“Our Mother of Unity, and Her Rosary that Takes Us There”
Homily, Votive Mass of Holy Mary, Mother of Unity
Annual Rosary Rally
October 12, 2024; St. Mary’s Cathedral
Introduction
On this celebration of our annual Rosary Rally Mass and Procession today, we have the certain hope that on this day we will be accompanied by angels – Blue Angels, that is. It might seem ironic, maybe even verging on blasphemous, that the name of a celestial being would be applied to such a forceful instrument of war. Let us recall, though, what those who serve our nation in the Armed Forces do for us: they protect us from enemies who are trying to harm us. Is this not exactly what the angels do for us?
Protection Against Division
We know well how the Book of Revelation recounts for us the battle of the St. Michael and his angels against the devil and his minions, who could not prevail against the forces of heaven. Likewise in the Book of the Prophet Daniel we are told that the Archangel Michael was sent to the prophet’s aid by waging war against the ruler of the nation that was oppressing God’s people. We, too, must be alert to the wiles of the evil one, who continually seeks to attack and destroy the people of God. How does he do that? In many ways, certainly, but above all by dividing. The devil is the great divider.
And so we turn to our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we celebrate today with this Votive Mass of Holy Mary, Mother of Unity. We pray to her under this title, because we all love her, and it gives us great delight to show her our love and devotion, and she is the one who unites all of God’s children into one family of God. This is the love of a mother! Appropriately, then, we do so by offering today this special composition that is the Mass of the Americas, first performed six years ago here in this Cathedral to honor our Lady under the twin titles of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. We use all of our gifts and talents to offer to God something beautiful as an expression of our desire to please Him and to ask for His grace to be united in one family of faith.
We mark this particular theme this year as well in response to Pope Francis’ request to offer Mass for immigrants, migrants and refugees on the occasion of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. As he teaches in his message for this occasion, “it is possible to see in the migrants of our time, as in those of every age, a living image of God’s people on their way to the eternal homeland. Their journeys of hope remind us that ‘our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Phil 3:20).” Yes, we must always keep our eyes fixed on the final goal, our ultimate destination. It is so easy to veer off the straight path by paying more attention to the distractions along the way than to our ultimate goal: the life of heaven, where we will all be one with our Lord and all the saints worshiping him in perfect joy in his eternal light.
One in Jesus Christ
We turn, then, to our Lady under her title of Mother of Unity because she is the mother of the source of our unity: her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one way to unity with God, the one path to the peace we all seek. Are we forgetting this? St. Paul gives us a powerful reminder in his First Letter to his disciple Timothy: “there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” And the night before he did that, before he gave himself as a ransom for us all, he prayed precisely for unity among his followers.
St. John in his Gospel gives us a lengthy account of our Lord’s final discourse to his disciples at the Last Supper. The account goes on for four chapters, narrating for us the final messages our Lord left his disciples the night before he died. He teaches them that he is the way and the truth and the life; he alerts them that he will be sending them the Holy Spirit after he departs from this world; he explains to them that he is the vine and they are the branches grafted onto him; he warns them that the world will hate them as the world hated him; and this lengthy discourse ends here, with what we just heard proclaimed for the Gospel reading of this Mass: his prayer for unity.
Take note of what he prayed: “I pray not only for these, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.” He prayed not only for the disciples who were there in the Upper Room with him, but for all believers who would trace the reception of their faith back to those first disciples. That means us, too: our Lord prayed for you and for me, that we might be one, right before died. And, indeed, right after this, our Lord leaves the Upper Room to go off to his Passion. In doing so, he sets the pattern for us. He not only prays for our unity, but he shows us how to be one. Specifically, in two ways.
Two Paths to Unity
First of all, all throughout this prayer he speaks of glory: that he gives to his disciples the glory that the Father gave to him; that they may see his glory, the glory that the Father gave to him. The glory he is speaking about here is the glory that he is about to go to: his crucifixion. His glory is the lowering of himself by being lifted up on the cross, so that we may be free. This is the only perfect act of altruistic love in human history, but it is the one we are called to imitate. The glory of Christ is following the way of the cross, because this is the way that makes us ever more capable of receiving God’s love and giving it to others. Love makes possible communion, the unity for which God created us. This, then, is the first lesson: when God’s people live the way of the cross, that is, the way of altruistic love, they are one with each other in Him.
The other lesson comes to us from what our Lord does here: he ends his lengthy discourse to his disciples the night before he died with prayer, and then what does he do? He leaves the Upper Room to go to a garden to … pray. There certainly can be no unity, no accomplishment of God’s will in any sense, without prayer. This is why St. Paul expresses his wish to his disciple Timothy “that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands, without anger or argument.” This posture of prayer, standing with hands outstretched and palms turned upward toward heaven, is an ancient one and was the normal posture of prayer for the early Christians. It signifies receptivity to God’s gifts. We stand ready to receive whatever it is that God deems best to give us. And St. Paul tells us we should do so with “holy hands,” that is, hands that don’t touch forbidden things, with souls that are free from being tainted by the bad things of this world.
The most powerful weapon we have to defend ourselves against the attacks of the enemy is to pray with this disposition as we pray the holy rosary. By praying the rosary, we meditate on the mysteries of our salvation, and ask our Lady to intercede for us. She will keep us on the path that leads us to her Son, she will constantly remind us that he is the one mediator, that there is no other way to the Father than through him, and she will always keep our vision fixed on that final goal of heaven, the final destination of this earthly pilgrimage of ours. But we must live what we pray, and he will give us the grace to do so.
We are all familiar with the wonderful Apostolic Letter Pope St. John Paul II wrote on the rosary, but his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, wrote his own Encyclical Letter on the same theme a little over 100 years before. In it he speaks precisely of our Lady as a force for unity, especially when we pray her rosary. As he says there,
… in Mary, God has given us the most zealous guardian of Christian unity. There are, of course, more ways than one to win her protection by prayer, but … the best and most effective way to her favor lies in the Rosary. [For] the devout Christian … not least among the advantages of the Rosary is the ready and easy means it puts in his hands to nurture his faith, and to keep him from ignorance of his religion and the danger of error. [Adiutricem, n. 24]
Conclusion
Let us, then, always seek her protection and that of the angels by our frequent recourse to prayer, and above all, by praying her rosary. Let us be sure to pray it at least once every day, and at least once every week as a family together. Under her mantle of maternal love, and the reinforcement of the heavenly hosts, we will be protected from the attacks and deceptions of the enemy, and so disposed to the grace God gives us to keep our vision focused always on His Son, so that we may stay on the straight path that leads to the life of perfect union with him in our heavenly homeland. May God grant us this grace. Amen.