Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Gen 3:9-15,20; Phil 1:4-6,8-11; Lk 1:26-38
Monsignor Tonino Bello wrote: “I am sometimes concerned because in regard to Our Lady we have a relationship of somewhat great respect. We hardly manage to remove from her head the diadem of the twelve stars to see how beautiful she is bareheaded. Bareheaded, Our Lady is equally stunning. That’s why I believe there can be no more beautiful conclusion… than to make this decision: to welcome Our Lady within your affairs… Introduce her into your affairs, into your designs. Introduce her into your thoughts… It’s spontaneous, it’s not contrived, it’s not laden with decorations, as is often the case with our spiritual life, with our piety. We have a lot of decorations on our shoulders, a lot of lace, a lot of ribbons.” This consideration is important, because the contemplation of Mary’s holiness from her conception risks making us feel distant or, as a well-known Marian hymn puts it, “unattainable.”… Instead, the Second Reading (Phil. 1:4-6, 8-11) reminds us that we have all been by God “chosen from the creation of the world to be holy and spotless in his sight.”
Yes, she is the woman in whom the Proto Gospel is fulfilled, who announces that her offspring will crush the serpent’s head (First Reading: Gen 3:9-15.20),
But Mary is also a concrete example of life for every believer. She is a woman of hearing, keeping and meditating on the Word: “She kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51). She is a woman of total obedience: “Let it be done to me as you have said” (Gospel: Lk 1:38); “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). She is a woman of faith: her greatness lies precisely not so much in her physical motherhood as in her full surrender to God: “Blessed is she who believed in the fulfillment of the words of the Lord” (Lk 1:45; cf. 11:27-28; Mt 12:47-49). She is a woman of the non-understanding of the mystery of God: “They were astonished at the things that were being said about him… On seeing him they were astonished…. They did not understand his words” (Lk 2:33,48,50). She is a woman who confronts Scripture and history: think of the “Magnificat” (Lk 1:46-47), an admirable example of how to combine biblical wisdom and signs of the times. She is woman of proclamation: “Mary set out” (Lk 1:39-45): she brings the Word to the prophets (John the Baptist, Anna), to the righteous (Elizabeth, Simeon, the Magi), to the poor (the shepherds). She is a woman of martyrdom for the Word, who is immediately prophesied that a sword will pierce her soul (Lk 2:35), who has to make exodus to Egypt because she is persecuted by the powerful (Mt 2:14), Sorrowful under the cross where her Son dies (Jn 19:25-27). She is a woman of community life and prayer, in the early Church (Acts 1:14; 2:1-4).
But above all, Mary is an example to us for a holiness of the everyday. For us lay people, immersed in the myriad worries of family life, amidst bills to pay and a leaky faucet, amidst condominium assemblies and conversations with our children’s teachers, Mary is a model of a holiness lived out not in striking gestures, but in humility and hiddenness, in the feriality of toil offered to God: that holiness which, as Francis de Sales used to say, consists in “doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way,” and which characterizes the spirituality of so many of our contemporaries, from Thérèse of Lisieux to Charles de Foucauld, to so many unknown mothers and fathers who certainly made themselves saints in the banality of their daily lives, even if they never found those who had the time and money to plead their cause for official beatification on the altars. .. Indeed, the Council tells us, “The perfect model of such a spiritual and apostolic life is the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Apostles, who, while she lived on earth the life common to all, full of family solicitude and work, was always intimately united with her Son, and cooperated in an altogether singular way in the work of the Savior” (Apostolicam Actuositatem, no. 4).