Cardinal's Column 8/15/04

Grace is a familiar name, used by real women and fictional characters. Grace is what we declare fills Mary, the mother of Jesus, each time we repeat in prayer the words of the Archangel Gabriel, sent by God to tell her of God’s plans for our salvation (Lk. 1:28). Grace is what we each receive for the first time at baptism. Grace is God’s life in us. Grace is a gift.

On August 15, the Church celebrates the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. The Eastern Catholic and the Orthodox Churches call this the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, her falling asleep. A few years ago, an Evangelical Christian told me that this feast bewildered him. He couldn’t see how believing that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at her death fit into the Christian faith. I asked him if he believed that Christ has risen bodily from the dead, knowing that he certainly held firmly to this belief. Then I asked him if he believed that each of us would someday also rise bodily from the dead to be judged by Christ himself. Again, he repeated that he believed in the general resurrection from the dead at the end of time. I then asked him if he was jealous that the Blessed Virgin Mary had beat the rest of us to the resurrection. He didn’t concede the point without an explicit scripture text to back it up, but he allowed a certain logic to the argument.

The logic is the logic of grace. Grace conforms us to Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made and in whom all are saved. Mary is the creature most perfectly conformed to her divine Son, the first of his disciples. She was prepared to be the Mother of God by being preserved from every taint of sin from the first moment of her conception. The feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 celebrates this singular grace granted by God to Mary. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception doesn’t hold that Mary was miraculously conceived in the womb of her mother, Anne. She wasn’t. Rather, the doctrine states as a truth of faith that Mary was preserved from sin from the first moment of her conception, the first instant of her existence. Never broken by sin, saved by being preserved from sin, Mary is the first to benefit from Christ’s conquest of sin, the first after Christ to experience bodily resurrection.

This coming December 8, the Church celebrates the 150th anniversary of the solemn proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a dogma of Catholic faith. Mary, under the title of her Immaculate Conception, is the patroness of the United States. In 1843, the Diocese of Chicago was dedicated by Bishop William Quarter, our first bishop, to “the Immaculate Mother of God.” Cardinal Bernardin recalled this dedication on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Archdiocese in 1993. It would be appropriate to mark this 150th anniversary of the dogma by rededicating the Archdiocese, by consecrating it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary this coming December 8.

Such a consecration has to be prepared. The auxiliary bishops and I have put together a preliminary plan. It moves from catechesis to prayer to consecration. Catechesis on the role of Mary in God’s plan for the salvation of the human race inevitably touches on the Church’s understanding of the relationship between women and men in human society and the nature of the Church herself, as bride of Jesus Christ. A July 31 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explains that the Church learns from Mary to root the Church herself in listening and receiving the word of God, in living intimately with Christ and in discovering the power of love. “In entrusting his mother to the Apostle John, Jesus on the cross invites his Church to learn from Mary the secret of the love that is victorious.”

Love is between persons, and sexual love presupposes a complementarity between men and women, in which each is biologically, psychologically and spiritually for the other. The first man lived in peace with the first woman until they came to consider God their enemy. The so-called “war between the sexes” is the inevitable outcome of humanity’s war with God. The Blessed Virgin Mary is sometimes called the “New Eve,” the mother of those who live in grace. She, whose entire lifetime was graced, freely makes herself available to God in order to model and bestow the life of grace won for all by Jesus, the New Adam. In Jesus and through Mary, peace with God and peace among ourselves becomes possible, not because we deserve it but because it is pure gift, pure grace.

People who understand the primacy of grace pass their days and years with a keen sense of God’s presence in their lives and of their dependence on him. They live with the expectation that God will surprise them. They often turn to God in prayer. They do not resent the fact that they are not the primary agents of their own salvation, for they know their sinfulness and have experienced something of God’s infinite love.

With God’s help and Mary’s prayers, the coming celebration of the 150th anniversary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception will re-awaken in the Archdiocese a sense of the primacy of grace and help us to live together in peace. That is my prayer, and I hope it will be yours.