Mary doesn't need to be saved?

Well, the answer traditionally to the first question is that God wants to prepare a worthy vessel for the reception of His word.

Just as the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple was kept pure and inviolate, so this definitive Temple, this new Holy of Holies, should be untrammeled.

He also knew that Mary would play a decisive role in the history of salvation, that she'd be tightly associated with the work of her Son.

Therefore, it was fitting and appropriate that she, like Him, should be sinless.

The answer to the second question is this: Mary is like the rest of us, saved by the grace of Christ.

But since that grace is, properly speaking, eternal or outside of time, it can be applied in a way that undermines the ordinary rhythm of time.

Thus, it was by a kind of preemptive strike that Christ's grace removed sin from the Blessed Mother even before Christ appeared physically.

This doctrine received a most surprising ratification in a humble French town nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

In February of 1858, the six members of the Subiru family lived in this tiny one-room hovel.

It was called the Cachot because it was a converted prison.

The city officials of Lourdes evidently felt that the conditions here were too harsh and primitive for the prisoners; really, it was little more than a cave.

On February 11, 1858, the eldest Subiru child, Bernadette, made her way from this place to Massabielle, a garbage dump on the outskirts of the little town of Lourdes.

She'd come there with one of her sisters and a friend to look for wood with which to heat her family’s home.

While her friends scampered away, Bernadette, due to her asthma, stayed behind near the fast-flowing river.

She felt a puff of wind and heard a sound.

When she turned to see what had caused the stir, she spied a beautiful young woman clothed in white and with a yellow rose on each of her feet.

Instinctually, Bernadette reached for her rosary, and the woman, who had a spectacular rosary of pearl, began to pray along with her.

When Bernadette finished the prayer, the woman smiled and disappeared.

Bernadette felt compelled to return to Massabielle, so the next day she came to the spot with a few of her friends.

She again saw the lady, but this time the mysterious visitor spoke: Would you do me the favor of returning for the next 15 days?

Then she had a message for the priests: Build a temple on this site and let processions come.

When Bernadette brought this message to the parish priest, Father Parimal, she was sharply rebuked.

Yet she continued, despite mockery and official opposition.

On one of her visits, the lady asked her to dig into the ground and find a spring.

When she did so, people thought that she had lost her mind.

But in time, water indeed flowed from the spot, and eventually, a severely crippled young boy was cured after bathing in it.

Bernadette came for those 15 days, and she communed with the lady.

But despite the speculations of many, she never claimed to know who this mysterious visitor was.

She referred to her only as the lady or, in her own local dialect, Aquero, that one.

On March 24th, the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation, she felt an inner impulse to go to the grotto.

The lady was there to meet her, and Bernadette felt the urge to ask her name.

Three times she petitioned, and finally, the lady looked at her with a serious expression, and her voice trembling with emotion, she said, I am the Immaculate Conception.

How wonderful and typical that Mary should appear to such a poor and humble soul!

In her great Magnificat in Luke's Gospel, Mary sings the praises of the God who cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.

Bernadette, who was herself something of a cave girl, was visited by the Immaculate Conception, by the Queen of Heaven, who received the message of the angel in a hovel and gave birth to the Son of God in a cave.

We have such a prejudice; I think it’s that we’re these cool moderns with analytical scientific minds, and those poor people back then—poor things!

You know, this goofy girl comes up with this crazy story, and they all believe her.

That’s a complete act of condescension on our part.

These were no fools.

I mean, they might have been uneducated, but they weren’t fools.

And in fact, there was a very subtle set of criteria, you might say, that people in this part of the world—uneducated, unsophisticated but canny—used to determine the difference between someone who’s just carrying on in a crazy way and someone who really has seen something.

They applied those criteria; I mean, they analyzed what she had said.

She was, you know, poked and prodded in so many ways.

Part of the charm of Bernadette was that she was so blunt and ordinary and straightforward in her account, and she was very consistent.

You know, there’s a principle articulated by Gamaliel; it’s in the Acts of the Apostles.

When they were saying, Shouldn’t we get rid of these Christians?

he very wisely said, Look, why don’t we leave them alone?

If they’re not of God, they’re just going to fade away.

If they are of God and we fight them, we will find ourselves fighting God.

That’s a really good principle.

So something’s going on; something happened.

What do we do?

Why don’t we leave it alone and see what happens?

Think of all the people who’ve claimed extraordinary visions or locutions, or they’ve seen something.

What’s come of it?

Nothing; it fades away over time.

Then you look at this and you say, well, with the Gamaliel principle, if we were fighting this, we probably were fighting God.

The Assumption of the Virgin was declared as a dogma of the Church only in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, but the roots of this doctrine are very ancient.

The teaching is that Mary, at the close of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven.

Now I know this can strike the modern mind as bizarre or mythological, but consider the non-dualism of the Bible.

Biblical religion is not Greek philosophy; it doesn't set the soul over and against the body, nor does it construe salvation as the escape of the soul from the body.

Rather, it sees salvation as the transfiguration, the perfection, the elevation of the whole self.

Indeed, it calls not for an escape from this world but for a new heavens and a new earth.

Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven, and again, we shouldn’t think about this in spatial terms.

It means just this: the elevation of Mary in the entirety of a person into the dimension of God.

At the end of the Apostles' Creed, we hear about the resurrection of the body.

Well, Mary is someone who has experienced precisely this definitive salvation.

The doctrine of the Assumption of Mary takes with great seriousness this world of ours and these lowly bodies of ours.

When we talk about the dormition of Mary, which is actually a very interesting idea, we say that Mary fell asleep.

What would it be like for a sinless person to pass from this world to the next?

We sinners experience death as something kind of horrible because we’re alienated from God, and so we approach death with a kind of horror or terror.

What if you were sinless?

Being sinless, you’re utterly responsive to God’s will.

Wouldn’t the transition from this life to the next be a bit like falling asleep?

When you fall asleep, when I fall asleep tonight, I don’t do so in terror; I do so with great confidence that I’m going to wake up and go on with my life.

So, a saint, or even now a sinless person— a sinless Mother of God— wouldn’t she fall asleep in the Lord?

To me, it’s a very telling way to describe the difference in the way Mary left this world.

So, I think those teachings about Mary, though they can strike us first as kind of weird and mythological, are actually very telling; they cut right to the heart of what Christianity is about.

Immaculate Mary, the Mother of God, assumed body and soul into heaven, is not of merely historical interest, nor is she simply a powerful spiritual exemplar.

Rather, as the Queen of all the Saints, Mary is an ongoing presence, an actor in the life of the Church.

Her basic task, as always, is to draw people into fellowship with her Son.

The Church believes that in a mysterious way, Mary continues to say yes to God and to go forth on mission.

There are literally tens of thousands of reports of apparitions of the Blessed Mother up and down the Catholic centuries.

We’ve already explored the appearance to Bernadette at Lourdes.

I want now to turn to a most extraordinary encounter between the Blessed Mother and, typically enough, one of her little ones.

On December 9th, 1531, just about ten years after the Spaniards first brought the faith to this part of the world, an Indian man named Juan Diego, a recent convert to the faith, was making his way here along this hill of Tepeyac, where I’m standing.

He was on his way to Mass.

He heard a burst of birdsong.

He turned to see where it was coming from, and he saw an extraordinary sight: there was a woman clothed in celestial light.

She announced herself as the Mother of the Most High God, and she had a simple request for Juan Diego: he would ask the bishop to build a temple here in her honor.

Being a simple, humble man, Juan Diego went directly to the bishop.

He relayed the story to him; he took it in, but he also said, I’d like a sign.

Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac on December 12th.

She invited him to take off his tilma, that was a simple coarse garment worn by peasants; it was woven from cactus fibers.

In that tilma, she helped him to arrange a group of roses that were blooming despite the lateness of the year.

That would be the sign for the bishop.

Juan Diego took the bundle of roses and went directly to the bishop.

He was made to wait for a while.

They say that officious aides of the bishop tried to find out what he was hiding in the tilma, but he wouldn't show them.

Finally, he was ushered into the bishop’s presence.

He opened the tilma, and the roses spilled to the ground.

But then, to his great surprise, the bishop and his aides were kneeling because something even more amazing had happened: on the inside of the tilma, there was the image of the woman clothed in light.

One might be tempted to say, Oh, it’s a charming story from a simpler, more credulous time.

But the best counter-indication to the skeptics is the tilma itself, which you can see directly behind me.

Studies have shown that it is indeed from the 16th century, and it is indeed woven from those simple cactus fibers which, under the best of circumstances, would normally last 20 or 25 years.

And yet there it is, 500 years later.

And the image—the strange and beautiful image—careful studies have revealed that no known pigmentation was involved in the making of it, and no underdrawing is discernible.

More to it, the symbolic power of it is extraordinary.

Here is a mestiza—not a Spaniard, not an Aztec, but a blend of the two races.

She’s called by the Mexicans La Morena, the brown-skinned girl.

The cincture that she wears was an Aztec sign of pregnancy.

She stands in front of the sun and on the moon, and her cloak is bedecked with stars.

Sun, moon, and stars were all gods for the ancient Aztecs.

This woman is greater than they.

At the same time, she keeps her eyes down and her hands folded in prayer, acknowledging that there is one greater than she.

Her name, Guadalupe, is probably a Spanish deformation of Coatlacue.

It means the one who crushes the serpent.

The serpent was another chief Aztec divinity, and the crusher of the serpent is the one predicted in the book of Genesis.

It is an undisputed fact that within 10 years of the apparition, almost the entire Mexican nation was converted to Christianity—nine million people.

This amounts to approximately 3,000 people per day for 10 years—a mini Pentecost every day for a decade.

And the image continues to beguile, fascinate, and beckon.

The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most visited religious sites in the Christian world.

People come here by the millions to commune with La Morena, some approaching her in supplication, penitence, or gratitude on their knees.

There are literally tens of thousands of stories of Marian apparitions up and down the centuries.

Let’s say many of which, if not most, are questionable.

There are, however, some—maybe a handful—that are harder to dismiss, and they kind of haunt the mind.

There’s something about the detail of them, something about the integrity of the account.

But then also, I would say, the consequences.

You judge the spiritual act by its fruit.

What’s the result of it?

You look at a place like this and you can see this massive—first of all, the conversion of Mexico—which is the most extraordinary thing about Guadalupe.

Within 10 years of the apparition, the entire country has been converted, while prior to that, the Franciscans, after about 10 years, had made very few inroads.

Juan Diego was kind of an odd duck—an Aztec who had become a Christian.

In the wake of Guadalupe, the entire country is converted.

And then to this day, almost 500 years later, people still come.

In contrast to a kind of silly thing where people saw an image of Mary in the salt dripping from the highway overpass—remember that was a few years ago in Chicago—well, no one bothers about that.

That had no effect; no one goes there to this day.

So I think you judge it by its fruit, by its consequences.

I’m standing on top of the Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient city of Teotihuacan.

Behind me, you can see the Pyramid of the Moon.

This is one of the most beautiful examples of pre-Columbian architecture.

Despite the beauty of the architecture, it’s also a place that chills us a bit because we realize that here, as in so many other places like it in ancient Mexico, human sacrifice took place.

Now, mind you, I’m not trying to demonize the ancient Aztec or Mayan cultures; many ancient cultures practiced human sacrifice.

In fact, if the contemporary philosopher René Girard is right, something like human sacrifice lies at the foundation of most human societies.

Girard says that tensions naturally arise within human communities, and then what kicks in is what he called a scapegoating mechanism.

We tend to find someone or some group to blame, and we cast, as it were, our anxieties onto them.

We persecute them, we ostracize them; at the limit, we kill them.

And in that process, we feel a kind of renewal of our community.

That explains why, on Girard's reading, ancient people saw the gods as pleased with scapegoating violence.

That’s why here, on top of pyramids like this, when they would raise the still-beating heart of the victim to the gods, they were seen as placating these powers that govern the universe.

Something René Girard found very interesting is in that great biblical story of the temptation of Jesus.

When the devil displays before Him all the kingdoms of the world and Jesus resists him, Jesus uses this term: He says, Begone, Satan!

“Hosatanas” in Greek means the accuser, the blamer.

The implication is that somehow, at the foundation of society, is something like this scapegoating mechanism.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, when she appeared to Juan Diego, said, I am the Mother of the Most High God.

She was announcing the emergence into the world of the true God, who at the climax of His life became not the perpetrator of scapegoating violence but precisely the victim of it.

In Jesus crucified, we see that the true God stands not on the side of the victimizers, but precisely on the side of the victims.

The world is ordered not through violence; the world is ordered precisely through love and through non-violence.

I labor under no illusions that the Spaniards who brought the faith to this part of the world were angels or that no atrocities were perpetrated in the name of Christ.

There were, however, this great message came through as Mexico was evangelized.

This practice of human sacrifice ended, and there I think is a prime example of how the evangelization of the country changed the very nature of the society.

In the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, we find Mary’s great hymn of praise to Yahweh.

It commences with the simple declaration, My soul magnifies the Lord.

Mary announces here that her whole being is ordered to the glorification of God.

Her ego wants nothing for itself; it wants only to be an occasion for giving honor to God.

But since, as we’ve seen, God needs nothing, whatever glory Mary gives to Him returns to her benefits, so that she is magnified in the very act of magnifying Him.

In giving herself away fully to God, Mary becomes a superabundant source of life; indeed, she becomes pregnant with God.

This odd and wonderful rhythm of magnifying and being magnified is the key to understanding everything about Mary—from her divine motherhood to her assumption and immaculate conception, and to her mission in the life of the Church.

The great 19th-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins caught this in his ballad “The May Magnificat.”

He wonders in the first few stanzas why May should be a month dedicated to Mary, and he provides Mary’s own answer, writing, Ask of her the mighty mother.

Her reply puts this other question: What is spring?

Growth in everything.

Then, with typical verbal dexterity and spiritual enthusiasm, Hopkins delineates the modes of growth in springtime: flesh and fleece, fur and feather, grass and green world—all together, star-eyed, strawberry-breasted throstle above her nested cluster of bugle-blue eggs.

Thin forms and warms the life within, and bird and blossom swell in sod or sheath or shell.

And he imagines Mary, the Mother of God, surveying all of this life with limitless pleasure.

He writes, All things rising, all things sizing,” Mary sees, sympathizing with that world of good nature’s motherhood.

Mary's utter willingness to magnify the Lord made of her a matrix of life.

The spring itself, in all of its wild fecundity, is but a hint at the vitality that she unleashes.