Push in the Right Direction

Today is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a day commemorated by entering religious orders (and anniversaries thereof) and a round of Marian piety in the Catholic social media universe. The Gospel today features the Magnificat, a wonderful prayer in its own right, and today a reminder of the personal particularity through which the Christian faith comes.  

And Mary said:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior

for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:

the Almighty has done great things for me

and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him

in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,

and has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel

for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

the promise he made to our fathers,

to Abraham and his children forever.”

Through Mary God accomplished the salvation of the world.  And through Mary the Christian tradition's penchant for antitriumphalism and unmerited grace see its first and greatest exemplar.  The Marian charism, especially with Pope Francis' support, will remain a revitalizing force within the Church.

Marian path to Christian Environmentalism

A recent post detailed some Trinitarian foundations for Christian environmentalism.  The very creedal profession of the Trinity--not just that we believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--but how we state those beliefs, all of which illuminate the Trinity's creative relationships suggests a renewed appreciation for the world itself but importantly how we care for it, too.


Confession time:  that post came about through reflecting on the Creed as it kickstarts the Rosary, usually as I drove to work through the geological oddity of eastern upstate New York, Albany's Pine Bush.  Google images montage here;  lots of scrubby pines and sandy soil, much of which now lies underneath sub/urban development and, problematically, the area's largest landfill.  Still, much natural beauty lies within, as this cathedral-like trail attests.

Anyway, the point: the Trinitarian foundations for viewing the environment come to us, in this case, through the Rosary, that most Marian and Roman Catholic of prayers.

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord with you.

Blessed are you among women,

and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, mother of God,

pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

I suppose the easy route would be to draw an analogy between the Blessed Mother's fertility celebrated by the prayer and the fertility of the natural world itself.  While superficially helpful, such a connection might obscure deeper, more authentic and vital, relationships.  After all, the Catechism (#773) asserts that the Church's Marian charism--its interior holiness--precedes the Petrine, the external, authoritarian charism.  Keep that in mind whenever you hear complaints about Vatican intrusiveness or the Church's unwillingness to change or the old canard "I'm spiritual but not religious."  Because of Mary, the Church is spiritual before it is "religious," and so, too, is the natural world.

In Pius IX's footsteps

This past Friday, May 13th, was the 224th birthday of Blessed Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti), Bishop of Rome from 1846 until 1878.  In a bizarre string of coincidences, the likes of which religion geeks like me love and everybody else (perhaps wisely) just overlooks, May 13th is also:
*  the anniversary of the Blessed Mother's appearance to the children at Fatima, Portugal (1917)
*  the birthday of Peoples Temple founder, Jim Jones (1931-1978)--yes, the purple Kool-Aid guy
and...
*  the 35th anniversary of the attempted assassination of St. John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca.

The Fatima and assassination events are connected.  We now know that St. John Paul, as his driver whisked him away to the hospital, uttered "And now we see the Third Secret of Fatima revealed...", referencing the three messages Our Lady revealed to the three children in May 1917.  The third secret, revealed only in 2000, included a vision of white-clad bishop being murdered amidst a crowd. John L. Allen, Jr. notes that St. John Paul firmly believed Our Lady of Fatima altered the shot's trajectory and saved his life.  Agca's bullet now resides in the crown of Our Lady's statue in Fatima itself.  Allen:

Consider the worldview at work here: John Paul II was profoundly convinced that on May 13, 1981, the Virgin Mary altered the flight path of a bullet in order to keep him alive and, in so doing, to preserve his papacy.

If you genuinely believe that Mary interceded with God in order to suspend the laws of physics to keep you in office, then you never just wake up one morning and decide you’ve had enough.

Recall that John Paul II, even before the assassination attempt, regarded his papacy as belonging to Mary, not to him, as expressed in his motto Totus Tuus, “Entirely Yours,” a line drawn from the spiritual works of Saint Louis de Montfort.

If ever the pontiff would have concluded that Mary had put an exclamation point on her rights of ownership, the day of the assassination attempt certainly was it.

In other words, John Paul II simply did not believe it was up to him to decide when it was over.

Read all of Allen's piece here.

The profundity of St. John Paul's faith and his mystical-eschatological view of human history, including his own life (something Allen details in the post linked), stem from his own foundations in Marian piety and thus the Rosary.  That is something St. John Paul's predecessors, particularly Pius IX and Leo XIII, knew quite well.  Leo wrote twelve encyclicals on the Rosary alone.  Pius' Marian devotion was perhaps a bit more embodied.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee

Blessed are you among women

and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death.

So that's Pius IX praying at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.