Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
May the Lord Jesus give you his peace.
We celebrate the feast of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal today.
And in the first reading we've heard about a woman who is clothed with the sun
and the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars.
And it's very reminiscent of the image of Our Lady on the Miraculous Medal,
especially with those twelve stars.
Pope Benedict, in a couple of homilies on the Assumption,
will talk about this image of the apocalypse, Revelation 12,
with regard to a struggle between two loves,
a lot like St. Augustine's city of God.
He will oppose the city of man.
Against the city of God, here we have the dragon who represents
and instigates the city of man.
You might think of Cain when he starts building cities after the fall.
Against the city of God, which is, in a mystical sense,
the Immaculate Virgin Mary.
And if we look at the apparitions at the Rue de Bac, 1830,
to St. Catherine Labarée, we can draw some lessons, for sure, out of them.
And certainly the beauty...
The beauty of Our Lady.
And even in the first apparition,
one of the first words that she says is that,
I wish to entrust you with a mission.
And that mission is all tied up with the Miraculous Medal.
And it's certainly all tied up with our charism,
given by St. Maximilian Kolbe,
the mission of the Immaculate Mediatrix on Earth,
which is, of course, to bring souls to Christ, your Son.
But there's several themes that keep recurring in the apparitions,
and one of them is confidence.
And to overcome discouragement, she offers this to St. Catherine.
It's very common with those that have received apparitions from Our Lady.
It's the opposition that will result by virtue of the fact
that the enemy does not want this message to get out.
And so, for the glory of these saints, St. Catherine Labarée,
the visionaries at Fatima,
it is something that they will endure,
endure and conquer by the grace of Christ.
But she says, Our Lady says to St. Catherine Labarée,
you will overcome all these difficulties,
which you will have much of,
by thinking that you are doing it for the glory of the good God.
And so, too, for us as well,
when there is, faced with discouragement and difficulties
and all kinds of trials,
all for the Immaculate, this is the glory of God ad extra,
the woman being the glory of the sacred humanity of Christ,
all for the Immaculate.
And that means even the small, small things in our daily lives as well.
So, confidence is something that recurs several times
in the three apparitions to St. Catherine Labarée.
And just the confidence in Our Lady's power of intercession.
The 27th of November was the second apparition
when Our Lady gave the vision of the Miraculous Medal.
Basically herself and surrounded by the words,
O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
And then also almost kind of flipping around,
showing the cross and with the monogram of Our Lady underneath
and also the 12 stars and the united hearts
of the Sacred Heart of Jesus crowned with thorns
and the Immaculate Heart of Mary transpierced by a sword.
We take a close look at that.
Part of the apparition,
we see that this monogram of Our Lady, this M,
which is beneath the cross,
can really be taken as a figure of the co-redemption.
Why? Because, well, there's the cross,
and of course Jesus hanging on the cross, we know.
But there's also a cross beam that goes right through the letter M.
And that cross beam that goes right through the letter M,
we can say that in union with her son and subordinate to him,
Our Lady is also being crucified mystically on Calvary.
And that cross beam,
that cross beam represents that.
You can also see with that M the way that it's written,
a lot like a lot of altars of Our Lady,
although there's only one M,
but right in the middle of it you can see the V,
which is virgin.
And virgin and mother,
these two things that we can think of as being privileges
that really undergird the privilege of the co-redemption.
Just at the Annunciation,
she was called to make an oblation of her vow of perpetual virginity.
And with that great trust,
it was perfectly fulfilled by the virgin birth.
Also at the foot of the cross,
immolating the rights of a divine maternity,
that her maternal rights she immolates,
she gives over,
and thus perfectly fulfilled now as mother of the church.
Now the 12 stars on the medal
were never mentioned in St. Catherine Laboure's notes.
I guess she, for like 46 years,
only told this to her confessor and spiritual director,
and that was it.
But they don't appear in our notes,
but from the very first time,
when the medal was first struck for the bishop,
which he got some of the first of them,
and he actually had some miracles right away with them,
many, many miracles.
That's why it's called the miraculous medal.
Even just recently, last weekend,
I heard of a miracle up in the Providence area
of a man who had accepted a miraculous medal,
prayed, and his legs had been greatly, greatly swollen,
and then some kind of,
he was in a chronic condition,
almost paralyzing his ability to walk,
dramatically improved.
So this stuff is still going on, of course.
But these stars,
if we take a scriptural look at what the stars might represent,
we can kind of get a little deeper at the mystery.
They occur in the first reading that we just heard,
and we say that there's no mention made
in St. Catherine's notes about them,
but in the first reading in the Book of the Apocalypse,
there are several meanings that we might uncover.
St. Jerome will say that these readings,
and each word in the Book of the Apocalypse
is multivalent, it has many meanings.
St. Bonaventure takes up the pen
and talks about this vision of the woman
clothed with the sun, moon under her feet,
and 12 stars, and he considers those 12 stars
as the 12 joys of heaven,
this brilliance of God-like splendor,
and that embodies the 12 joys of heaven.
So he's talking about the 12 joys of heaven,
and that embodies the 12 joys of heaven,
and that embodies the 12 joys of heaven,
and that embodies the 12 joys of heaven,
and that embellished the happiness of heaven.
Pope Benedict will talk about the figures
as being the sun, meaning really completely surrounded
and penetrated by God's light.
She's clothed with the sun.
The 12 stars he takes as the 12 tribes of Israel,
but in fact the whole people of God,
which means, of course, the 12 apostles as well,
all of Israel, the new Israel.
But if we look at sacred scripture,
we can kind of uncover even more
that we can think about in the book of the Apocalypse.
There's two major associations with stars
as you look through sacred scripture.
One is to do obeisance to, in other words, to serve.
In the book of Genesis, we see,
which can really be a key to interpreting
what's going on with these stars.
Joseph has a dream, which he told his brothers.
Probably not the best thing to do, but he did.
I had another dream, he said.
The sun, the moon, and the 11 stars here
did obeisance to me.
He has 11 brothers.
When he told that to his father and his brothers,
his father reproved him.
What is this dream that you have had, he said.
And the father now, Isaac, interprets the dream for us.
Can it be that I, this is the sun,
and your mother, the moon,
and your brothers, which would be the 11 stars,
will come to bow to the ground before you?
And so here we have something of an interpretive key
for these moon, the sun, the moon,
and the sun.
We have the stars here, and the sun being Christ,
the moon, in one sense, being Our Lady herself,
and also the stars being these brothers of Joseph.
And here we can think of, in some relation
to the Blessed Virgin Mary as well.
But there's another association with these stars as well.
So the first one is obeisance.
And we almost see hyperdulia here,
that these stars are giving service to,
and really,
venerating in a very special way the Blessed Virgin Mary.
These stars also, in sacred scripture,
are the righteous in heaven,
a specific glory where one star
differs in glory from the other.
But the second association in sacred scripture
is with seed, or one's posterity, or one's descendants.
And so with those stars also around the Blessed Virgin Mary,
we can see that she is the mother of them.
She has engendered them.
This is the promise to Abraham that is numerous,
as the sands, or the stars in the sky,
so will be your seed upon the earth,
your posterity upon the earth.
So we can see Our Lady surrounded by these 12 stars
as really the mother of the entire people of Israel,
the entire new Israel.
And this is some symbolism.
So the great gift that we've been given
is both with the message and also the privilege,
the message of confidence in Our Lady's power of intercession,
and also the privilege,
that's underlying, which is her co-redemption.
And this is, in our day,
the mission of the Immaculate Mediatrix.
And so, as we pray today
with more and more confidence,
uniting ourselves to the very hope of Our Lady,
we pray also in a special way
for the promulgation,
for the knowledge of Our Lady's co-redemptrix.
© transcript Emily Beynon