Saint of the Day – Sept 8, 1975 – Monday
“A Roman and Apostolic Catholic, the author of this text submits himself with filial devotion to the traditional teaching of Holy Church. However, if by an oversight anything is found in it at variance with that teaching, he immediately and categorically rejects it.”
The words “Revolution” and “Counter-Revolution” are employed here in the sense given to them by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the first edition of which was published in the monthly Catolicismo, Nº 100, April 1959.
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Today, September 8, Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady and of Our Lady of Coromoto – for the two invocations go together – and you well know how devotion to Our Lady of Coromoto is dear to us – on this feast I wanted to make sure to hold this meeting with you to replace the Saturday meeting I was unable to give for health reasons, so we could talk about the Nativity of Our Lady.
So that you can take advantage of the presence of the Statue during this meditation, I would advise you to have in mind the following: there is no guarantee that this statue physically resembles Our Lady very much. This statue was sculpted by a contemporary Portuguese artist who did not draw inspiration from any special document about Our Lady. For, except for the image found in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, which is painted on wood – an image of Our Lady said to have been painted by the Evangelist St. Luke, but there is no complete certainty of that – except for that image there is no source at all that indicates to us what Our Lady was really like.
Not so with Our Lord. We know how He was through the Holy Shroud of Turin, which has His face imprinted on it and reveals His divine face to us perfectly well.
But we do not know how Our Lady was like. Even more interesting, She appeared to various persons who oriented artists to paint Her most holy face, but the artists were unable to. The very people who oriented them later said their works had some similarity to Our Lady but that She is incomparably more beautiful, more majestic, more perfect, so that She really did not closely resemble any of their paintings.
But if that is true, there is another curious and very beautiful thing about this matter which is this: Catholics diffusely have – I believe through an action of grace – a certain idea of what Our Lady was like. So that although we never met Our Lady, when we see an image we soon realize whether or not it is an image of Our Lady. And all images of Our Lady –– which are so many and so different, mind you –– have an I-don’t-know-what trait in common which we can’t quite place and which expresses the idea all Catholics have of what Our Lady was like.
It is impossible for this trait common to all images not to be a very salient trait – perhaps the salient trait – of Our Lady’s physiognomy.
And while this statue has an extraordinarily meaningful and expressive physiognomy, it is natural for us to understand that a person looking at this image does not see a face that necessarily has a nose, mouth or eyes resembling those of Our Lady. Maybe yes, maybe not. One is not sure. But clearly the physiognomy of the image is that of Our Lady, or has something of the physiognomy of Our Lady. The physiognomy of Our Lady is incomparably richer, holier, and incomparably more beautiful. But something of Our Lady’s physiognomy is expressed here.
This coincides with what I have said about the sacred, supernatural character of these physiognomic expressions. As such, a mere wooden statue alone is incapable of manifesting so many expressions of physiognomy as this statue shows at times. This undoubtedly means that this Statue has expressions of physiognomy which are communicated to it by a supernatural action and therefore cannot fail to resemble the physiognomy of Our Lady. And hence the utmost respect we have for this statue. It brings all the way down to us, if not the physical features, at least the physiognomic traits of Our Lady. And this explains the enchantment we have for this Sacred Statue.
So in order for us to follow well this meditation that we will do here based on an excerpt of Sister Mary of Agreda, I think it would be interesting for you gentlemen to imagine Our Lady as having a physiognomy similar to this Statue. And imagine her as a person who did the things I will now recount. And then you will better penetrate the reality of the scene I will describe.
Is this clear?
* After the death of Our Lord, Our Lady continued her everyday occupations remembering the various events of her life
Sister Mary of Agreda narrates that after Our Lord ascended to Heaven and Our Lady stayed alone on earth, She began little by little to organize Her life. As you know, She lived in the city of Ephesus for quite a while with St. John the Evangelist, whom Our Lord, a few moments before His death, had given to Her as a Son at the same time as He gave Her as Mother to St. John. And the Gospel says that from that moment on, St. John the Evangelist took Her as his Mother, and She accepted him as son. And that he had for her all the attention and cares that Our Lord would have, in other words, he was extremely devoted to Our Lady, extremely good, attentive and venerating toward Her.
So they lived together and She began to organize Her common, everyday life. A life no longer participating in the earthly life of Our Lord, which had gloriously closed with His Ascension to Heaven, but participating by remembrance and souvenirs in all that had happened in the life of Our Lord. She was a burning torch of nostalgia for Our Lord Jesus Christ, one of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and continuous petition to Him.
Then, as time went by and She went on organizing Her life, She remembered dates – She was conceived without original sin and thus had a most perfect memory, in addition to being most intelligent by nature and extremely helped by grace. So She went on remembering the dates of the principal events in Her life and in that of Her Divine Son.
She did not look at the main events in Her life as anyone else would. For instance, a young man today would say: “I enrolled in the university in such a date, won a motorcycle on such another date…” It is not like that. The true dates in a man’s life are the dates in which he served Our Lady in a more distinguished way through the apostolate, through suffering, or with prayer. Or the dates when Our Lady gave him special graces. These are the true dates in a man’s life. The rest is baloney.
So She looked at the various dates and when a date would be repeated on the calendar She would commemorate that day with special ceremonies in Her little bedroom, as the Church still was not organized with sacred buildings and all that. The Church was still extraordinarily new. So, in her little room She would commemorate that date in her own way.
* Our Lady celebrated her own birthday, on September 8, with spiritual exercises, prostrations and canticles from the eve of the feast
So today it is a beautiful idea to try to see how Our Lady celebrated the day of her own birth. And we will see how Her life was like, how She celebrated and how Our Lord would come to see Her and help with the celebration. And we will celebrate Her birthday by admiring, deeply touched, the way She celebrated Her own birthday, so our celebration is one in intimate union with Hers.
Thus I thought it would be a good idea to read an excerpt of Sister Mary of Agreda on this matter and comment on it with you.
So let us go to the commentary.
Our Lady celebrated the feast of her birth on September 8, the date she was born. And she would start the first night with the same exercises, prostrations and chants as on the day of the Immaculate Conception.
That means, the night of the 7th to the 8th.
Now you will see how all this has a reason for being. The day of the Immaculate Conception is the day She was conceived without original sin in the most pure bosom of Saint Anne; in other words, the day She began to exist in the world. Conception and birth are correlated developments. Birth is the fruit and apex of a physiological process that begins with conception, and in her case, also of a spiritual process. For, since She was conceived without original sin, She was able to reason from the first instant of her being. And though living inside Saint Anne, her mother, She already reasoned in a most elevated and sublime way with the graces God would give her, the revelations God would make to her etc.
Thus, when She was born – that is, when She left the maternal cloister – she came with an already extremely high spiritual life, an already accomplished process of sanctification. And things were calculated in such a way that at the moment in which by the laws of physiology She should leave the maternal cloister, at that moment Her soul had already accomplished all the progresses She should have made at that phase of Her spiritual life. And so She was born to the earth like a sun.
And for this reason She – who on the day of the Immaculate Conception celebrated the feast with a series of prostrations, prayers and canticles – She would repeat those ceremonies on Her birthday. You see how all this is rational, logical, and shows Our Lady’s supreme wisdom.
What does this teach us? To be reasonable, logical, always consistent in everything, and to do everything as Our Lady commands and as Our Lady asks: this is what we must do, always with tranquility, serenity, and complete self-giving.
* Our Lady’s chant would be capable of converting to Christianity anyone who were to listen when going by St. John’s house
Now, look a little to this Statue and imagine what a young Our Lady would have been like closed in her room in their small house, now praying, now rising, now kneeling, and chanting every once in a while. You can imagine whether there ever was on earth a chant as beautiful, majestic, sweet and suave as the chant of Our Lady, above all Our Lady chanting for God? Could there have been on earth a like melody? Absolutely not. So you can imagine Our Lady, in her inner soul, serene, serious, recollected, and at times, in an apex of enthusiasm, chanting; or then, in an apex of humility, prostrating herself; or yet, in an apex of dignity, rising.
You can imagine, outside the door, St. John the Evangelist working and all of a sudden hearing a canticle by Our Lady… Let us say She herself singing the Magnificat! So Saint John stops to listen, knowing not what to say, and then continues to work. But in what state of soul? In what state of soul would we be if this Statue all of a sudden were to sing the Magnificat? We would not know what to say. We would be stuttering all night till morning without knowing what to say, isn’t it?
All right, you can imagine what repercussions that chant would have on the soul of St. John, whose devotion to Our Lady was much greater than ours. Theirs was a small house and thus the rooms were close to the street. A pagan passing by the street all of a sudden could hear a canticle and stop: his soul had been touched. The next day he runs into St. John and says: “I was told that your mother, or your aunt, chants in an admirable way, I don’t know… last night I could not sleep so great was my joy… Would you take me there one day to listen to her sing?” In doubt, St. John says, “for a few minutes, yes.” So the man goes and listens a bit to the voice of Our Lady, and leaves inebriated. A few days later he is baptized. A modulation in Our Lady’s voice had touched that soul more profoundly than any sermon ever would!
This is so because everything that touches on Our Lady is absolutely exceptional and unique. And this is how all things that have to do with Her should be seen and imagined.
* Our Lady would give thanks to God and at the same time ask to spend Her life at His service, to please Him
Sister Mary of Agreda continues the narration of what the celebration was like.
She would thank God for having been born alive to the light of this world and for the favor She received soon after birth, of having been elevated to Heaven and intuitively seen the Divinity, as I said in the first part.
So here you see how the birth of Our Lady was something admirable. She is so holy and so beloved above all creatures that She opened her eyes to the earth and soon afterward saw God. What a way to enter life! That, which is not even the apex in the life of the vast majority of people, was the beginning of Her life. That is how high She hovers above everything and everyone, She cannot possible be compared to anyone.
The text continues:
She would once again propose to employ her whole life to serve and please the Lord, as He would make known to Her Highness.
In other words, when She saw God what She asked Him for was to spend her whole life to serve and please Him. And She would renew that petition on every birthday. And She would thank Him for her birth, for that vision, and would ask to spend the rest of Her life to please and serve Him. Note that She was confirmed in grace, conceived without original sin, She knew She was the Mother of God and had bore Our Lord Jesus Christ in her bosom for nine months; She, in whose bosom the Real Presence never ceased, would receive Communion and the Sacred Species would remain incorrupt in her until the next day’s Communion – She was therefore a tabernacle – yet She had such a profound notion of the humility of the human condition that She would ask God to spend her whole life serving Him and pleasing Him. And with that She would be satisfied.
She would thank Him for the fact that as She took the first step entering life, She was already more advanced in merits than the highest saints and Seraphim. And she would propose to start over that same day, working as if it were the first in which her virtue was beginning. And again she would ask the Lord to help Her, to govern all her actions and orient her for His greatest possible glory.
You see what her prayer was like. She would say: “My Son, my God, my Lord, I know that from the first instant of my life Thou gavest me even more graces than to the Seraphim. Let my birthday be like a new birth and that with renewed strength and an even greater love, I may serve Thee even more in this new year of life Thou givest me; for I want continuously to grow in Thy love. I cannot have enough of this and there is no point where I would want to stop.”
You see how this is most sublime! This is how one should pray.
* Our Lord Jesus Christ would visit Our Lady on Her birthday, at St. John’s house
She continues:
… although on that feast She would not be taken to Heaven as on the day of her conception, something else would happen. Her Son would come down from Heaven to the room where She was praying.
In other words, when her prayer likely became especially intense, Our Lord would come down. And that was so natural, so explicable, so reasonable. What son does not visit his mother on her birthday? It was Her birthday; He was Her Son and so He would come down from Heaven to that small cubicle in an insignificant house in a pagan city: Our Lord Jesus Christ himself would come. And you can imagine Our Lady’s joy after missing Him so much, and the affection with which they treated each other! The apex of the feast was just beginning; all the foregoing had been preparations for it.
You see how all this is rational: one the eve She would prepare, on the day She would begin this most sublime prayer that we mentioned. At the apex, Our Lord comes to visit Her. It is not the only apex: you will see that this feast has two complementary, extremely logical apexes that merge into only one, a real marvel!
The text continues:
He would bring with Him many choirs of angels, with the ancient Patriarchs and Prophets and notably Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, her parents, and Saint Joseph, her most chaste spouse.
For you to understand what is meant by “would come with many legions of Angels,” I will prolong this Saint of the Day a bit more.
I do not recall who the saint to whom her Guardian Angel appeared was. We know that in the heavenly hierarchy, the Guardian Angels are at the lowest level. Yet the splendor of the Guardian Angel was such that when he appeared, she knelt down thinking it was God Himself. So you can imagine several hierarchies of Angels, all filling up Our Lady’s room and singing in Her praise, uniting it with praise for Our Lord Jesus Christ, how harmonious all that must have been!
And then, the whole Old Testament present before Her: the Patriarchs, Prophets, all the most distinguished just men of whom the Bible speaks in the Old Law and especially Her parents and Her spouse. You can imagine the joy of St. Ann, St. Joachim, St. Joseph, rendering homage to Her; Her joy seeing them once again, the satisfaction She had in being with each of them. And above all for the presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ — the unfathomable, absolutely unfathomable because it is infinite – source of joy that any man can have. The presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the absolute source of the absolute joy. And there He was associating Himself with that praise and saying things to Her.
Imagine, for example that He were to address to Her some of the invocations of the Litany of Our Lady: Mater puríssima, Mater castísssima, Mater inviolata, Mater amabilis, Mater admirabilis, etc., etc. All these things which are so little on our lips, on His lips what a sonority they would have! And what repercussion they would have on Her soul! How She must have been inundated with joy and supreme union with Her Son as She heard all that. Here you see how She contemplated, how She celebrated Her birthday.
And so you can have an idea of Her grandeur, sanctity, and perfection.
Sister Mary of Agreda continues:
The purest of all creatures, in the presence of that heavenly company, adored God with admirable reverence and worship and again gave Him thanks for having brought her to the world and for the benefits she had received.
This is the normal reaction of every person who wants to have a good spiritual life and who receives praise: it is not to enjoy that praise like a glutton enjoys candy or a chalice of delicious liqueur, drop by drop. On the contrary, it is to immediately give glory to God. Because since everything good we have comes from God, the just and faithful person who receives praise immediately says: Magnificat! Magnificat anima mea Dominum! In other words, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. This is how She would make Her thanksgiving.
Soon the Angels would to the same and chant: “Nativitas tua”, etc. Which means, “Thy birth, o Mother of God, announced a great joy to the whole world because from Thee was born the Sun of Justice”… that is to say, the Sun of Virtues, the Sun of Sanctity, Our God.”
The Patriarchs and Prophets also made their canticles of glory and thanksgiving. Adam and Eve, present in the room, would thank Her, as reparation for their sin had come from Her. And the parents and spouse of the Queen would thank God for having given them such a Daughter and such a Spouse.
Now comes the complement of the feast.
And soon the Lord would lift His Divine Mother from the ground where She was prostrated and place Her on His right. And in that place He would manifest to Her new mysteries with a vision of the Divinity which, though not intuitive and glorious, was abstractive, with greater clarity and an increase in the divine light.
In other words, in the presence of all those persons inside the room, She would prostrate herself out of veneration.
* Our Lord Jesus Christ would give Her a birthday present: the knowledge of something new about Himself
The hour has come for the birthday present. See how everything has been well calculated. There is a preparation, the feast commences with prayers, then comes a first apex: Our Lord descends. She thanks Him with all her heart and in all humility. It then goes to a second apex: Our Lord glorifies Her. He places Her sitting next to Him; and She, who was prostrated on the ground – the Magnificat says, deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles — He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly, who bow before God – He places Her next to him and gives Her a birthday present. What could that present be?
You would say: “but the present has already been given, She saw Our Lord Jesus Christ and that’s an exuberant present” You could even add: “it never even dawned on me that a present would be needed after that.” You are laughing because this reflection apparently interprets your temperamental reaction to what I was saying.
But the thing is extremely profound. For a soul who loves God, the true present is to know something new about God and to love something new in God; it is the only real present. For it is proper for pleasure to bring on something new, not something old. Imagine, for example, a person who has in his home a beautiful object on the wall, which for his whole life as a young man he saw hanging on that wall. It was a birthday present. His parents look at him and say, “look, we are giving this to you but it will continue to be there on the wall…” Now, if they should bring a new object for him from the outside, then the sensation that he is receiving a gift increases. A gift has to have something new about it.
And to Our Lady only one thing was valuable, and thus the present could only be one thing. What was it? The present was to know something new about God. Then, sitting next to Her, Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself would reveal new things about God Our Lord, and thus about Himself, for He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He was revealing some new things to Her.
You can imagine the new degree of sanctity that She acquired. It seems incredible, but She progressed spiritually throughout her life. A new degree of sanctity! What joy, understanding, affection and thanksgiving She had! How She felt filled with riches with that mere spiritual present! That incomparable feast was reaching its zenith. First, the Son comes to visit His Mother, second, the Son places Mother next to Him and adorns Her, for example, with a beautiful necklace of diamonds or a stupendous diadem: “My Mother, here are new truths about the divine essence.” And She listens on, enthralled…
Is it true or not that when one reads about a scene like that, before reading it one has no idea of what an elevated thing really is? Above all, in the trivial everyday life, one does not understand how something like that can have that much elevation. And this helps us conquer at least a little bit of that love of sublime and elevated things that should characterize the future member of the Confraternitas; that should characterize the true slave of Our Lady. To like what is elevated, to like what is sublime, not to compromise with what is vulgar and trite.
Here you have, given by Mary of Agreda, a truly admirable lesson in sublimity. She continues:
With such ineffable favors, She was again transformed into Her most holy Son, fired up with love, spiritualized to work for the Church as if She were being born again.
Our Lady had aged. But She acquired a new temper as if She had been born again. And She would catch on fire and merge with Our Lord Jesus Christ more or less as two flames would merge with each other.
* St. John, outside the room, would still follow the commemoration of Our Lady’s birthday
And on those occasions, the sacred Evangelist, St. John, deservedly participated in some aspects of that feast by listening to the music of the Angels celebrating.
You see that St. John, from the outside, realized that a tremendous feast was going on. And he was the Virgin Apostle, and thus the Apostle whom Our Lord loved – but also the Apostle who cried for his whole life over his treason during Our Lord’s prayer at the Garden of Olives and through almost the whole Passion. So you can imagine that Apostle kneeling down, listening, at times knocking on his chest asking forgiveness and at times forgetting about himself, lost in the beautiful things he was hearing from the other side of the door. But he was outside: he dared not enter; all that was so high that no earthly eyes could behold it. Just a little bit of the music sufficed to fill his soul, pretty much as this narration in some way already fills our souls. You understand the plenitude of Our Lady’s soul at that moment.
* St. John would celebrate Mass, and Our Lady, with Her Divine Son beside Her, would receive Him in the Blessed Sacrament
And the Lord [Jesus Christ] being in the oratory with Angels and Saints who assisted Him, the Evangelist would come in and say Mass.
You see that this is the third apex. It is the descent of Our Lord – I only remembered two apexes – the second is when He is sitting next to Our Lady who is receiving revelations from Him; the third apex is the Mass, an unbloody repetition of the Holy Sacrifice of Calvary. Now see the honor of St. John – who certainly did not see everything that was going on, he saw a little bit – imagine his honor celebrating Mass there in the presence of Our Lady who was illuminated as a Seraphim from Heaven, and he could perceive many things going on around Her…
Do you want to have an idea of what a Mass is? Was it or was it not a great honor for him to enter the oratory on that occasion? It was an enormous honor. To celebrate Mass is an even greater honor! To say the words by which the Transubstantiation is operated is an honor greater than all that. Here you understand what it is to celebrate a Mass.
Our Lady attended that Mass next to Her Divine Son and would receive Him in holy Communion at Mass.
How beautiful! God is everywhere; on that occasion, Our Lord was at the same time next to Her and inside Her.
All these mysteries were a spectacle of renewed joy for the Saints, who also served as godfathers in the most worthy communion ever to be seen after Christ and even to the end of the world.
Really, there never were communions like Our Lady’s, not even remotely!
And as the Grand Lady received Her Son in the Blessed Sacrament, He would leave Her recollected in that glorious way, and, in a natural and glorious way, He would be turned to Heaven.