Ave Maria!
Third Sunday of Lent —11 March AD 2007

    Now it came to pass as He said these things, that a certain woman lifted up her voice from the crowd and said to Him, “Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, and the breasts that nursed Thee.”
But He said, “Rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.”[1]

Giotto Bondoni  1266-1337
Saint Francis Casting out Devils

[Ordinary of the Mass]
[English Mass Text]
[Latin Mass Text]
[Lenten Observance]

    At first glance it may appear that our Lord disagreed with the woman who praised His holy mother—sometimes it sounds that way, particularly in those Masses of the Blessed Virgin where the Gospel is nothing more than those two short verses.

    The point that our Lord was making was that no mere accident of birth would be adequate to attain salvation.  It was not enough to be one of His countrymen;  not enough to be one of his close relatives;  not enough, even to be His Blessed Mother.  The blessed in heaven would be those who heard the word of God on earth, paid attention to it, and conducted their affairs in accordance with it.  Saint John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople at the beginning of the fifth century observed:

    No one can hope for salvation from anything after divine grace, except his own virtues.  If relationship to [Jesus] had been useful to Mary by itself, it would have been useful also to the Jews, who were Christ’s relatives according to the flesh; it would have been useful for the city in which He was born;  it would have been useful to His close relatives.  But.... His country, indeed, gained nothing from being His fatherland and was destroyed by fire;  His fellow citizens were killed and perished miserably;  His relatives according to the flesh gained nothing for salvation, lacking the protection of virtue.  But the Apostles became the most renowned of all, since by obedience they gained His true friendship and desired companionship.  Thus we are to understand that faith is always necessary to us, and a life shining with virtues; this alone can save us.[2]

    The woman who praised Mary was certainly correct on a number of counts.  To begin with, she was pointing out our Lord’s own wisdom in dealing with the Pharisees, who were not particularly well liked by our Lord or by the common people.  And, she recognizes not only His wisdom, but also the fact that He is the Son of God.  The Venerable Bede (672-735) puts it this way:

    While scribes and Pharisees are blasphemously putting out Lord to the test, she is the first to recognize His incarnation.  She recognizes it with utter sincerity; she confesses it with utter confidence ... she puts the great men there to shame with their wicked criticisms, and confounds the faithlessness of future heretics.[3]

    Bede praised the woman in the crowd, for he knew with both hindsight and with foresight that the Church would always be affected by those who would detract from the excellence of the Blessed Virgin.  Living in eighth century England, Bede could look back to heretics like Nestorius and Eutyches in the early fifth century;  the one denying Mary’s motherhood of God;  the other suggesting that Christ’s nature was something other than human and not derived from His human Mother.  With foresight, Bede could look ahead to the Reformation and to the modern era, when truths of the Faith like Mary’s Immaculate Conception, perpetual Virginity, and glorious Assumption into heaven would be denied either for being “non-scriptural” (as though nothing outside the Bible were true)—of for being “too miraculous” (as though God never works miracles, and is confined to purely natural efforts, even in the matter of our salvation).

    One of Bede’s fellow Englishmen, a convert from Anglicanism, the erudite twentieth century Monsignor Ronald Knox critiqued this rejection of the miraculous in a very beautiful passage on the Blessed Mother in his book, The Belief of Catholics.  It is a little long, but I feel it needs to be read once in a while—I am going to read a few lines right now, and will read it in its entirety when we finish:

    They have said that we deify her; that is not because we exaggerate the eminence of God's Mother, but because they belittle the eminence of God. A creature miraculously preserved from sin by the indwelling power of the Holy Ghost—that is to them a divine title, because that is all the claim their grudging theologies will concede, often enough, to our Lord Himself. They refuse to honor the God- bearing Woman because their Christ is only a God-bearing Man.[4]

    What Knox is saying is that people who reject the exalted status of the Virgin Mary often do so because they don’t really think much of God Himself.  They are the same people who insist that the universe is just an “accident of random chance,” or that God is, at most, a clock maker, who fashioned the universe, wound it up, and walked away.  They are the same materialists who erroneously define truth and morality as nothing more than the product of human dialogue and consensus—something that changes as man changes with the cosmos.  To the materialist, Mary was just another changing part of the universe, and is no longer.

    If we return to the Venerable Bede, we find that he interprets our Lord as saying that men and women must become like Mary, conceiving Christ in our minds as Mary conceived Him in her womb.  He says:

    The physical mother of the Word of God [is not alone].  Blessed too are all those who conceive that same Word spiritually, by the faith that comes from hearing, and who by their good works strive to bring It in to birth, and, as it were, to nourish It in their own hearts and in the hearts of their fellow men.[5]

    So, on examination, we see that our Lord was not disagreeing with the woman in the crowd, and was taking no honor away from His holy Mother.  He was telling us, rather, that we must be like her; hearing the word of God and keeping it.

    Now let me read that beautiful passage from Monsignor Knox in its entirety:

    They have said that we deify her; that is not because we exaggerate the eminence of God's Mother, but because they belittle the eminence of God. A creature miraculously preserved from sin by the indwelling power of the Holy Ghost -- that is to them a divine title, because that is all the claim their grudging theologies will concede, often enough, to our Lord Himself. They refuse to honor the God- bearing Woman because their Christ is only a God-bearing Man. We who know that God could (if He would) annihilate every existing creature without abating anything of His blessedness or His glory, are not afraid less the honor done to His creature of perfect Womanhood should prejudice the honor due to Him. Touchstone of truth in the ages of controversy, romance of the medieval world, she has not lost with the rise of new devotions, any fragment of her ancient glory. Other lights may glow and dim as the centuries pass, she cannot suffer change; and when a Catholic ceases to honor her, he ceases to be a Catholic.[6]

  And let us never cease to be Catholics!