Mary
Turns to Us, Saying:
Have the Courage to Dare With God!
The Petrine and Marian principle
H.H. Benedict XVI
St. Peter's Basilica
Dec. 8, 2005
Papal
Homily on 40th Anniversary of the Close of Vatican II
The Mass was on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
Dear Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Pope Paul VI solemnly concluded the Second Vatican Council in
the square in front of St. Peter's Basilica 40 years ago, on 8
December 1965. It had been inaugurated, in accordance with John
XXIII's wishes, on 11 October 1962, which was then the feast of
Mary's Motherhood, and ended on the day of the Immaculate
Conception.
The Council took place in a Marian setting. It was actually far
more than a setting: It was the orientation of its entire
process. It refers us, as it referred the Council Fathers at
that time, to the image of the Virgin who listens and lives in
the Word of God, who cherishes in her heart the words that God
addresses to her and, piecing them together like a mosaic,
learns to understand them (cf. Luke 2:19,51).
It refers us to the great Believer who, full of faith, put
herself in God's hands, abandoning herself to his will; it
refers us to the humble Mother who, when the Son's mission so
required, became part of it, and at the same time, to the
courageous woman who stood beneath the Cross while the disciples
fled.
In his discourse on the occasion of the promulgation of the
dogmatic constitution on the Church, Paul VI described Mary as "tutrix
huius Concilii" -- "Patroness of this Council" (cf. "Oecumenicum
Concilium Vaticanum II, Constitutiones Decreta Declarationes,"
Vatican City, 1966, p. 983) and, with an unmistakable allusion
to the account of Pentecost transmitted by Luke (cf. Acts
1:12-14), said that the Fathers were gathered in the Council
Hall "cum Maria, Matre Iesu" and would also have left it in her
name (p. 985).
Indelibly printed in my memory is the moment when, hearing his
words: "Mariam Sanctissimam declaramus Matrem Ecclesiae" -- "We
declare Mary the Most Holy Mother of the Church," the Fathers
spontaneously rose at once and paid homage to the Mother of God,
to our Mother, to the Mother of the Church, with a standing
ovation.
Indeed, with this title the Pope summed up the Marian teaching
of the Council and provided the key to understanding it. Not
only does Mary have a unique relationship with Christ, the Son
of God who, as man, chose to become her Son. Since she was
totally united to Christ, she also totally belongs to us. Yes,
we can say that Mary is close to us as no other human being is,
because Christ becomes man for all men and women and his entire
being is "being here for us."
Christ, the Fathers said, as the Head, is inseparable from his
Body which is the Church, forming with her, so to speak, a
single living subject. The Mother of the Head is also the Mother
of all the Church; she is, so to speak, totally emptied of
herself; she has given herself entirely to Christ and with him
is given as a gift to us all. Indeed, the more the human person
gives himself, the more he finds himself.
The Council intended to tell us this: Mary is so interwoven in
the great mystery of the Church that she and the Church are
inseparable, just as she and Christ are inseparable. Mary
mirrors the Church, anticipates the Church in her person, and in
all the turbulence that affects the suffering, struggling Church
she always remains the Star of salvation. In her lies the true
center in which we trust, even if its peripheries very often
weigh on our soul.
In the context of the promulgation of the constitution on the
Church, Paul VI shed light on all this through a new title
deeply rooted in Tradition, precisely with the intention of
illuminating the inner structure of the Church's teaching, which
was developed at the Council. The Second Vatican Council had to
pronounce on the institutional components of the Church: on the
bishops and on the Pontiff, on the priests, lay people and
religious, in their communion and in their relations; it had to
describe the Church journeying on, "clasping sinners to her
bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification ..."
("Lumen Gentium," No. 8).
This "Petrine" aspect of the Church, however, is included in
that "Marian" aspect. In Mary, the Immaculate, we find the
essence of the Church without distortion. We ourselves must
learn from her to become "ecclesial souls," as the Fathers said,
so that we too may be able, in accordance with St. Paul's words,
to present ourselves "blameless" in the sight of the Lord, as he
wanted us from the very beginning (cf. Colossians 1:21;
Ephesians 1:4).
But now we must ask ourselves: What does "Mary, the Immaculate"
mean? Does this title have something to tell us? Today, the
liturgy illuminates the content of these words for us in two
great images.
First of all comes the marvelous narrative of the annunciation
of the Messiah's coming to Mary, the Virgin of Nazareth. The
Angel's greeting is interwoven with threads from the Old
Testament, especially from the Prophet Zephaniah. He shows that
Mary, the humble provincial woman who comes from a priestly race
and bears within her the great priestly patrimony of Israel, is
"the holy remnant" of Israel to which the prophets referred in
all the periods of trial and darkness.
In her is present the true Zion, the pure, living dwelling-place
of God. In her the Lord dwells, in her he finds the place of his
repose. She is the living house of God, who does not dwell in
buildings of stone but in the heart of living man. She is the
shoot which sprouts from the stump of David in the dark winter
night of history. In her, the words of the Psalm are fulfilled:
"The earth has yielded its fruits" (Psalm 67:7).
She is the offshoot from which grew the tree of redemption and
of the redeemed. God has not failed, as it might have seemed
formerly at the beginning of history with Adam and Eve or during
the period of the Babylonian Exile, and as it seemed anew in
Mary's time when Israel had become a people with no importance
in an occupied region and with very few recognizable signs of
its holiness.
God did not fail. In the humility of the house in Nazareth lived
holy Israel, the pure remnant. God saved and saves his people.
From the felled tree trunk Israel's history shone out anew,
becoming a living force that guides and pervades the world. Mary
is holy Israel: She says "yes" to the Lord, she puts herself
totally at his disposal and thus becomes the living temple of
God.
The second image is much more difficult and obscure. This
metaphor from the Book of Genesis speaks to us from a great
historical distance and can only be explained with difficulty;
only in the course of history has it been possible to develop a
deeper understanding of what it refers to.
It was foretold that the struggle between humanity and the
serpent, that is, between man and the forces of evil and death,
would continue throughout history. It was also foretold,
however, that the "offspring" of a woman would one day triumph
and would crush the head of the serpent to death; it was
foretold that the offspring of the woman -- and in this
offspring the woman and the mother herself -- would be
victorious and that thus, through man, God would triumph.
If we set ourselves with the believing and praying Church to
listen to this text, then we can begin to understand what
original sin, inherited sin, is and also what the protection
against this inherited sin is, what redemption is.
What picture does this passage show us? The human being does not
trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbors the suspicion that
in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is
a rival who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human
only when we have cast him aside; in brief, that only in this
way can we fully achieve our freedom.
The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a
dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he
is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his
existence and the fullness of his life from God.
He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power
to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to
God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own
efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems
untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it
confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights
on power, with which he desires to take his own life
autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit
rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into
emptiness, into death.
Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The
freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and
therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared
freedom, in the communion of freedom: Only if we live in the
right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom
develop.
We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth
of our being, and that is, in accordance with God's will. For
God's will is not a law for the human being imposed from the
outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of
his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him
the image of God, hence, a free creature.
If we live in opposition to love and against the truth -- in
opposition to God -- then we destroy one another and destroy the
world. Then we do not find life but act in the interests of
death. All this is recounted with immortal images in the history
of the original fall of man and the expulsion of man from the
earthly Paradise.
Dear brothers and sisters, if we sincerely reflect about
ourselves and our history, we have to say that with this
narrative is described not only the history of the beginning but
the history of all times, and that we all carry within us a drop
of the poison of that way of thinking, illustrated by the images
in the Book of Genesis.
We call this drop of poison "original sin." Precisely on the
feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have a lurking suspicion
that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring
and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic
dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to
descend into the shadows of sin and to want to do things on
one's own is part of being truly human; that only then can we
make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and
women, of being truly ourselves; that we should put this freedom
to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in
reality, fully ourselves.
In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that
we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the
fullness of being. We think that Mephistopheles -- the tempter
-- is right when he says he is the power "that always wants evil
and always does good" (J.W. von Goethe, "Faust" I, 3). We think
that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little
freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even
necessary.
If we look, however, at the world that surrounds us we can see
that this is not so; in other words, that evil is always
poisonous, does not uplift human beings but degrades and
humiliates them. It does not make them any the greater, purer or
wealthier, but harms and belittles them.
This is something we should indeed learn on the day of the
Immaculate Conception: The person who abandons himself totally
in God's hands does not become God's puppet, a boring "yes man";
he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts
himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative
immensity of the freedom of good.
The person who turns to God does not become smaller but greater,
for through God and with God he becomes great, he becomes
divine, he becomes truly himself. The person who puts himself in
God's hands does not distance himself from others, withdrawing
into his private salvation; on the contrary, it is only then
that his heart truly awakens and he becomes a sensitive, hence,
benevolent and open person.
The closer a person is to God, the closer he is to people. We
see this in Mary. The fact that she is totally with God is the
reason why she is so close to human beings. For this reason she
can be the Mother of every consolation and every help, a Mother
whom anyone can dare to address in any kind of need in weakness
and in sin, for she has understanding for everything and is for
everyone the open power of creative goodness.
In her, God has impressed his own image, the image of the One
who follows the lost sheep even up into the mountains and among
the briars and thornbushes of the sins of this world, letting
himself be spiked by the crown of thorns of these sins in order
to take the sheep on his shoulders and bring it home.
As a merciful Mother, Mary is the anticipated figure and
everlasting portrait of the Son. Thus, we see that the image of
the Sorrowful Virgin, of the Mother who shares her suffering and
her love, is also a true image of the Immaculate Conception. Her
heart was enlarged by being and feeling together with God. In
her, God's goodness came very close to us.
Mary thus stands before us as a sign of comfort, encouragement
and hope. She turns to us, saying: "Have the courage to dare
with God! Try it! Do not be afraid of him! Have the courage to
risk with faith! Have the courage to risk with goodness! Have
the courage to risk with a pure heart! Commit yourselves to God,
then you will see that it is precisely by doing so that your
life will become broad and light, not boring but filled with
infinite surprises, for God's infinite goodness is never
depleted!"
On this feast day, let us thank the Lord for the great sign of
his goodness which he has given us in Mary, his Mother and the
Mother of the Church. Let us pray to him to put Mary on our path
like a light that also helps us to become a light and to carry
this light into the nights of history. Amen.
[Translation distributed by the Holy See]
