– José Maria C.S. André
In the month of October, traditionally consecrated to Our Lady, the Pope issued a book on the Mother of God, in the form of an interview with Marco Pozza (published in Italian by Rizzoli and the Libreria Editrice Vaticana). The recording will be broadcast every Tuesday on Tv2000, starting on October 16. In this conversation, the Pope sketches the profile of Our Lady and teaches us to pray her, especially the “Hail Mary”.
A fundamental feature of the holiness of Mary is the sanctity of everyday life, of small ordinary things, as the common life of most men and women. The summit of holiness is not a strange thing, out-of-this-world, but the acting presence of God through normality:
“From the moment she was born until the Annunciation, when she encountered the Angel of God, I imagine her as a normal girl, a girl of today, I can’t say she is a city-girl, because she is from a small town, but she is a normal girl, with a normal education, open to marriage, to start a family. I figure out that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures, she attended catechesis in a family environment, a catechesis from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman: Mary is normal, she is a woman that any woman in this world can imitate. There are no strange things in her life, she is a normal mother: even in her virginal marriage, chaste in virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, she went shopping, helped her Son, helped her husband: she was normal.”
Christian normality does not consist in yielding to the worldly spirit. On the contrary, it is the generosity to approach others, to take friendship very seriously, to forge strong and deep personal bonds, which bring others closer to God. To isolate oneself, to neglect a committed citizenship, that is the strategy of Satan:
“Normality is living among the people and like the people. It is abnormal to live without roots in a people, without connection with a historical people. Such lack of roots gives rise to a sin –very much cherished by Satan, our enemy–: the sin of the elite. The elite does not know what it means to live among the people and when I speak of the elite I do not mean a social class, I mean an attitude of the soul (…). However, as the Council says in ‘Lumen gentium’, the Church is the faithful holy people of God. The Church is the people, the people of God. And the devil likes the elite.”
The normality of Our Lady shines, full of fruits, by the action of God. Based on her faithfulness, God transformed the world:
He “starts the re-creation with Mary.”
The response to the vocation is always a personal encounter with God, not the namelessness of someone diluted in a group. The vocation, which is discovered in personal prayer, in an intimate dialogue with God, is to give oneself individually, even when this path links our life with that of others:
“Let’s think of the single women who run the house, who alone raise their children. Mary is even more alone. Alone, she begins this story, which continues with Joseph and the family; but at the beginning there is only the dialogue between God and a single woman. She is alone in the moment of Annunciation and alone when her Son died.”
The Pope asked everyone to pray the Rosary with special devotion especially in October and asked that we pray, through the intercession of Mary and the Archangel Saint Michael, for the unity of the Church, threatened in these times by the wiles of Satan.
[DESTAQUE (PULL QUOTE)]
“Mary is normal, she is a woman that any woman in this world can imitate.”
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