"You never think of Mary without Mary's thinking of God for you. You never praise or honour Mary without Mary's praising and honouring God with you. If you say 'Mary,' she says 'God'. St Elizabeth praised Mary, and called her blessed, because she had believed. Mary, the faithful echo of God, at once intoned: 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'." - St Louis de Monfort
The meeting of Mary and Elizabeth was also a meeting of the children they were carrying, the Saviour and His precursor. John the Baptist leapt for joy in his mother’s womb. In Luke’s account we see hints of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, the one who bears God. Joy pervades this scene as Mary brings the hidden presence of Jesus to the home of her relatives. Today she still presents Jesus to the world through her role as our spiritual mother.
(St Paul’s Weekday Missal)
St Charles de Foucauld in his meditation on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin to her cousin does not dwell on Mary’s readiness to help her elderly cousin. In his eyes Mary’s visit, while partly a visit of practical charity to assist Elizabeth in the last months of her pregnancy and at the birth, was at the same time something else that was more important.
St Charles de Foucauld writes that Mary “set out to sanctify St John, to proclaim the Good News to him, to evangelise and sanctify him, not with words but by silently bringing Jesus to him in his home … John the Baptist was sanctified, and with him, the whole of Zechariah’s family, not through words or an invitation to conversion that would in any case have been impossible, but simply through the presence of the Son of God within her. From before His birth, therefore, Jesus is Saviour with His presence alone.”
St Charles then states that all Christians should sanctify and bring Christ to the world “just as Mary sanctified John by going to his home and bringing Jesus Himself, the living Gospel, within her.”
Prayer
O Lord God Who did lead the Blessed Virgin Mary to visit Elizabeth, to their exceeding joy and comfort: Grant unto Thy people, that as Mary rejoiced to be called the Mother of the Lord, so they may ever rejoice to believe the incarnation of Thine only begotten Son; to Whom with the Holy Spirit be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen. 💐💖🙏
