Tag Archives: Mary

St. Joseph, Master of Virginal Begetting

Msgr. Jean-Jacques Olier, who founded the great seminary Sainte-Sulpice (and later the Sulpicians) as a response to the Council of Trent's call for a reform of the approach to training priests in seminaries, entrusted the seminarians of Sainte-Sulpice to the patronage of St. Joseph. The reason, he explained, was that St. Joseph, like priests, was involved in the “virginal begetting of Christ.” To understand this, one must recognize that the marriage between Joseph and Mary was necessary for the Annunciation to take place. In this sense St Joseph plays a real and important, although not biological, role in the begetting of Christ. St John Paul II wrote that “while it is important for the Church to profess the virginal conception of Jesus, it is no less important to uphold Mary's marriage to Joseph” (Redemptoris Custos #7).

Msgr Olier's concern that priests master the art of the virginal begetting is shared by Pope Francis who tied together unhappiness in a celibate vocation with a lack of spiritual fatherhood, “please: … never any priests with faces like 'chilis pickled in vinegar' — never! … But what is at the heart of this lack of joy? … when a priest is not a father to his community … he becomes sad. … the root of sadness in pastoral life is precisely in the absence of fatherhood…. It is impossible to imagine a priest … who [is] not fertile: this is not Catholic!… Joy, no sadness, pastoral fecundity.” (Pope Francis, Address to novices and seminarians, July 6, 2013)

Essentially, Pope Francis is emphasizing that the joy of the priesthood comes from fulfilling the spousal meaning of the body in making a sincere gift of oneself. This self-gift becomes mystically, virginally fruitful, begetting Christ in souls, and thus engenders a spiritual fatherhood in the priest. What can we learn from St. Joseph about how to live out this essential element of priesthood more fruitfully?

St Joseph models a culture of encounter and tenderness

The first point is the importance of cultivating encounters with certain qualities–encounters that are personal, tender, and open to human suffering. Pope Francis has taught us persistently about this as he has encouraged us to build a culture of encounter. When we have the courage to draw close to others, it forms a people, a family. “Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (EG) #270)

St Joseph was tempted to distance himself from Mary, from her human suffering, but his openness to the Word of God and his courage to reverse his decision and draw close to Mary is an inspiration for priests who might likewise seek to distance themselves. His return to Mary with tenderness, rather than stoning, is likewise an example. And there is no doubt that his decision made his life “wonderfully complicated” and helped to form a people, truly to form the People of God.

Complementarity, the Holy Spirit and virginal fruitfulness

A second quality that is important for spiritual fecundity can be seen in the complementarity of Joseph and Mary and the role of the Holy Spirit. Joseph and Mary could only enter into a marriage because they were male and female. Furthermore, the virginal begetting could only take place because Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. St Joseph clearly did not understand all that was taking place and yet he was willing to draw close to the mystery and discover God in a new way in his virgin bride. The priest opens himself to the same spiritual fruitfulness when he draws close to the mystery of the bridal Church in the power of the Holy Spirit. He does this when he preaches the Word of God in the power of the Holy Spirit. Without this the seeds of faith cannot be planted in hearts, “and how can they believe…without someone to preach?” (Rom 10:14) When the priest goes out of himself to plant the seeds of faith in the hearts of his people, watering them with baptism and nourishing them with the tenderness of personal encounter, the Church becomes pregnant with new life by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Without the bridal Church and without the Holy Spirit there can be no virginal begetting. Pope Francis drew out this analogy in a Wednesday Audience on the Church, “First of all a mother generates life, she carries her child in her womb for 9 months and then delivers him to life, giving birth to him. The Church is like this: she bears us in the faith, through the work of the Holy Spirit who makes her fertile, like the Virgin Mary.” (Sept. 09, 2013) Pope Francis also described the fruitfulness that comes when we are willing to let ourselves be fascinated by the difference, by the complementarity of the other, “When we live out a spirituality of drawing nearer to others and seeking their welfare, our hearts are opened wide to the Lord’s greatest and most beautiful gifts. Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God. Whenever our eyes are opened to acknowledge the other, we grow in the light of faith and knowledge of God.” (EG #271)

The mysterious nature of virginal fruitfulness

A final point that must be raised is that the pastoral fecundity is not always obvious; virginal begetting is also mysterious. Just as St. Joseph lived for many years in the hiddenness of Nazareth, the priest must often live in the uncertainty of the importance and fruitfulness of all his efforts. He can teach us what Pope Francis has called “a sense of mystery”. “'A sense of mystery' … involves knowing with certitude that all those who entrust themselves to God in love will bear good fruit (cf. Jn 15:5). This fruitfulness is often invisible, elusive and unquantifiable. We can know quite well that our lives will be fruitful, without claiming to know how, or where, or when. We may be sure that none of our acts of love will be lost, nor any of our acts of sincere concern for others.” (EG #279)

St. Joseph is the best teacher for us in understanding the mystery of virginal begetting which he inaugurated in his willingness to encounter our Lady with tenderness, in embracing her difference with the power of the Holy Spirit and in rejoicing at the mysterious fruitfulness that burst forth in their lives.

Originally published in the Theology of the Body Institute email newsletter

 

The Importance of Mary’s Body in Our Faith

One week before the beginning of the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI made a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady, her Holy House in Loreto, Italy. He did this to entrust the Year of Faith to her intercession. This physical gesture of pilgrimage and prayer (he even lit a candle!) incarnated his words at the end of his Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei for the indiction of the Year of Faith, “Let us entrust this time of grace to the Mother of God, proclaimed ‘blessed because she believed’ (Lk 1:45).” But, stepping back, we might ask, “Why Mary? Why Loreto?” Before answering those questions, first we should ask, “What is the goal of the Year of Faith?”

Pope Benedict writes in Porta Fidei, “The Year of Faith…is a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Saviour of the world.” A “renewed conversion to the Lord” means turning away from lies and turning towards the Truth. The lies entice us to reduce ourselves, our future, our hope to something much less than God has made us to be. So, if I might paraphrase, during this Year of Faith, Pope Benedict wants us to rediscover who God is and, in light of that, to rediscover the greatness of who we are made to be, the greatness of our destiny, and then, in faith, to take a step in that direction.

With this in mind, we can understand the importance of Mary for the Year of Faith. In her, we come to a clearer vision of God, a clearer vision of God’s love for us, and a discovery of the true greatness of our human nature, a discovery of what we are called to, a discovery of our destiny. Furthermore, we can learn from Mary how to take a step away from the reduced vision of the human person offered to us by the world and a step towards embracing the greatness of the human person revealed by God in Jesus Christ.

Let us see how Pope Benedict explains this in his homily from Mass celebrated a week before the Year of Faith at the Holy House in Loreto. Please allow me to quote at length before reflecting on the Holy Father’s words:

Mary offered her very body; she placed her entire being at the disposal of God’s will, becoming the “place” of his presence, a “place” of dwelling for the Son of God. We are reminded here of the words of the Psalm with which, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ began his earthly life, saying to the Father, “Sacrifices and offering you have not desired, but you have prepared a body for me… Behold, I have come to do your will, O God” (10:5,7). To the Angel who reveals God’s plan for her, Mary replies in similar words: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). The will of Mary coincides with the will of the Son in the Father’s unique project of love and, in her, heaven and earth are united, God the Creator is united to his creature. God becomes man, and Mary becomes a “living house” for the Lord, a temple where the Most High dwells. Pope Benedict XVI, Homily from Loreto, October 4, 2012

Pope Benedict explains to us that Mary’s very body became the meeting place of heaven and earth, the place where the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, a “living house” for the Lord. What we discover in Mary, then, is the great dignity of the human being. No other creature, not even the angels, can be a dwelling place of God—only human beings, only the human body can be a living house for the Lord. We can have heaven within us.

What a different vision of the human person this is in comparison to what the world offers. We are not just a cog in the wheel of production. We are not merely consumers, who can be manipulated by advertising and enslaved by our appetites. We are not the servants of science on a path to world domination. We cannot be reduced to the sum of our failures, nor to the sum of our successes. Our life is not valuable only in so far as we have possessions, power, and pleasure in this world. Our life is valuable because we are made to be the living house of God. From the unborn child to the terminally ill, from the severely mentally challenged to the most brilliant genius, from the quadriplegic to the Olympic athlete, every human being is made, like our Lady, to be the meeting place of heaven and earth. That is what defines us.

Unfortunately, this destiny cannot be realized unless we are willing to be open to the Lord. God is willing—that is the source of our dignity—but are we willing? What is holding us back? The problem is that we are blinded by a lie, corrupted by a poison that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. We always knew that we were made for heaven, made to be filled with God, made to be like God, but, at the serpent’s urging, we go about it in the wrong way. Hearkening back to the passage of Adam’s sin in Genesis 3, Pope Benedict summarizes, “What picture does this passage show us? The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbours the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we have cast him aside; in brief, that only in this way can we fully achieve our freedom.” Homily from December 8, 2005

When we allow this poison to take hold in our hearts and we see God as a rival, then His commandments become a threat, a plot to steal our freedom, a plot to take away the fun in life. Suspicious of God, we carve out a part of our life and keep it away from Him. This attitude, in the modern day, leads to the cry to keep God out of the bedroom or to keep God out of politics. In whatever area of life that we try to keep God away from, it is because we do not trust Him to bless that part of our life, to fill it with heaven. We think that only when we are in control, when we are free to do whatever we want, that our life will be filled with heaven.

What we discover, however, is that when we keep God out by insisting on control, we also keep love out. Love does not exist in an environment of control, but in an environment of openness and trust. Pope Benedict says, “it is precisely God who liberates our liberty, he frees it from being closed in on itself, from the thirst for power, possessions, and domination; he opens it up to the dimension which completely fulfils it: the gift of self, of love, which in turn becomes service and sharing.” Homily from Loreto, October 4, 2012 Being closed in on ourselves, being in control through power, possessions and domination is not heaven. To the contrary, it is a radical isolation, being locked up entirely in ourselves. It is hell! Only God draws us out of ourselves to become the gift of love we were made to be.

In this light we see the wisdom of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, “man… cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (#24) We are filled with heaven when we make a gift of ourselves. In this, and so many other teachings of the Second Vatican Council, we see that Blessed John XXIII’s prayer to the Virgin of Loreto was answered: “Here at Loreto fifty years ago, Blessed John XXIII issued an invitation to contemplate this mystery, to ‘reflect on that union of heaven and earth, which is the purpose of the Incarnation and Redemption,’ and he went on to affirm that the aim of the Council itself was to spread ever wider the beneficent impact of the Incarnation and Redemption on all spheres of life.” Pope Benedict XVI’s Homily from Loreto, October 4, 2012

At the heart of the Year of Faith is this rediscovery of who we are, in light of the Incarnation and Redemption. Our bodies are made to be the meeting place of heaven and earth, living houses of God. Our task for the Year of Faith is first to believe this and then to let this truth reach into every corner of our lives until we experience a total conversion to the Lord. We look to Mary for this, as Pope Benedict said in Loreto, “As we contemplate Mary, we must ask if we too wish to be open to the Lord, if we wish to offer our life as his dwelling place; or if we are afraid that the presence of God may somehow place limits on our freedom, if we wish to set aside a part of our life in such a way that it belongs only to us.”

Concretely, in this Year of Faith, Pope Benedict is asking us to look back to those seminal teachings in Vatican II where we can learn who God is and who we are. He directs us also to the Catechism which is, as he says, one of the most important fruits of the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, as a daily practice we are encouraged to take up the Creed as part of our daily prayer. We can remember that the interpretive key for all that teaching is the fundamental truth that God has made us to be His dwelling place and He wants to fill us with heaven.

In this article, we have allowed the mystery of the Annunciation to shine light on the Year of Faith. It would take another article to see how Mary guides us in the other dimension of the Year of Faith—in light of the mystery of the Visitation. Having been filled with God in the Annunciation, it is in the Visitation that Mary brought Jesus to her cousin Elizabeth, and by extension, to all who are in need. This follows the impulse of the New Evangelization, noted by Pope Benedict in Porta Fidei: “Caritas Christi urget nos.” (2 Cor 5:14) The Love of Christ impels us to share this gift of faith with others, to counteract the lie that self-sufficiency is heaven, and to open the heart of each person to be, like the womb of the Virgin Mary, filled with heaven.

To return to the question stated above, then, we can see now how important our Lady is. Heaven and earth come together in her and she teaches us how to be her little children, little Mary’s, such that heaven and earth can also come together in our bodies. With her faith in our hearts, heaven and earth come together in us. Let us conclude with Pope Benedict’s own prayer from the end of his homily in Loreto, “Mother of the ‘yes’, you who heard Jesus, speak to us of him; tell us of your journey, that we may follow him on the path of faith; help us to proclaim him, that each person may welcome him and become the dwelling place of God. Amen!”

(Published originally in the Theology of the Body Institute online newsletter October 25, 2012)