Saint Mary Magdalene represents the state of contemplation and penance, the exact opposite of Judas.

Saint of the Day – June 22, 1965 – Tuesday

 by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

 

“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.

 

Saint Mary Magdalene was the first to see Our Lord resurrected (Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Italy)

 

Mary Magdalene has the spirit of Jacob, Judas, that of Esau. The two crossing trajectories cause us to tremble before our own weakness, but we find in Our Lady a safe port. June, 22 is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene the penitent. The Martyrologium states that Our Lord expelled seven demons from her and she also merited being the first to contemplate the resurrected Savior.

The famous episode of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Our Lord at the banquet has some collateral aspects that provide some insights into her life and soul and her position in the Church.

Mary Magdalene was a sister of Lazarus and according to the traditions and documents from the Orient, she was a person of the high society. Lazarus was a very rich man and the prince of a small nation that had been incorporated into the Jewish nation through wars and conquests. In spite of this, he continued to enjoy the honors of being a prince in the bosom of the Jewish nation even though he did not have the political functions of one.

He and his sisters were people of high class. While Mary Magdalene had decayed considerably and become a public sinner, after her repentance it became clear that she had come to represent two things.  On the one hand contemplation and on the other, penance.

She represented contemplation in contrast to Martha in the famous episode in which Our Lord said to Martha – who was reproaching Magdalene for not taking care of household chores but just looking at and listening to Our Lord – “Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her.” She thus came to represent pure contemplation, a contemplation not united to active life but a purely contemplative state; she was detached from active life and living exclusively for contemplation.

 

Through her fidelity at the foot of the Cross, her enormous repentance and the fact she was the first to receive the news of Our Lord’s Resurrection, Mary Magdalene represented not only contemplation but the glory of penance. Penance in the state of greater forgiveness. Penance in the state of greater intimacy with Our Lord to the point that by the example of her life and the lives of other saints, some theologians claim that the state of penance is even more beautiful than that of innocence. That of course, is a serious and profound penance.

Additionally, she represents the affirmation of the rights of innocence and of the rights of Our Lord. What do the rights of innocence and the rights of Our Lord mean? We remember the episode when Our Lord was at the Pharisee’s home when she entered and broke a vase of perfume and began to anoint the feet of Our Lord with those oils. At that point Judas criticized this act and Our Lord justified her attitude.

Here we see penance and contemplation, both in a kind of irreducible opposition to Judas’ remorseless state of soul. Judas is the opposite of repentance. He had no repentance, only despair. Committing suicide by hanging from a fig tree was not an act of repentance; it was an act of desperation. Whereas Mary Magdalene’s contemplation and penance represented a renunciation of all earthly goods, Judas the thief and traitor, represented attachment to earthly goods. So there is a flagrant opposition between the figure of Saint Mary Magdalene and that of Judas, an opposition that lasts throughout the way of the Cross, and the Resurrection.

While she stood at the foot of the Cross, he was the cursed apostle, the execrable man who instead led Our Lord to be crucified. Saint Mary Magdalene was the first to witness the Resurrection, while he hangs himself. His soul plunges like a pig into hell, and Saint Mary Magdalene is ready to witness the Resurrection of Our Lord.

In other words, the antitheses between the two are tremendous, and so are their mentalities. So we need to make an analysis of the connections that link the traits of the two mentalities. In other words, what connection is there between repentance and pure contemplation, and in contrast to this, final impenitence, despair, attachment to worldly goods and wallowing completely in the practical active life as Judas did. He was also a thief, being a man who naturally made illegitimate deals he even stole to make such deals.

How do the spirits of Jacob and Esau correlate to Saint Mary Magdalene and Judas? Saint Mary Magdalene appears to have the spirit of Jacob entirely. A superior mentality turned to spiritual things, therefore to the things of God, and thus indifferent to the material things of the world. Judas is a type of Esau. He not only sells his right as first-born for a bowl of lentils; he sells his Savior for thirty coins, something infinitely worse. Then as a result, he falls into despair. He is a man without true repentance, one whose attitude shows no form of virtue. Only an evil person hangs himself in this way after failing so completely by having committed the most grievous crimes.

In the scene of Judas dealing with Our Lord painted by Giotto, Our Lord appears with a golden halo and Judas with a black one. This black halo expresses a son of perdition very well, a son of iniquity, the cursed apostle whose head is all enveloped in darkness. In contrast, the venerable, sacrosanct head of Our Lord is surrounded with a halo of light. So we can say that Saint Mary Magdalene is surrounded with a halo of light and that Judas is surrounded with one of shadows, a black halo. How many heads with black halos are there in our days?

What relationship is there between the spirit of contemplation, the spirit of repentance, and detachment from worldly things; this affirmation that pomp must be for Heaven? It is very easy to understand the connection. From any of these points a person can move to one the other. A profoundly repentant person, with an efficacious repentance, loses attachment to worldly things that had been the occasion and motive for sin. With the loss of attachment to worldly things, it is easy to soar in contemplation. Taken to its ultimate extreme, pure contemplation and renunciation of the things with which one sinned, are proper to penance. True penance is not limited to separating oneself from that through which one sinned. A person also execrates that through which one sinned. Thus the greatest distance is placed between the sinner and the sin. This is true penance.

In light of this, we see how good it was for that great penitent to separate herself completely from the world. Not to merely stay in a state of both contemplative and active life, but to remain in a purely contemplative state. A life in which the person has abandoned everything of the world and has thus cut off any indirect contact with the execrable matter of sin. Therefore, the only thing left is contemplation. Contemplation born from penance and detachment, makes a person understand Heaven better, and that all things on earth were made for Heaven. Ergo, it is an act of justice and goodness to have poured perfumed oils upon the sacrosanct feet of Our Lord Jesus Christ, even when there are the poor in need of alms.

A religious community in São Paulo that possesses a splendid, ancient convent will be leveled in order to build a simpler one. One of the objections that could be made to this horror would be precisely this: the reason for this convent’s beauty is not that it is made merely to lodge nuns as such. It is because of their dignity as spouses of Christ, the intrinsic dignity of a religious family established by Holy Church for the state of perfection. The dignity of the religious state is what is involved here. Not to speak of the chapel, the residence of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the spirit of Judas that leads people to not understand this and thus to desire for the Church an indecorous poverty. Just like Judas though it a waste to anoint Our Lord’s feet with perfumed oils. Now we can see how these things are related.

As for Judas, what could have led this miserable to have so much attachment to money, an attachment that naturally turned into hatred of Our Lord? No one commits such treason just for profit without hatred, a hatred that ended up being bigger than his love for money. What led this miserable to steal the alms collected for the poor, he who was the defender of the rights of the poor when it came to anointing the feet of Our Lord? What is it that led this miserable to do what he did if not because, when he was next to Our Lord and heard his preaching and saw his miracles, his mind was really no longer there?

So he began to think about Jerusalem and its square or temple, where all those fine, nice and intelligent Pharisees gathered. He wanted to be important in that super myopic society of Jerusalem and thought he was spoiling his human career to a point by following Our Lord Jesus Christ, Whom the Pharisees scorned as a man without importance.

What could have led him to this attitude except a desire to become rich, have a career in parallel to that of apostle and be considered an important man in the streets and squares of the city? He did not dwell on the contemplations of Our Lord but begun to aspire for the things of the world, and thus fell into sin. His sin reached the extreme point we have just seen, and having reached that extremity, the consequence was despair. In the end, Judas hung himself from the cursed fig tree.

All of this has logic in which we see two aspects: that of the golden halo and that of the black halo. It is impressive to note that one must admit the possibility that at a certain moment, Judas was in the state of grace, and Mary Magdalene was in the state of mortal sin. She left her sins to rise all the way to the point of great sanctity, whereas he plunged from his condition as apostle to become the great scoundrel that would sell Our Lord. Our Lord, Who loved him until the end, and Whom he also loved at a certain point. We can see how tremendous this is: how a soul can rise from the mud and how a soul called to the highest vocation, can fall.

It could instill terror to imagine these two souls crossing trajectories. All the authors who have dealt with this subject note that Judas certainly did not have a devotion to Our Lady. If he had devotion to Her with a modicum of a filial spirit, a minimum of sympathy or love, when he realized his predicament he would have looked for Her and asked Her to help him in his situation. But naturally, he detested and hated Her. The Gospel says that the devil had entered him, and having entered him, the devil drove him as far apart from Our Lady as possible.

What was the result? He did not go to the fountain of grace. He disliked the One who was the fountain of graces, and that was his perdition. After having denied Our Lord, St. Peter might have had a temptation to despair, but it is morally certain that he went to Our Lady. By going to Our Lady, he, who had also sinned gravely, was faithful and turned out to be the great apostle, the first Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Saint Mary Magdalene always appears to us intimately united with Our Lady. She was part of the retinue of Our Lady and Her cortege at all times and above all, she was present at the royal moments Our Lady’s life when She adhered to Our Lord’s sacrifice and became the co-Redemptrix of mankind, the moment in which Our Lord Jesus Christ said the “Consummatum est” with unspeakable pains.

We can imagine St. Mary Magdalene together with Our Lady when She held the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ on her lap. We can imagine her going with Our Lady to the Cenacle at that most sorrowful moment when Our Lady was entirely abandoned; with Our Lord in the sepulcher, the Apostolic College vacillating, the city of Jerusalem shaken by earthquakes, the just of the ancient Law walking about town. There is very little known about Our Lady during those moments, but there is a reference in the ecclesiastical history of Brazil under the invocation of Our Lady of Solitude. Our Lady was completely alone. I have the impression that St. Mary Magdalene was with Her and assisted Her. Being with Our Lady, she would have merited a whole rosary of glories, each one more extraordinary than the last.

In the final analysis, it is impossible not to tremble upon seeing our own weakness when we reflect on all of this. But it is also impossible for us not to feel consonance with one point. However weak man may be, as long as he is very attached to Our Lady and asks Her insistently for his own perseverance, for Her to support him and never abandon him, he finds in Her an ineffable goodness and solidity.

The last of sinners approached Our Lady and became a most glorious penitent and saint. An apostle who was cold and distant from Our Lady became the son of malediction and perdition. Dante placed him in Hell inside the mouth of Satan, with his legs out, being eternally crushed. When we imagine St. Mary Magdalene in Heaven, very close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, eternally thanking them for the unmerited favors with which she was blessed, then you have a reflection about the life of Saint Mary Magdalene.