IMAGE: CNS photo/Remo Casilli, Reuters
By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Celebrating the feast of Our Lady of
Guadalupe, Pope Francis described Mary as a strong woman who inspires believers
to give “flesh to the Gospel” in societies often marked by distrust
and blindness.
“To look at the Guadalupana is to remember that the presence
of the Lord always passes through those who manage to make his word flesh, who
seek to embody the life of God within themselves, becoming living signs of his
mercy,” Pope Francis said Dec. 12 during an evening Mass marking the feast
day.
The Mass began with a procession of the flags of the nations
of South, Central and North America — a sign that Our Lady of Guadalupe is
patroness of the Americas.
Like the U.S. bishops’ had asked their faithful to do, the pope’s
Mass included a special prayer “for our Hispanic brothers and sisters and
for the migrants of our lands that their dignity would be recognized and
protected” and that their family unity and social and ecclesial integration
would be promoted.
Another prayer intention asked God, through Our Lady of
Guadalupe, to end violence on the continent and guarantee “land, work and
a roof” over the heads of all.
The pope himself ended his homily with an improvised prayer
that Our Lady of Guadalupe would intercede to give peace, bread, a home and a
strong faith to all the continent’s people.
The Mass was celebrated primarily in Spanish, although some
of the prayers were in Portuguese and English. And the music, in addition to
Latin, included Marian hymns in the indigenous Quechua, Nahuatl and Mapuche
languages.
The feast day’s Gospel reading was the story of Mary
visiting her cousin Elizabeth, a story Pope Francis said illustrates how,
whenever God “visits,” people are moved and their very being “is
transformed into praise and blessing.”
“When God visits us, he leaves us restless with the
healthy restlessness of those who feel they have been invited to proclaim that he
lives and is in the midst of his people,” the pope said. Mary, “the
first disciple and missionary,” goes out to Elizabeth to share the good
news.
She did the same in 1531 when she appeared to Juan Diego at Tepeyac
in Mexico, the pope said. She reached out to the continent’s native peoples who
were in pain, “becoming their mother.”
Mary is “the icon of the disciple, of the believing and
prayerful woman who knows how to accompany and encourage our faith and our hope,”
the pope said. Mary’s is not a “poetically sweetened faith,” but a
faith that is strong and courageous in the face of brokenness and conflict.
The same kind of faith is needed today, the pope said, if
the peoples of the Americas are to build a society that overcomes the
increasing “signs of division and fragmentation,” where so many
people are excluded and poor, “a society that likes to vaunt its
scientific and technological advances, but that has become blind and
insensitive to the thousands of faces that are there along the way, excluded by
the blind pride of the few.”
Pope Francis questioned how the peoples of the Americas can
boast of their societies’ well-being when there are “thousands and
thousands of children and young people on the streets, begging and sleeping in
railway stations, in the subway or wherever they find space. Children and young
people exploited in illegal work or driven to seeking a few coins at intersections,
cleaning the windshields of our cars.”
Too many families, he said, “are scarred by the
suffering of seeing their children made victims of the merchants of death,”
and too many elderly are abandoned to solitude. In addition, he said, there is
“the precarious situation that affects the dignity of many women. Some,
since childhood and adolescence, are subject to many forms of violence inside
and outside the home.”
Yet, celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he
said, Christians are called to remember that they have a mother — “we are
not and never will be an orphaned people” — and where there is a mother,
there is a strong force pushing children to behave like brothers and sisters.
“I have always been impressed to see, in different
peoples of Latin America, those struggling mothers who, often alone, manage to
bring up their children,” Pope Francis told the congregation. “This
is Mary with us, with her children: a woman who fights against the society of
mistrust and blindness, the society of apathy and dispersion; a woman who
fights to strengthen the joy of the Gospel, who fights to give ‘flesh’ to the
Gospel.”
Celebrating the feast, he said, Christians make a commitment
to proclaiming hope and trust in God’s ultimate victory and pledge to love like
she loved.
“Her presence leads us to reconciliation, giving us the
strength to create bonds in our blessed Latin American land, saying ‘yes’ to
life and ‘no’ to all kinds of indifference, exclusion or the rejection of
peoples and persons,” Pope Francis said. “Let us not be afraid to go
out and look upon others with the same gaze, a gaze that makes us brothers and
sisters.”
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