HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
December 8, 2005
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. Lk
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 centre 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, n. 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. Col 1: 21; Eph 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 marvellous 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" (Ps 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 harbours 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.
