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My dear Catholic families, at pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham this year, pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham has a special character. It cannot be done as usual with a physical and community gathering. However, for Our Lady, there are no physical obstacles. She overcomes all the current hindrances, even the hindrances put to the exercise of public worship by the secular state authorities. We can firmly believe that Our Lady will grant to all of you who cannot physically visit her shrine, plenty of heavenly graces. There are no obstacles to making a spiritual visit to her shrine. As there is the possibility to do spiritual communion, to visit spiritually our Eucharistic Lord present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, so in an analogous manner, one can spiritually visit to shrines of Our Lady. And this you are doing this year, you are doing a spiritual pilgrimage to Our Lady. Your hearts are probably filled with even more love, with more longing, with more trust in Our Lady.
When in August 13, 1917, the anti-Christian state authorities of Portugal prevented the three shepherd children of Fatima to visit a place of Our Lady’s apparition in the Cova da Iria, because they were confined in a prison, Our Lady appeared to them On August the 19th. Let us trust that this year Our Lady of Walsingham will visit with special graces each family who is doing a spiritual pilgrimage in their homes, dear Catholic families, ask with confidence, Our Lady of Walsingham to grant your families, your country, the clergy and in first place, the Pope, abundant graces of spiritual renewal, of conversion, of a new fire and zeal for witnessing the Catholic faith in the midst of a new pagan society that is showing ever more signs of a cruel barbarity. However, where the distress is great, the closeness of a mother is ever stronger. Our Lady will be close to us who trust in her interceding omnipotence. She is the maternal Mediatrix of all graces, which her divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, merited for us through His sacrifice on the cross. He constituted her in the maternal office of administering, distributing, and mediating His graces. We are so happy to have such a good and such a powerful mother who is the personal, spiritual mother of each of us.
St. John Henry Newman, a glorious son of England, left us inspiring words about devotion to Our Lady and about devotion to the Holy Eucharist for God’s worship and adoration. Among the luminous testimonies of his truly catholic and apostolic mind, one can indicate as examples his love for the reverent worship of God and the sacredness of the liturgy, and his love and devotion to Blessed Virgin Mary, on the virtue of love and feeling of fear in worshiping God and the sacredness of liturgy. Saint John Henry Newman said, “In us so natural is the connection between a reverential spirit in worshiping God and the faith in God that the wonder only is how anyone can, for a moment, imagine he has faith in God and yet allow himself to be irreverent towards him. To believe in God is to believe in the being and presence of one who is all holy, all-powerful, and all-gracious. How can a man really believe thus of him and yet make free with him? It is almost a contradiction in terms. Hence, even heathen religions have ever considered faith reverence identical to believe and not to revere, to worship familiarly and at once is an anomaly and a prodigy, unknown even to false religions, to say nothing of the true one, not only the Jewish and Christian religions, which are directly from God, inculcate the spirit of reverence and godly fear. But those other religions which have existed or exist, whether in the east or the south, inculcate the same worship, forms of worship such as bowing the knee, taking off the shoes, keeping silence, a prescribed dress, and lack are considered as necessary for a due approach to God.”
The whole world, differing about so many things, differing in creed and rule of life, yet agree in this, that God being our Creator, a certain self-abasement of the whole man is the duty of the creature, that he is in heaven. We upon earth, that He is all glorious, and to be worms of the earth and insects of a day. But those who have separated from the Church of Christ have, in this respect, fallen into greater than pagan error. They have considered all to be superstition and reverence to be slavery. They have learned to be familiar and free with sacred things, as it were, on principle. It is the delight of all holy beings who stand around the throne of God to use one and the same form of worship. They are not tired. It is an ever-new pleasure for them to say the words anew. They are never tired.
But truly, all those persons would be soon tired of fearing them, instead of taking part in their glorious choir, who are tired of church now and seek something more attractive and rousing. God hates the worship of the mere lips. He requires the worship of the heart. A person may bow and kneel and look religious, but he is not at all nearer heaven unless he tries to obey God in all things and to do his duty. But if he does honestly strive to obey God, then his outward manner will be reverent also. Decent forms will become natural to him. Holy ordinances, though coming to him from the church, will at the same time come, as it were, from his heart; they will be part of himself, and he will as little think of dispensing with them as he would dispense with his ordinary apparel, nay, as he could dispense with tongue or hand in speaking or doing. This is the true way of doing devotional service, not to have feelings without acts or acts without feelings, but both to do and to feel. It is to see that our hearts and bodies are both sanctified together and become one, the heart ruling our limbs and making the whole man serve God, who has redeemed the whole man, body as well as soul.
St. John Henry Newman continues, saying the one class of persons consists of those who think the Catholic creed too strict, who hold that no certain doctrines need be believed in order to salvation, or at least question the necessity, who say that it matters not what a man believes, so that his conduct is respectable and orderly, who think that all rites and ceremonies are mere niceties as they speak and trifles and that a man pleases God equally by observing them or not, who perhaps go on to doubt whether Christ’s death is strictly speaking an atonement for the sin of man, who, when pressed, do not allow that he is strictly speaking in literally God, and who deny that the punishment of the wicked is eternal in hell.
The other class of men is, in their formal doctrines, widely different from the former. They consider that though they were, by nature, children, or for us, they are now, by God’s grace, so fully in his favor that they were they to die at once and go straight away to heaven. They consider that God so absolutely forgives them day by day their trespasses that they have nothing to answer for, nothing to be tried upon at the last day of the judgment, that they have been visited by God’s grace in a manner quite distinct from all around them, and are His children in a sense in which others are not and have an assurance of their saving state peculiar only to themselves.
I have alluded to these schools of religion to show how widely a feeling must be spread that such contrary classes of men have in common. Now, what they agree on is this, in considering God as simply a God of love, not of awe and of reverence, also the one meaning by love, benevolence, and the other meaning mercy. And in consequence, neither the one nor the other regards Almighty God with fear, and the signs of want of fear in both the one and the other, which I propose to point out, are such as the following. For instance, they have no scruple or misgiving in speaking freely of Almighty God; they will use his name as familiarly and lightly as if they were open sinners. They, the one class, adopts a set of words to denote Almighty God, which removed the idea of his personality, speaking of him only as the deity or the divine being, which, as they use them, are, of all others, most calculated to remove from the mind the thought of a living, personal, intelligent governor of their Savior, of their judge. Another is the unwillingness so commonly felt to bow at the name of Jesus, nay, the impatience exhibited towards those who do but as if there were nothing awful in the idea of the eternal God being made to man, and as if we did not suitably express our wonder and awe at it by practicing what St. Paul has in very word prescribed.
Another instance is the careless mode in which men speak of our Lord’s earthly doings and sayings, just as if he were a mere man. He was a man indeed, but he was more than a man, and he did what man does. But then those deeds of his were the deeds of God, and we can as little separate a deed from the doer as our arm from the body and another is their general mode of prayer, I mean in diffuse and free language with emphatic and striking words in a sort of colored and rich style, which pomp of manner, in an oratorical tone, as if praying were preaching, and as if its object were not to address Almighty God, but to impress and affect those who hear them. Many other instances might be mentioned of very various kinds.
For instance, the freedom which men proposed to alter God’s ordinances, His commandments, to suit their own convenience or to meet the age, their reliance on their private notions about sacred subjects, their contempt of any view of the sacraments which exceeds the evidence of their senses, and their confidence in settling the order of importance in which the distinct articles of the Catholic faith. So, Saint John Henry Newman wrote about the true and authentic attitude in worshiping God in prayer.
And now let us hear about the love and veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I quote, “There were holy men who indeed have never committed mortal sin. Now, sometimes have never committed even one mortal sin in the whole course of their lives, but Mary’s holiness went beyond this. She never committed even a venial sin, and this special privilege is not known to belong to anyone but Mary. Now, whatever want of amiableness, sweetness, attractiveness really exists in holy men arises from the remains of sin in them, or again, from the want of a holiness powerful enough to overcome the defects of nature, whether of soul or body. But as far as Mary, her holiness was such that if we saw her and heard her, we should not be able to tell those who asked us anything about her except simply that she was angelic and heavenly. We should not recollect any of her features, because it was her beautifully sinless soul which looked through her eyes and spoke through her mouth and was hurt in her voice and encompassed her all about. There was a divine music in all she said and did in her air, her department that charmed every true heart that came near Mary, her innocence, her humility and modesty, her simplicity, her sincerity and truthfulness, her unselfishness, her unaffected interest in everyone who came to her, her purity. It was these qualities that made her so lovable.”
And then St. John Henry Newman continues to speak about our lady, he says, “Because she was Christ’s mother, God’s mother, and because she had him and all his sufferings actually before her eyes, and because she had the long intimacy of 30 years with him, and because she was from her special sanctity so ineffably near to Christ in spirit when then Christ was mocked, bruised, scorched and nailed to the cross, she felt as keenly as if every indignity and torture inflicted on him, was struck at herself. She could have cried out in agony at every pain of his. Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the mother of God, the mother of Christ? If to him that has more is given, and holiness and divine favor go together, and this we are expressly told what must have been the transcendent purity of Mary, whom the Creator spirit condescended to overshadow with his miraculous presence, what must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom he was bound by nature to revere and look up to, the one appointed to train and educate God, Christ, to instruct him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature. This contemplation runs to a higher subject. Did we dare follow it, for what think you was the sanctified state of that human nature of which God formed his sinless Son? Our Lord died for those heathens who did not know him, and His Holy Mother intercedes for those Christians who do not know her, even, and she intercedes according to God’s Will, and when he wills to save a particular soul, she at once prays for it. I say he will indeed, according to her prayer, but then she prays according to God’s will.”
So the words of Saint John Henry Newman, about our Lady, dear Catholic families, dear participants of the Walsingham pilgrimage. We conclude with a prayer to Our Lady written by St. John Henry Newman, “O, mother of Jesus and my mother, let me dwell with you, cling to you and love you with every ever-increasing love. I promise the honor, love, and trust of a child. Give me a mother’s protection, for I need your watchful care. You know, better than any other, the thoughts and desires of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Keep constantly before my mind the same thoughts, the same desires that my heart may be filled with zeal for the interests of the Sacred Heart of your divine Son. Instill in me a love of all that is noble, that I may no longer be easily turned to selfishness. Help me, dearest mother, to acquire the virtues that God wants of me, to forget myself always, to work solely for him, without fear of sacrifice. I shall always rely on your help to be what Jesus wants me to be. I am his, I am yours, my good Mother, give me each day your holy and maternal blessing, until my last evening on earth, when your Immaculate Heart will present me to the heart of Jesus in heaven, there to love and bless you and your divine Son for all eternity. Amen, Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for all families, for all Catholic families, especially for the families who in this year are doing this common spiritual pilgrimage to you.”
“Dominus vobiscum, et cum, spiritu tuo. Et benedictio dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et spiritus Santi descendant, super vos et maneat semper.”