AT THE SCHOOL OF THE BLESSED MOTHER

Here again we have come to the month of October, a month commonly known to Catholics as the Marian month or the month of the Rosary. This month, to some ecclesial communities and to some catholic individuals, is characterized by a deepened renewed devotion to the recitation of the Rosary. This devotion always is intended to also renew our filial love to the Mother of God, Mother of the Church, help of Christians, and Queen of the Rosary.

Have you thought about how to live this month of devotion to the Rosary? Have you thought about what God can do for you and how many graces you can receive through your prayer with, and through the Queen of the Rosary just in this month? If not, I am very happy and encouraged to remind you and invite you to think and plan about this blessed month of Our Blessed Mother. The month of the Rosary is an occasion to manifest our love to the Holy Mother, a faithful acknowledgement her love, prayers, and intercession. It is a month of inviting her into our lives and its challenges.

It is a moment of being at her school, a school where she teaches us faith. In her school we learn faith because she is an attentive Virgin who received the word of God with faith, and she shows us how to be faithful and obedient disciples of Christ “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn.2:5). At the school of our Holy Mother, we learn obedience to God for “full of faith, and conceiving Christ in her mind before conceiving him in her womb, she said, ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord, let what you have said be done to me’ (Lk 1:38). From the Marian school we learn holiness and sanctity of life, we learn true love of God and of the neighbor, because she is the most excellent exemplar of the Church in the order of faith, charity, and perfect union with Christ”. (Paul VI, Encyclical Marialis Cultus of February 02, 1974).

Because the Queen of the Rosary is the “Virgin in prayer,” in her prayers she poured out her soul in expressions of glorifying God and expressions of humility, faith and hope, as expressed in the prayer of the Magnificat (Lk. 1: 45-55). In the Bible, the Blessed Mother appears as the Virgin of prayer and adorer of her God and Savior. In the infancy narrative at Bethlehem, after the vision of the angels, the shepherds “went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. . . And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart”. (Lk. 2: 16, 19) At the visiting of the Magi, it is said that, “on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother” (Mt. 1: 11). At Cana the Blessed Virgin appears as the Virgin at prayer when she intervenes and ask her Blessed Son to help at the wedding (cf. Jn. 2:1-12), and she stood under the Cross of her suffering and dying Son contemplating the Paschal Mystery, “Standing by the Cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister…” (Jn. 19: 25ff). On the day of Pentecost, we have the prayerful presence of the Blessed Mother at prayer with the Apostles. 

Through our prayer of the Rosary, may God grant us all graces and blessings through the prayers and intercession of the Queen of the Rosary. Amen.

Fr. Justus