Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we celebrate a big Franciscan saint, although perhaps not very well known outside of the Franciscan order: St. Leonard of Port Maurice. He was born in 1676 near Genoa in Italy, and as a young man, he visited a Franciscan friary in Rome where he was studying. He heard the brothers chanting the breviary, and at a certain point, when he heard the words, “Convert us, O God, our salvation”—which is part of the breviary—he thought to himself, “Wow, I think that’s for me.” “Convert us, O God, our salvation.” He felt the calling, and at the age of 21, he entered the Franciscan order.
As a Franciscan, he became well known for his preaching. He’s one of the biggest Franciscan preachers of all our history. So, in the 18th century, the 1700s, he went up and down the Italian peninsula, converting many to God by his eloquence, but also by his holiness, because his preaching was backed by severe penance, mortification, and sacrifice that obtains grace to make preaching efficacious.
He was known also for his devotion to the Passion of Our Lord. He’s the one who propagated the Stations of the Cross in the Church. Today, it’s a devotion that we find in every Catholic church, and it was thanks to St. Leonard of Port Maurice that it became so popular.
He also composed the Divine Praises. So, if you’re ever at Benediction—“Blessed be God, blessed be His Holy Name”—after Benediction, he composed those, especially as a reparation for blasphemy, which was very widespread in Italy at that time and continues to be widespread. So, the Divine Praises.
He died at the age of 75, and there’s one more thing about him that I’d like to underscore, and that’s his devotion to Our Lady. In fact, when he was still young, he got tuberculosis. At that time, many people died of tuberculosis; he was on the verge of dying, but he was miraculously cured, and that was through the intercession of Our Blessed Lady. Later on in life, remembering this grace that he had received and his own devotion to Our Lady, he would always say, “All the good that I’ve received, or that I’ve done, is thanks to Our Lady, thanks to the Virgin Mary.”  And this personal devotion of his, which was part of his preaching as well, perfectly sums up the place God has given to Our Lady in the economy of salvation. God gives to us all things through Our Lady, right? Even in the Book of Wisdom, the Church interprets the Book of Wisdom in a Marian key: “All good things came to me together with her.” God gives all things through Our Lady. And it’s of course part of the Magisterium. Recently, Benedict XVI, right, “There’s no fruit of grace in the history of salvation that does not have as its necessary instrument the mediation of Our Lady.” It so pleased God to make Our Lady part of His plan that all good things come to us through her.
Now, Leonard—St. Leonard—was particularly devoted to Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. It’s a big thing for Franciscans, and he in fact called it the most important cause in the world. And he did it for two reasons: one theological, the other more practical, which flows from the theological.
So, the theological is that the Immaculate Conception contains in itself, in summary form, all of Our Lady’s privileges, and again, it kind of sums up where God has put Our Lady in His plan. So, the Immaculate Conception—when it was later defined as a dogma in 1854 by Pius IX, another Franciscan—the Immaculate Conception, the Church teaches, is in God’s mind from all eternity. She is predestined together with Christ from all eternity by one and the same decree, which basically means that in God’s mind, Jesus and Mary are inseparable from all eternity. We don’t add Mary later on; she doesn’t insert herself later on. In God’s mind from all eternity, there will be an Incarnation; that Incarnation will be Marian. God becomes man through Our Blessed Lady, and she is forever part of God’s plan. She, with Christ, collaborates in acquiring all the graces of our salvation and then distributing all the graces of our salvation. There’s an inseparability there, an intimate union there. And she must be, therefore, a part of our union with Christ as well.
Immaculate Conception. An amazing doctrine, but the doctrine, again, has practical consequences. Why be so worked up about it? Why make it a dogma? Because there are practical consequences. Again, God wants us to recognize Our Lady as our Mother and to ask for graces through Her. And when we do so, then the fullness of grace comes to us. Our Lady is always operative, always active, always praying for us, even if we’re not thinking of Her. But when we do explicitly recognize Her, then the fullness of grace can come; then the best graces come to us through God. That’s why, again, it’s the most important cause in the world, St. Leonard of Port Maurice would say, because it’s when the Church recognizes and proclaims and honors and lives Our Lady as God wants Her to be honored, known, and revered, then we receive through Her all that God wants to give to us.
So, St. Leonard, of course, is now in heaven, a saint, and his life’s work was achieved after his death. The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed in 1854. But even after it’s proclaimed, as St. Maximilian Kolbe would say, now we have to make it part of our life, right? Now we have to incorporate it into our own life and make it part of our spiritual life. All Franciscans are excited about the cause of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. We can say, indeed, it is the most important cause in the world, and practically speaking for us as well, because for each one of us, too, when we invite Mary into our lives, ask Our Lady to pray for us, when we surrender ourselves to Her, then God will give us the fullness of grace that from all eternity He has wanted to give us through Her, through Her mediation.  Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.