Mary the ?influencer? of God
Pope Francis addressed the young people participating in the World Youth Day with a discourse pronounced during the Vigil with the young people, in Campo San Juan Pablo II – Metro Park (Panama)on Saturday, January 26, 2019, with a revolutionary language and very popular one.
In Panama, there were more than 600 thousand young people from 156 countries with Francis. The Holy Father told them:
“The Gospel teaches us that the world will not be better because there are fewer sick, weak, frail or elderly people to be concerned about, or because there are fewer sinners. No, the world will not be better on account of this. It will be better when more people, like these friends who have spoken to us, are willing and enthused enough to give birth to the future and believe in the transforming power of God’s love. To you, young people, I ask: are you willing to be an “influencer” like Mary? [“Yes!”] She dared to say, “Let it be done”. Only love makes us more human, not fights, not bullying, not studies on their own: only love makes us more human and fulfilled; everything else is a pleasant but useless placebo”.
To define Mary as ‘influencer’, as the ‘influential of God’ is to attribute to her a new “title”, this time taken from commercial language of “marketing” which will have to be filled with all the theological and Mariological content that it wants to express. We all know that the more common titles, “Mother of God”, “Virgin Mary”, Conceived without sin”, “Assumption”, are the ones more used. Starting, today we will add to the “Rosary” of titles, including the more current, up to date one, coined directly by Pope Francis: Mary “influential of God”.
In ‘marketing’, that term is used to refer to someone who makes a proposal to us of following, of acquisition, of behavior.
Possessing the theological and mariological dimension Mary goes ahead, she precedes us on the way of faith. To Jesus through Mary.
The path of Mary, says the Pope, is a life that “is not a salvation up “in the cloud” and waiting to be downloaded, a new “app” to be discovered, or a technique of mental self-improvement”.He insists: "Still less is that life a “tutorial” for finding out the latest news. The salvation that God offers us is an invitation to be part of a love story interwoven with our personal stories; it is alive and wants to be born in our midst so that we can bear fruit just as we are, wherever we are and with everyone all around us".
Read here the words of the Pope.