BLESSED ARE YOU AMONG WOMEN

FEAST OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY

Acts 1:12-14; Lk 1:46-55; Lk 1:26-38

Joining in Prayer with Mary, the mother of Jesus

The holy Rosary is a Catholic prayer that gradually developed into its present form. It began at the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary the coming of the Messiah. “He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice, so highly favoured! The Lord is with you.’” From that very cradle of the Rosary, which represents the encounter between a renewed or graced human will and the divine will, the openness to the divine will, which Mary signifies, has expanded, through the Seed she conceived in her embrace of the Word, and her maternal intercession, to the whole world. The Blessed Virgin Mary stands for the human ‘Yes’ to divine will or the Word. At her visitation to her elderly cousin Elizabeth, the ‘Yes’ of the Old Testament joined the New, in which the Old finds its completion. Elizabeth’s words point to this fulfilment. “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’” Her prophecy expresses the joy of the Old in being admitted to the New Covenant. “And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

Elizabeth recognised this mother and her Seed as the New communion for human salvation. The Blessed Virgin Mary, herself, understood most deeply what her cousin was prophesying. She heard the angelic words and kept them in her heart as was her custom. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God.” She gradually understood the mystery of her motherhood; she has conceived the Son of God and the Son of Man, both in nature and in mystery. What belongs to her in the whole wonderful operation of grace is her yes. “I am the handmaid of the Lord,’ said Mary, ‘let what you have said be done to me.’” The same is all that is required of us, to be conceived in her as members of Jesus Christ, and to collaborate with her in the conception and birth of the Son of God in the world. For our ‘yes’ to be effective as hers, we must give our attention to the word of God daily and very often; we must lower ourselves before the word of God, acknowledge and confess our sins of disobedience to God’s will. “He looks on his servant in her nothingness; henceforth all ages will call me blessed.” The humility of the Blessed Virgin Mary makes this a divine imperative. We need to call Mary blessed to be saved. The holy Rosary gets its salvific effect partly from this and mainly from the divine content it brings to our minds and hearts.

This humblest mother expands this saying: “The almighty works marvels for me. Holy is his name!” The holiness of God’s name is most evident in his divine compassion for us. “His mercy is from age to age, on those who fear him. He puts forth his arm in strength and scatters the proud-hearted.” We truly understand her blessedness when we conceive the mystery of our salvation in Jesus Christ. Her presence with the disciples and prayer for the coming of the Holy Spirit was not by accident. It was the beginning of the mystical part of her role as the mother of the Son of God and Son of Man. In the upper room, “there were Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Jude son of James. All these joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” The holy Rosary extends and admits us to this prayer cenacle with the Blessed Virgin Mary. The words we use in the Rosary prayer help us fuse our minds, hearts, and awareness with the Blessed Virgin Mary and become one with her. The Rosary reinforces our conception in Mary and our collaboration in her conception and birth of the Word of God, in us and in the world. We are not to let a day pass without praying the Rosary, for it nourishes our attentiveness to Jesus Christ. May our Blessed Father, Saint Dominic, who received the Rosary from the Blessed Mother, pray for us in this regard.

Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an Angel, may, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by his Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of his Resurrection. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.