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Brookline Carmel Bulletin
February 12, 1961
Cogitatio Sancta
(Holy
Meditation)
“But they went forth and preached everywhere while the
Lord worked with them and confirmed the teaching by the signs that followed.” (Mark 16, 20)
The science of Mariology
is a massive structure, comprising a very important part in the whole of
Catholic Theology. Marvelous to tell,
it sprang from a few meager facts in much the same way a huge tree springs from
a tiny seed. It stands as a monument to
what reason illumined by Faith can accomplish.
Only a few isolated incidents from the life and doings of Our Lady are
recorded in the Gospel narratives (and then only secondarily; the main
objective being to outline the high points in the life of Jesus). Nevertheless, they have been enough to enable
the great Saints and Teachers of the Church to discover and make known her
outstanding Holiness, her glorious Prerogatives, and her role in the History of
salvation, her place in the Mystical Body.
All the while God continued to work with them and has confirmed their
explanations by the signs that have followed.
He has allowed her to give visible proof of the Church’s teaching
concerning herself, not only privately, i.e., in the lives of individual
Christians, but publicly and openly. By
His own divine ordinances she has come down to earth in order to make known to
the whole world that she is in fact what Theologians, from theoretical
considerations, have shown her to be.
The most famous of all these proofs is Lourdes. Just four years after the Dogma of the
Immaculate Conception had been solemnly defined by Pius IX, Our Blessed Mother
appeared on our planet and identified herself in terms of that very same Dogma. Since then, Our Lady has shown herself at Lourdes
to be all that the Litany of Loreto, that curious admixture of naked fact and
mystic symbolism (which we may look upon as a compendium of Mariology), has
predicated of her: Mother of
Mercy, Refuge of sinners, Comforter of the afflicted, help of Christians, …etc. The
miracle worked there and at other Marian shrines are the irrefutable proofs
that God Himself approves, ratifies and fosters Catholic Devotion to the
Blessed Virgin Mary.
Of the greatest importance
and highly instructive is Our Lady’s method of procedures in her apparitions to
Bernadette. It is so thoroughly
orthodox. As a rebuke to those who
maintain that devotion to Mary derogates from the honor and glory we owe to
God, we can point to the fact that she did not identify herself until six weeks
after her first appearance, at a time when her mission was completed. With characteristic humility, she put first
things first. At the very outset she
taught Bernadette how to make the sign of the Cross properly and showed her how
to say the Rosary. The sign of the
Cross because it is the instrument of Redemption and the key to the treasury of
God’s graces, the Rosary because it calls to mind in a systematic way the basic
truths of our Holy Religion. She then
instructed Bernadette to do penance, and finally, showed her a secret spring,
bidding her to drink of it and to wash herself in its waters. In all this we are reminded of the work of
St. John the Baptist, precursor to the Messiah, herald of the Kingdom of
Heaven. He taught his disciples how to
pray; he preached a gospel of repentance; he made use of ritual cleansing
(baptism) as a visible sign of an interior conversion. Our Lady’s primary concern at Lourdes was,
therefore, to teach (or rather, to remind us again) how to dispose ourselves to
receive the great gift of Sanctifying Grace.
Unless we pray and do penance we cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.
Having seen to the essential
internal dispositions, Our Lady turned her attention to the external means
of obtaining the divine favor. She
asked that a church be built. Certainly
she was not looking for a monument to herself. (It became that only because her clients willed
it so). Instead, she was interested
in the Holy Sacrifice that would be offered there, our unique Savior, which
would be responsible for the miracles of grace and nature that would be performed;
it would be out of the treasury of graces He earned that she would dispense
favors. Again, she knew the value
and efficacy of public prayer: “I
say to you further, if two of you shall agree on earth about anything at all
for which they ask, it shall be done for them by my Father in Heaven. For where two or three are gathered together
for my sake, there am I in the midst of them.”
(Matt. 18, 19-20). Mary’s concern
for our orthodox approach to God shows that that story is not quite true which
would have her smuggle in the back door those found wanting to the judgment
seat. Her one great work is to obtain
for her devotees the grace to fulfill the entrance requirements.
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