Agios.Mar 19

Pope Francis has decided that the memory of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, be included in the Roman calendar and celebrated every year on Monday after Pentecost as a holy day of obligation.

If it were to coincide with another feast day of a saint or a blessed, the prevalence would be for the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church.

The invocation of Mary, Mother of the Church is the fruit of the Second Vatican Council and reflects the orientation of the post-conciliar Popes.

It was Paul VI, in the promulgation of Lumen Gentium, who declared Mary, Mother of the Church.

Pope Paul VI himself propagated this invocation in the 1974 Marialis Cultus documentary.

In anticipation of the Holy Year of 1975, the Congregation for Divine Worship proposed a votive mass in honor of Mary, Mother of the Church, and it was introduced like this into the Missal. For his part, John Paul II granted the Episcopal Conferences authority to add the invocation of the Mother of the Church in the Litany of Loreto.

_________________
Antonio Martínez Estaún, Postulator general

In Mary’s way
Water from the Rock 25

The relationship of Marcellin to Mary was deeply marked by an affective and total trust in her, as the “Good Mother,’’* because it was her work that he undertook. He wrote once: Without Mary we are nothing and with Mary we have everything, because Mary always has her adorable Son within her arms or in her heart.This belief remained constant all through his life. Jesus and Mary were the treasure on which Marcellin had learned to place his own heart. This intimate relationship helped shape the Marial dimension of our spirituality. In our tradition, the phrase “Ordinary Resource” has come to encapsulate our constant reliance on Mary. The motto attributed to Champagnat by his biographer, All to Jesus through Mary, all to Mary for Jesus, captures this close relationship between the Son and the Mother and our Founder’s attitude of confidence in Mary, which we are invited to live.