Honoring Mary as Mother of the Church

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

IT’S easy to understand why Mary is honored as Mother of the Church the day after Pentecost Sunday. And that’s because Pentecost, or the coming of the Holy Spirit, being the birth of the Church, it’s logical that Mary, being the Mother of Christ and our Mother too, should also be regarded as Mother of the Church.

If the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ whom Mary conceived in her virginal womb, making God man, Mary should also be rightly considered as the Mother of that Mystical Body of Christ in the same way that she became Mother of Christ through the Holy Spirit.

On Pentecost, she was with the other disciples—Tradition would put it as she gathering together the disciples who were afraid of the authorities then and prepared them for the coming of the Holy Spirit—when the Holy Spirit descended to put into a continuing life what Christ has established on earth, the Church.

We need to develop a strong and deep sense of making Mary not only as a Mother to each one of us but also as Mother of all of us together, the Church, as we navigate the oceans of the today’s world that is becoming more complicated and challenging.

She is always around to guide us and to help us to get close to her Son. That’s her sole concern. And she is the best guide since she managed to be fully identified with the will of God.

Even in those moments when she could not fully understand the will of God, as in the case of the Annunciation, she just allowed herself to obey what was told her. She was always in the habit of pondering the ineffable will and ways of God in her heart.

And she was and is always deeply concerned for the life the Church. Since the time of Christ and the apostles, to the different stages of human and Church history when several Marian apparitions and interventions took place, like the apparitions in Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, etc., she has been around to help us.

We, who are the People of God, the Family of God, the Church, should always have recourse to Our Lady. Thanks to God, in our country, we can still observe a great Marian popular piety, with every Marian feast vastly celebrated in many places. But just like anything else, these popular celebrations should trigger in us another conversion, a step further in deepening our Christian life, etc.

We should never be contented with just materially and physically joining the Marian festivities which are actually meant to nourish our faith and spiritual life. With each Marian celebration, there should also be some growth and progress in our devotion to her.

When we pray the Rosary or make a Marian pilgrimage, for example, we should be able to feel that we are getting close to Mary and through her, to our Lord, Jesus Christ!

We have to find a way to be always near her and intimately close to her. We need to learn how to read her mind and catch the slightest insinuations she makes, because all these are a tremendous help in our spiritual life.

That’s precisely because with all the bombardment of things we are subjected to these days, Mary, the Mother of Christ who gave her to us to be our mother too, shows us how to be spiritual and supernatural in the midst of our glutting human affairs.