Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church
Mother of the Church, fairest daughter of Israel, and sacred vessel chosen by God. Eve approaches you like mother to daughter, Old Eve to New Eve—two mothers of souls both on earth and in heaven. - Robert Cardinal Sara
In 2018 Pope Francis established Mater Ecclesiae as a feast to be kept on the Monday after Pentecost.
In the Fourth Gospel, Mary the Mother of Jesus and the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved keep watch on Golgotha. They are symbolic of the entire Church gathered at the foot of the cross. In fact, in that Gospel, the Holy Spirit is gifted to them when Jesus is pierced with the lance, symbolized by the blood and water flowing from the wounded side of Christ. This flowing blood and water gives birth to the sacraments of the Church and, in John, the Church itself.
It is most appropriate that this Gospel be proclaimed the day after the Solemnity of Pentecost as in truth it is the Pentecost of the Johnannine tradition.
The crucified Jesus gives his mother to the Beloved Disciple to care for in his own home. That little house at Ephesus was the house Church above all house Churches! (In the early centuries Christians met in one another’s homes.) Here she is Mater Ecclesiae par-excellence.
A Jewish psychologist friend of mine took one of those packaged tours of Turkey. One day the tour guide announced that their next stop would be the House of the Virgin Mary at Ephesus. Now she had never heard of such a place nor did she know of the long held legend that Mary and the Beloved Disciple lived there. It has been a site of pilgrimage from the earliest centuries.
Upon entering, my friend had what she described as the most profound transcendent spiritual experience of her life. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before. It was otherworldly, hard to describe. Its essence, she said, was like “One Jewish mother greeting another.”
Let us pray:
Father of mercies,
whose Only Begotten Son, as He hung upon the Cross,
chose the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Mother,
to be our Mother also,
grant, we pray, that with her loving help your Church
may be more fruitful day by day
and draw, to her embrace, all peoples.Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
– Collect for the Feast of Mary, Mother of the Church
-Timothy J. Cronin