The article of the month

This Month… by Teresa Caldecott Cialini

Though it usually closes “Mary’s Month”, this year the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is bumped from its usual spot in our calendar by the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. Our Lady, as vessel of the creative work of the Holy Trinity, played a pivotal role in the revelation of this most complex of the Christian Mysteries: she is the obedient daughter of God the Father, Bride of God the Holy Spirit, and Mother of God the Son: no other­ human being has been so entirely intertwined with the One-God-in-Three-Persons than she. Though we skip the Visitation, this month is far from devoid of wonderful Marian feastdays, with Our Lady of Fatima on the 13th and Mary, Mother of the Church on the 25th. This latter celebration always comes directly after the great feast of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, when the Church was born into the world.

In Fatima, as in Lourdes and Guadalupe, our Blessed Mother appeared to simple people—in this case three young shepherd children who were seemingly not at all prepared for the weighty visions they were shown during their encounters with our Lady. To better equip them for all they would witness and endure after, the “Angel of Peace” appeared to them first, to teach them how to pray and to give them their first Holy Communion. During six appearances in 1917, Mary told the children that she was the Lady of the Rosary and urged them—and all of us—to cling to this powerful form of prayer in particular.

Expanding Our Hearts

The Rosary encapsulates the way Mary always pulls us in closer to her Son; in the Rosary, when we reach out to take Mary’s hand, she lifts us up to her proverbial eye level­ as we pray through the Mysteries of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ. By drawing close to Jesus, accompanied by the Mother he loved and shared with us, we strive to open our hearts to the work of the Love that he pours out upon the world, namely the Holy Spirit. Only this fire can burn away the distorted mess in humanity’s hearts and expand them, as Venerable Lucia of Fatima’s testimony so powerfully explains in our Meditation on the 13th.

Though at the Baptism of the Lord (and in most depictions of the Annunciation) the Holy Spirit appears soft like a dove, the more usual experience of his arrival is as a consuming and radiating fire. The most obvious example is the disciples in the upper room at Pentecost, to whom the Spirit appeared as divided tongues as of fire…and rested on each one of them (Acts 2), causing them to leap into action not only overflowing with intellectual gifts (like languages!) but with the passionate love that drives out fear. Another ­example is in the life of Saint Philip Neri (26th May) who, while praying in the catacombs of Rome, was entered by a ball of fire that physically expanded and heated his heart to the degree that it broke several ribs and caused him from then on to fling open his shirts in the depths of winter. Of course, this degree of surrender to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” takes a tremendously courageous Saint: the physical sign of what happened to Saint Philip seems to remind us that even a heart fully given over to the Lord still cannot contain his superabundant Grace.

Spouse of the Mother of God

We venerate another Servant of the Holy Trinity at the beginning of this month in the memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker and Patron of the Universal Church. Saint Joseph’s attentiveness to the will of God, conveyed to him through dreams and angels, is maybe less physically painful than that of Saint Philip Neri, though no less life-disrupting. In the Prayer After Communion for the memorial, the priest asks on our behalf “that, by Saint Joseph’s example, cherishing in our hearts the signs of your love, we may ever enjoy the fruit of perpetual peace”. The two pieces of sacred art we offer for reflection this issue depict this side of Saint Joseph—a peaceful, young version of the head of the Holy Family, faithfully cherishing the infant Christ in his strong worker’s arms.

Both of these paintings come from Spain at the time of a great surge of devotion to Saint Joseph, a surge that can be credited in large part to the Spanish Carmelite reformers of the century before: Saint Teresa of Ávila and her friend and confessor Saint John of the Cross (our “Saint Who?” on the 25th May). Teresa wrote that this contemplative Saint is the patron of those who seek to grow in prayer, but she also extolls how dedicated he is as an intercessor: “I wish I could persuade everyone to be devoted to the glorious Saint Joseph, for I have great experience of the blessings which he can obtain from God.… To other saints, the Lord seems to have given grace to help us in some of our necessities. But my experience is that Saint Joseph helps us in them all; also, that the Lord wishes to teach us that, as he was himself subject on earth to Saint Joseph, so in heaven he now does all that Joseph asks.”

Her wish was granted: the seeds took root and spread in the following centuries, eventually blossoming into this hard-working, trustworthy Saint being declared “Patron of the Universal Church” in 1870. Joseph served the plan of God quietly, decisively, and whole-heartedly, and can be a model of faith and action: his practical protection of and labour for the Holy Family was always framed within prayerful attentiveness to the will of God. Along with Mary, we can have no better models for loving devotion to our triune God.