Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God (Year A) - 1 January
1st January 2023
Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God (Year A) - 1 January
“We never give more honour to Jesus than when we honour His Mother, and we honour her simply and solely to honour Him all the more perfectly. We go to her only as a way leading to the goal we seek - Jesus, her Son.” - St Louis Marie de Montfort
A reflection on Mary, the Holy Mother of God by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
"There is, actually, only one person in all humanity of whom God has one picture and in whom there is a perfect conformity between what He wanted her to be and what she is, and that is His Own Mother. Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign. The Ideal that God had of her, that she is, and in the flesh. The model and the copy are perfect; she is all that was foreseen, planned, and dreamed. The melody of her life is played just as it was written. Mary was thought, conceived, and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realisation.
"That is why, through the centuries, Christian liturgy has applied to her the words of the Book of Proverbs. Because she is what God wanted us all to be, she speaks of herself as the Eternal Blueprint in the Mind of God, the one whom God loved before she was a creature. She is even pictured as being with Him not only at creation but also before creation. She existed in the Divine Mind as an Eternal Thought before there were any mothers. She is the Mother of mothers - she is the world's first love.
"‘The lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything, from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived; neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out; the mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established before the hills I was brought forth.' (proverbs 8:22)
"But God not only thought of her in eternity; He also had her in mind at the beginning of time. In the beginning of history, when the human race fell through the solicitation of a woman, God spoke to the Devil and said, 'I will establish a feud between thee and the woman, between thy offspring and hers; she is to crush thy head, while thou dost lie in wait at her heels' (Gen 3:15). God was saying that, if it was by a woman that man fell, it would be through a woman that God would be revenged. Whoever His Mother would be, she would certainly be blessed among women, and because God Himself chose her, He would see to it that all generations would call her blessed.
"We should not be surprised that she is spoken of as a thought by God before the world was made. When Whistler painted the picture of his mother, did he not have the image of her in his mind before he ever gathered his colours on his palette? If you could have pre-existed your mother (not artistically, but really), would you not have made her the most perfect woman that ever lived - one so beautiful she would have been the sweet envy of all women, and one so gentle and so merciful that all other mothers would have sought to imitate her virtues? Why, then, should we think that God would do otherwise? When Whistler was complimented on the portrait of his mother, he said, 'You know how it is; one tries to make one's Mummy just as nice as he can.' When God became Man, He too, I believe, would make His Mother as nice as He could - and that would make her a perfect Mother.
"She is the one whom every man loves when he loves a woman - whether he knows it or not. She is what every woman wants to be when she looks at herself. She is the woman whom every man marries in ideal when he takes a spouse; she is hidden as an ideal in the discontent of every woman with the carnal aggressiveness of man; she is the secret desire every woman has to be honoured and fostered; she is the way every woman wants to command respect and love because of the beauty of her goodness of body and soul. And this blueprint of love, whom God loved before the world was made, this Dream Woman before women were, is the one of whom every heart can say in its depths: 'She is the woman I love!'"
(The World's First Love)
Prayer for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God by St Francis of Assisi
Hail, O Lady, Holy Queen, Mary, Holy Mother of God, who are the Virgin made Church, chosen by the most Holy Father in heaven whom He consecrated with His most Holy Beloved Son and with the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, in whom there was and is all fullness of grace and every good.
Hail His Palace! Hail His Tabernacle! Hail His Dwelling! Hail His Robe! Hail His Servant! Hail His Mother! And hail, all You holy virtues which are poured into the hearts of the faithful through the grace and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, that from being unbelievers, You may make them faithful to God. Amen. 💖🙏💐