Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
Today we honor in the life of the Church that day in which the Mother of God appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous,
through apparitions that have become known in the mystical body of Christ as Our Lady of Lourdes.
And indeed, St. Pius X would extend to the Universal Church this feast in honor of Our Lady.
But if we are to really honor Our Lady at Lourdes, we are to understand the message she came to give us.
And perhaps that can be best understood in her answer to St. Bernadette's question,
Who are you? For Our Lady declares to her, I am the Immaculate Conceptionist.
And so she declares her very essence, that she is the Immaculate Conception.
And then we hearken back to that day when our first parents fall.
And immediately after the fall, God had come in search of our first parents, and he would find them hiding.
And so God would wish to lure us out of our hiding so that we could again be reconciled with God our Father.
And so he would promise to our first parents that there would come a time
in which we would see the sign by which God was going to earnestly restore all of mankind to himself.
And that sign was to be the woman who was at enmity with the serpent.
And if we understand this first prophecy of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
then we understand that that word enmity meant that there was never in any way a moment
when Satan would touch the Blessed Virgin Mary, that she would be preserved from original sin.
And so when she declares,
She does with maternal solicitude, for which she wishes to point out to the modern world
that she is the singular exception.
She is the only one who has been preserved by God from the stain of original sin.
That becomes very important in our I'm okay, you're okay society,
in which ultimately modern mankind is denying the existence of original sin,
and hence declaring of themselves,
that prerogative which alone belongs to the Mother of God,
that they too are immaculate conceptions.
What Our Lady is pointing out is that she is given by God a singular grace
in which she is preserved from original sin, and the rest of us are quite not okay.
We are infected by the stain of original sin, and we are corrupted by our own personal sins.
But she wishes to come to Lords to give us hope, and so she ultimately is holding herself out
as the answer for what afflicts modern society,
that if we turn to her and consecrate ourselves to her,
it is not a matter of our faults and failings,
but it is a matter of our intention to give ourselves entirely to the Mother of God,
so that she can form Christ in us.
Indeed, Saint Augustine very early in the church,
for those who would say that the doctors and fathers spoke not much of the Mother of God,
for often in our modern age and in our modern societies,
we think we must multiply words,
we must have a lot of evidence to prove the point.
But when Saint Augustine declares that the Mother of God is the mold of God,
then, as it were, we have a most profound statement,
and so she wishes to form Christ in all of us who first formed Christ in her own womb.
And so we are to give ourselves into her hands,
for God can form us into himself in one of two ways,
by the heavy blows of the chisel on the rough rock,
or by the soft pouring of ourselves,
into the mold.
And since it is the Mother of God herself who holds the mold in her hands,
if we give ourselves to her,
then she will truly form Christ in us.
And ultimately, that is the goal of all humanity,
to have Christ formed in them,
so that the Father may recognize us when we depart from this life.
Saint Louis de Montfort will go further and point out
that in consecrating ourselves to the Mother of God,
we consecrate ourselves to what he calls the echo of God,
for he points out she is the one who always speaks to God,
and always speaks of God,
and so she can communicate nothing but to accept the love of God.
And so we give ourselves entirely to her,
so that she takes all of our requests,
all of our prayers,
as defective as they are,
and she, in a sort of sense,
cleans them up and presents them to God our Father,
and ultimately it is then that they become pleasing.
So it is not a matter of our struggle with our faults,
and our failings.
It is not a matter of the struggle of our sinful selves.
It is a matter of how much we truly entrust ourselves
to the maternal care of the Mother of God,
and if we do so, then she will bring us to perfection.
And so let us strive in this day and age,
so forgetful as it is of the things of God,
to entrust ourselves to the Mother of God.
At Lourdes, Our Lady begins to initiate her time,
and so it is her time,
because it is a time of grave sin.
It is a time of great sin,
and so it is the time of her who crushes the head of the serpent,
and ultimately of sin.
For she and she alone understood most profoundly
what God meant when he came and said,
I do not come to destroy the sinner,
but to reconcile them to God their Father.
Our Lord comes to destroy sin,
and ultimately we cooperate in that,
insofar as we have entrusted ourselves
to the maternal care of the Mother of God.
And so, in this day and age of sin,
in which it seems almost impossible to escape its influence,
it comes to us through all channels of the media,
it comes to us from the philosophies promulgated,
from the pulpits of politics,
it comes to us, unfortunately,
even through some of the members of the mystical body.
And when we are surrounded by sin,
there is only one escape,
that this escape that was caught so well by the poet,
who said that our Lady is like the air we breathe.
And so, when sin seems to oppress us and press us down,
let us always take a deeper breath,
the breath of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
so that she truly surrounds us with her maternal care
and her maternal solicitude,
so that the stain of sin does not touch us,
as it did not touch her from the first moment of her conception.
She is our safeguard against sin,
and she is the portal to heaven.
She opens to us the mysteries of our faith,
and so, in entrusting ourselves to her,
we begin to love God with the faith of the Virgin Mary,
and ultimately, all else is just groping in the darkness.
When Saint Peter was out fishing with the Apostles at the night,
he caught nothing.
He labored earnestly in the dark,
and he caught nothing.
And if we do not entrust ourselves to the Mother of God,
we labor in the dark.
We may, as it were, acquire,
some state of holiness,
but it will always be defective,
and it will always be in peril of being lost,
because it is not in the dark that God is found,
it is in the light,
and that light burns most brightly
in the soul of the ever-Blessed and Virgin Mary.
Indeed, it is in her soul
that it burns from the first moment of her conception,
and that is why she can truly be called the free woman.
For we often construe freedom
as the ability to do whatever we want,
but freedom is not for the creature
doing whatever one wishes.
Freedom is doing what God had created them to do.
And so, in the Virgin Mary,
we see that the human soul was created to praise God
from the first moment of its conception
until the end of its life on this earth,
so that it may praise Him for all eternity in the life to come.
And so, let us strive to entrust ourselves entirely
to the free woman,
because she always does,
the will of God,
so that she may give us that freedom
that she enjoyed from the first moment of her conception,
and that we begin to joy at the moment of our baptism,
a grace, as it were,
requested for us by the Mother of God
as she requests all grace,
as Saint Maximilian Mary Colby and others point out,
all graces that all mankind has received,
the grace of the conversion of our first parents
after their fall into sin,
and every grace that will be given to souls
until the end of time,
is given to us in some mysterious way
through the maternal solicitude,
the maternal intervention of the Mother of God.
And so it is that we come to understand
in the light of the mystery that she revealed at Lourdes,
I am the Immaculate Conception,
that mystery that Saint Bernardine caught so well when he declared,
if God had not foresawn the faithfulness of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
He would have foregone the act of creation.
And so everything in the created order
we owe to the faithfulness of the Mother of God.
And that is why in entrusting ourselves to her,
we can do so with entire confidence
that she and she alone can take on sin,
crush it without crushing the soul of man.
And so we have much to rejoice this day
because at Lourdes the Mother of God
interceded in her maternal love for humanity,
to point out to them a way out of the darkness,
out of the malaise of the sin that has overcome the modern world.
She is that way, she is that royal road,
she is the one that we give ourselves entirely to,
and that is the end.
For often it is misunderstood that the act of consecration
to the Mother of God is somehow some form of passive act
by which we just pass through the Virgin Mary.
But Saint Maximilian called her
an end to sin.
She is an end in herself.
And that mystery was also caught by Saint Louis de Montfort
when he called her the echo of God.
She is an end in herself because she cannot do anything
except give souls to God.
And so in giving ourselves entirely to her,
we are giving ourselves to God
and we are allowing ourselves to be formed
as God the Father allowed his very Son to be formed,
that is, by the Blessed Virgin Mary.
And so let us go forward with confidence,
knowing that our faith is not dependent upon our feelings
and our emotions as the modern world tells us.
I am okay, you are okay.
Obey your thirst or any of the other modern expressions
that indicate a society so corrupted and so blinded
that it seems almost not to have any conception
of the supernatural life.
And in it all, the Mother of God wishes one thing
and one thing only, to establish again in the heart of man,
an aspiration, a desire that he was created
to enjoy God for all eternity.
And so the things of this world can only be enjoyed
insofar as we use them in accord with the will
and the design of the divine architect.
And no one knows more clearly the design of the divine architect
than the most holy and blessed Mother of God.
And so let us strive to build up the kingdom of Christ
by entrusting ourselves entirely to her.
So that that mystery that was revealed at Nazareth
by the angel Gabriel becomes a mystery embraced by all mankind.
That is the mystery of the Holy Family in which all humanity
strives to imitate the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
The life that was lived at Nazareth, lived at Bethlehem,
lived in Egypt, lived in Jerusalem.
A life that was lived in good times and in bad times.
And always it was a life, a life of joy,
a life of union with God the Father.
And so we have the model and the example of all that is good.
And so let us strive to see that mankind becomes a model
of that family, that family that lived that holy life at Nazareth
so that mankind may come again to know the dignity
that he has been raised up.
And he has been raised up to that dignity most especially
by the Mother of God.
She who from the first moment of her conception
was full of grace and every moment of her life
while she always remained full of grace grew in the grace of God
so that she becomes holier and holier each moment of her life.
But at no point in her life is there holiness lacking in her.
She is the perfection of holiness at each moment
and as each moment passes she reaches a higher state of perfection.
And so we truly can call upon her with confidence and in trust
as she has come to us at Lourdes and at Fatima
and at other apparitions.
She comes always with one message.
Turn from your sin and trust yourself to me
and I will raise you up as I raised my son up.
For at Calvary we understand that mystery
by which the Mother of God literally raised her son up
by sacrificing her maternal rights over the flesh.
And so she truly became the co-redemptrix
of the world.
And so let us go forward with great confidence
because as Our Lady said,
I am the Immaculate Conception.
And so let us go forward with great confidence
because as Our Lady said,
I am the Immaculate Conception.
And so let us go forward with great confidence
because as Our Lady said,
I am the Immaculate Conception.