Our Advent Lady
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Friday, December 11, 2009 2:00 PM
The Pope visited Rome’s famed Spanish Steps on Tuesday.
He went to pay homage to the Immaculate Conception on her feast day. Her image hangs over the piazza there, almost keeping watch over the city.
The Pope’s remarks there are lovely—and since we celebrate another Marian feast tomorrow (Guadalupe), I thought they’d still be timely.
“What does Mary tell the city? Of what does her presence remind us? It reminds us that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Rom 5: 20), as the Apostle Paul wrote. She is the Immaculate Mother who tells people in our day too: Do not be afraid, Jesus has defeated evil, he has uprooted it, delivering us from its rule.
How great is our need of this good news!”
Something that struck me in the Pope’s short address is his singling out of Mary as a woman of action. He puts her quiet but active participation in the Good News in contrast to “the news”—which generally we receive passively.
He notes how gloomy “the news” can make us feel simply because the terrible things we read and take in each day are never resolved, so there is a constant accumulation of evil in a sense. Yet the danger of over-consumption of news isn’t that we’ll feel bad, it’s that it can tempt us to forget we are protagonists in the world, not merely passive consumers. He points to the irony that knowing about everything can have the effect of making us feel disconnected from it
The mass media always tends to make us feel like “spectators”, as if evil concerned only others and certain things could never happen to us. Instead, we are all “actors” and, for better or for worse, our behaviour has an influence on others.
He calls this pollution of the spirit.
We often complain of the pollution of the atmosphere that in some parts of the city is unbreathable. It is true. Everyone must do his or her part to make the city a cleaner place. Yet, there is another kind of contamination, less perceptible to the senses, but equally dangerous. It is the pollution of the spirit; it makes us smile less, makes our faces gloomier, less likely to greet each other or look each other in the eye…. The city has many faces but unfortunately collective dynamics can make us lose our in-depth perception of them. We perceive everything superficially. People become bodies and these bodies lose their soul, they become things, faceless objects that can be exchanged and consumed.
Mary, says the Pope, because of the “perfect transparency of her soul within her body,” teaches us to rediscover the truth about the human person and his unique dignity. She also helps us recover a “space,” if you will, for action:
I want to pay homage publicly to all those who in silence, not with words but with deeds, strive to practice this evangelical law of love that propels the world forward. There are so many of them even here in Rome and they rarely hit the headlines. They are men and women of all ages, who have realized that it is not worth condemning, complaining or accusing; that it is better to respond to evil by doing good. This changes things; or rather it changes people, and hence improves society.
He ends with an exhortation:
While we are busy in our daily routine, let us listen to Mary’s voice. Let us hear her silent but pressing appeal. She tells each one of us that wherever sin increases, grace may abound all the more, starting in your our own heart and in your life! And the city will be more beautiful, more Christian and more human.
The Vatican website has a nice collection of photos from the event. I love especially the shots of the crowds on the streets of Rome parting for the popemobile.
There is also a link to all the Pope’s Advent speeches and homilies. If you haven’t read the Pope’s homily at the beginning of Advent, you’re missing out.
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