Full text of homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 9, 2010.
Fr. Anthony Brankin
MP3 Audio Page
May I offer my warmest and most affectionate Mother’s Day greeting to all our Mothers, our fathers—our parishioners, and in a special way to our First Communion children who today crown the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Did you know that yesterday these littlest ones received their First Holy Communion? For the first time in their lives they received the Body of Christ. We pray that it may be the first of a million communions in their lives and a source of grace for their families. Also they received the mantle of Mary’s protection in the Brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
And now today, our darling children place a beautiful crown on Mary who becomes the Queen of their Hearts, the Queen of the Holy Eucharist. Think of how it all fits together: Jesus, the Crowning of Mary, First Communion and families and Mother’s Day.
Today and yesterday—and everyday, it is all about life and love. In God the Son, in Mary His Mother, in our families and through our children we see that Love and Life are inseparable. There is no love without life, nor is there life without love. And the greatest example of this is a mother’s love for the children she bears. In love she has conceived life, and the life she carries is the fruit of her love.
About thirty years ago I made a statue for the garden at Our Lady of Charity parish in Cicero. That was when I was a young assistant priest there with Monsignor Halpin. It was a statue of the Virgin Mary with Child—but not the Christ Child in her arms. In this statue, the Child was still within—within her womb.
In other words, she was pregnant.
Now, in those days a pregnant Blessed Virgin was a pretty unique subject—at least in the United States. I know in Old Europe and in Mexico and Latin America there are many such representations of the Virgin with the Child Jesus in her womb.
Those Latin and Catholic countries are very Catholic in spirit and are untouched by Protestantism and Calvinism and Puritanism. They are unlike America where people are somehow ashamed to think of Mary with Child.
But I had decided to do make this statue—Mary at the very beginning of her Motherhood—with Jesus hidden in her womb—as my personal response to what I saw happening in our country at that time.
It was only a few years after the government of the United States had said that it was a fundamental American right to kill unborn babies. They were filling our minds and hearts with confusing propaganda, trying to convince our poor mothers that if they were in a troubled situation they could hire doctors to kill the child conceived in their womb.
In modern America, it looked like “death” was the new “life”. And the newspapers and the television and the movies—all owned by people who do not believe in God— let alone Jesus—conspired to convince us that human life was inferior to our lusts and desires—that love was only about pleasure and if human life got in the way of that pleasure then you should prevent it or destroy it. In this manner love (sexual relations) was separated from life. Love was no longer intrinsically connected to life.
Love was about itself, and sexual gratification became the highest good. Love without life therefore lost its reason and meaning. A whole industry grew up around this notion of love for love’s sake. We became a culture of pornography and pleasure. This was our new way of life. Love was about love and nothing more.
Love had nothing to do with life or with family or with sacrifice or with duty. Love was about physical pleasure, and nothing more.
By separating love from life—by saying that children were not necessary, and could in fact be eliminated if they weren’t first prevented, our culture succeeded in degrading and demeaning love until it seemed no different than what the animals do. Ask Hugh Hefner what love means to him. And he is celebrated as a hero in every media outlet in this country.
Love takes its meaning from the possibility of life—and if we separate the two—life from love—or love from life—we destroy them both. Love gets defined only as “sex” and life becomes utterly disposable.
That is why I thought that if I made a statue of Mary pregnant with Jesus, it might encourage us to consider that just as Mary’s womb was the first home of the Lord of Love, then any mother’s womb is also the home of love as it lives in her baby. I had hoped that even if some poor mother were troubled, and that she was in a difficult situation, because the love in her life was imperfect, she might still take heart and rejoice in the little baby now living in her womb.
How beautiful that our Catholic Faith never fails to make the connection between love and life. Holy Mother Church never hesitates to teach us that Love and life are inseparable—and in every circumstance. She proclaims in all her teachings about marriage and relationships—that love is about life—and never only about itself.
Traditional Catholic societies always understood this connection. That is why courtship and love and marriage were always very carefully structured with chaperones and periods of engagement and dowries and formal weddings. Those customs were developed to protect the mothers of the village—and their future children.
They knew that the mother was the most important person in the village and that she—in questions of love— must be protected and safeguarded by every possible means because she bore life. Her love was sacred because she was the guarantor of life.
How unlike our glittery superficial world of today—where we have allowed our women to become playthings of powerful men. We have allowed our daughters and sisters to become toys for the cheap enjoyment of rude, crude party boys whom every one admires because they can burp and drink while they are watching the Superbowl.
That is not how our Catholic ancestors ever regarded men and women. We have always understood that the relationship of men and women is respectful and reverent. Because their love could always yield human life.
Did you ever wonder why we Catholics are the only ones left in the world who do not believe in birth control?
Because we still believe that no greater example of true love between a man and a woman can be shown than when they say to each other— “I love you so much—and I trust you so much—I have so much faith in you— that there will be no question that we will raise whatever children God gives us—and raise them in the love of a mother and father—raise them in the love of a family and in the love of God.
And we will not prevent children by any means fair or foul—by pills or chemicals or devices. And we will trust God, the Lord of Life—to see us through the difficult times.”
What deep love and trust and faith is demonstrated when couples say that their relationship will be fruitful— that their love will actually yield life—that they will have as many babies as God sends them.
Did you ever wonder why we Catholics seem also to be the only ones left who have a problem with the gay marriage agenda? Because we know that that kind of love is sterile and a dead-end. It is not normal or natural because it cannot give life. Anything less than true, giving, selfless sacrificial love that is open to life is dry and dead.
There is nothing more senseless and pointless and deathly than the pornography of modern life where love has been taken out of the context of life.
As Catholics we see how it all fits together—all creation—the planets, the trees, the flowers and fruits, the fields and plains, mothers and fathers, are all fertile and fecund and beautiful and life-holding and life-giving because they come from love and give life.
Our children also come from love and they have life and now life to the full because Jesus is within in Holy Communion. And they crown Mary on Mother’s Day as their way of thanking Mary and their own Mothers for the life they possess and for the love they receive.