Pope Francis: homily for Solemnity of Mary, Mother of
God
Homily of His Holiness Pope Francis
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
1 January 2017
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
1 January 2017
“Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her
heart! (Lk 2:19). In these words, Luke describes the attitude with which
Mary took in all that they had experienced in those days. Far from trying
to understand or master the situation, Mary is the woman who can treasure, that
is to say, protect and guard in her heart, the passage of God in the life of
his people. Deep within, she had learned to listen to the heartbeat of
her Son, and that in turn taught her, throughout her life, to discover God’s
heartbeat in history. She learned how to be a mother, and in that
learning process she gave Jesus the beautiful experience of knowing what it is
to be a Son. In Mary, the eternal Word not only became flesh, but also
learned to recognize the maternal tenderness of God. With Mary, the
God-Child learned to listen to the yearnings, the troubles, the joys and the hopes
of the people of the promise. With Mary, he discovered himself a Son of
God’s faithful people.
In the Gospels, Mary appears as a woman of few words, with
no great speeches or deeds, but with an attentive gaze capable of guarding the
life and mission of her Son, and for this reason, of everything that he
loves. She was able to watch over the beginnings of the first Christian
community, and in this way she learned to be the mother of a multitude.
She drew near to the most diverse situations in order to sow hope. She
accompanied the crosses borne in the silence of her children’s hearts.
How many devotions, shrines and chapels in the most far-off places, how many
pictures in our homes, remind us of this great truth. Mary gave us a mother’s
warmth, the warmth that shelters us amid troubles, the maternal warmth that
keeps anything or anyone from extinguishing in the heart of the Church the
revolution of tenderness inaugurated by her Son. Where there is a mother,
there is tenderness. By her motherhood, Mary shows us that humility and
tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong. She teaches us
that we do not have to mistreat others in order to feel important (cf.
Evangelii Gaudium, 288). God’s holy people has always acknowledged and
hailed her as the Holy Mother of God.
To celebrate Mary as Mother of God and our mother at the
beginning of the new year means recalling a certainty that will accompany our
days: we are a people with a Mother; we are not orphans.
Mothers are the strongest antidote to our individualistic
and egotistic tendencies, to our lack of openness and our indifference. A
society without mothers would not only be a cold society, but a society that
has lost its heart, lost the “feel of home”. A society without mothers
would be a merciless society, one that has room only for calculation and
speculation. Because mothers, even at the worst times, are capable of
testifying to tenderness, unconditional self-sacrifice and the strength of
hope. I have learned much from those mothers whose children are in
prison, or lying in hospital beds, or in bondage to drugs, yet, come cold or
heat, rain or draught, never stop fighting for what is best for them. Or
those mothers who in refugee camps, or even the midst of war, unfailingly embrace
and support their children’s sufferings. Mothers who literally give their
lives so that none of their children will perish. Where there is a
mother, there is unity, there is belonging, belonging as children.
To begin the year by recalling God’s goodness in the
maternal face of Mary, in the maternal face of the Church, in the faces of our
own mothers, protects us from the corrosive disease of being “spiritual
orphans”. It is the sense of being orphaned that the soul experiences
when it feels motherless and lacking the tenderness of God, when the sense of
belonging to a family, a people, a land, to our God, grows dim. This
sense of being orphaned lodges in a narcissistic heart capable of looking only
to itself and its own interests. It grows when what we forget that life
is a gift we have received – and owe to others – a gift we are called to share
in this common home.
It was such a self-centred orphanhood that led Cain to ask:
“Am I my brother's keeper?” (Gen 4:9). It was as if to say: he
doesn’t belong to me; I do not recognize him. This attitude of spiritual
orphanhood is a cancer that silently eats away at and debases the soul.
We become all the more debased, inasmuch as nobody belongs to us and we belong
to no one. I debase the earth because it does not belong to me; I debase
others because they do not belong to me; I debase God because I do not belong
to him, and in the end we debase our very selves, since we forget who we are
and the divine “family name” we bear. The loss of the ties that bind us,
so typical of our fragmented and divided culture, increases this sense of
orphanhood and, as a result, of great emptiness and loneliness. The lack
of physical (and not virtual) contact is cauterizing our hearts (cf. Laudato
Si’, 49) and making us lose the capacity for tenderness and wonder, for pity
and compassion. Spiritual orphanhood makes us forget what it means to be
children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents, friends and believers. It
makes us forget the importance of playing, of singing, of a smile, of rest, of
gratitude.
Celebrating the feast of the Holy Mother of God makes us
smile once more as we realize that we are a people, that we belong, that only
within a community, within a family, can we as persons find the “climate”, the
“warmth” that enables us to grow in humanity, and not merely as objects meant
to “consume and be consumed”. To celebrate the feast of the Holy Mother
of God reminds us that we are not interchangeable items of merchandise or
information processors. We are children, we are family, we are
God’s People.
Celebrating the Holy Mother of God leads us to create and
care for common places that can give us a sense of belonging, of being rooted,
of feeling at home in our cities, in communities that unite and support us (cf.
Laudato Si’, 151).
Jesus, at the moment of his ultimate self-sacrifice, on the
cross, sought to keep nothing for himself, and in handing over his life, he
also handed over to us his Mother. He told Mary: Here is your son; here
are your children. We too want to receive her into our homes, our
families, our communities and nations. We want to meet her maternal
gaze. The gaze that frees us from being orphans; the gaze that reminds us
that we are brothers and sisters, that I belong to you, that you belong to me,
that we are of the same flesh. The gaze that teaches us that we have to
learn how to care for life in the same way and with the same tenderness that
she did: by sowing hope, by sowing a sense of belonging and of fraternity.
Celebrating the Holy Mother of God reminds us that we have a
Mother. We are not orphans. We have a Mother. Together let us
all confess this truth. I invite you to acclaim it three times, standing
[all stand], like the faithful of Ephesus: Holy Mother of God, Holy
Mother of God, Holy Mother of God.
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