Annual Rosary Pilgrimage
JM + JD
Homily for Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage 2023
“The Apostles with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and with Mary, the Mother of Jesus... As we gather this afternoon for this annual Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage here at the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace, it is a consolation, at least for myself, to know that we are, this day, following the example given by the apostolic band so long ago, as they awaited the outpouring of the promised Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Jerusalem, as they devoted themselves to prayer along with the holy women and with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
In the Fifth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, the Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple, recounted for us only in St Luke’s Gospel, once our Blessed Mother and her beloved St Joseph have found Jesus, we are told: He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. Can it not be said that everything we do here today, we do in and through the Immaculate Heart of our Blessed Mother?
In fact, you and I can be numbered among “all these things” that are kept in the Heart of our Blessed Mother. What our Blessed Mother is keeping in her heart is the Mystery of who her Divine Son is. She ponders in her heart all the joyful and sorrowful and glorious (and luminous) happenings since that day in Nazareth when she consented to be the Mother of the Son of God, in the presence of the Heavenly Messenger Gabriel. She keeps all these things in her heart until that day when her own heart would be pierced with the sword of sorrow, as the ancient Simeon had prophesied, as she stood at the Foot of the Cross of her Son and witnessed His own Sacred Heart be pierced with a lance from which Blood and Water flowed, giving birth to the Church. As His parting gift, our Lord and Savior had constituted His mother as the mother of the infant Church. He extends her physical maternity into a spiritual maternity towards all who are brought to life by His own saving death. “Woman, behold your son,” and then to the Disciple whom he loved “Behold your mother.”
What is kept and pondered in the Immaculate Heart of Mary is the Mystery of her Son, the Mystery of God-made-man, the Mystery of Christ. And you and I, my brothers and sisters, are members of the Body of Christ through our common baptism. We have been made one in Christ, and therefore we too have “a place” in the heart of our Blessed Mother. She loves us with the very same love with which she loves her Divine Son, because she loves us precisely in Him, because in Him we are her children; in Him she is our mother.
Do you see how this relates to the Rosary, to this simple prayer that our Blessed Mother herself and the Church have exhorted us to pray down through the centuries, right up to our very own day? What the Immaculate Heart of Mary ponders and keeps at all times is the exact same thing that you and I ponder as we meditate upon the Mysteries of the Rosary. The Rosary is such a powerful form of prayer, with such transformative power for the one who prays it faithfully, because through the Rosary we enter every more deeply, bead by bead, decade by decade, into the Mystery of Christ, into the saving life, death and resurrection of Jesus, into the mystery of our own lives in Christ. When you and I pray the Rosary, we pray it in union with our Blessed Mother, we contemplate the Mystery of her divine Son from within the shelter of her Immaculate Heart.
I want to share with you this afternoon, briefly, what it means to live in the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that you and I can live as “those things” that are kept in her heart. It’s taken from the writings of St Maximilien Kolbe, that extraordinary servant and knight of the Immaculata, that martyr of charity, who entered into eternal life on the Vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. In speaking of consecrating ourselves to the Immaculate Heart, St Maximilien makes note of what our Blessed Mother told St Bernadette at Lourdes when St Bernadette asked her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She didn’t say “I am the one who was conceived immaculately,” and St Maximilian says that if our Blessed Mother can rightly say “I am the Immaculate Conception,” it is because her entire being exists only in the pure relationship of a creature with God; she belongs totally to God. One with the Holy Spirit as she is, she is totally consecrated by all the fibers of her being, to the Father through the Son. Thus she will ever be throughout eternity. She is in the Son just as the Son is in the Father.
If you and I turn over to her everything we have of ourselves, not only what we have but more importantly what we are, Mary will take our life completely into her hands, to give it to God. St Maximilian goes on to say: All of our perfection, all of our hope of procuring God’s glory depend on our being instruments in the hand of the Immaculata, on being her “things,” her property. Such should our interior life be that we become an instrument in her hands, to be guided in everything by her. In truth, we are very weak; and often enough we experience this weakness; the only way to overcome it is to consecrate ourselves to the Immaculata.
So, you and I, following the advice o f a great saint like St Maximilian Kolbe, should always aspire to be one of the “things” that our Blessed Mother keeps in her heart, because she keeps Christ there, there in her Immaculate Heart, and if we live in Him, in union of heart and mind with Christ, “of whom shall we be afraid?”
Each of the Popes of the 20th and 21st centuries has made it a point to go on pilgrimage, at least once, to the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in Pompeii, Italy, outside of Naples, in the shadows of Mount Vesuvius, a shrine built by Blessed Bartolo Longo, a lay Dominican, and there to pray, in the name of the whole Church, the “Supplication to the Queen of the Holy Rosary,” written by Blessed Bartolo. And even if the Holy Father isn’t in Pompeii on Rosary Sunday, the Praying of the Supplication by the Holy Father on Rosary Sunday is something that devout Catholics in Italy are very attentive to.
The Supplication goes like this:
O Blessed Rosary of Mary, sweet chain which unites us to God, bond of love which unites us to the angels, tower of salvation against the assaults of Hell, safe port in our universal shipwreck, we will never abandon you. You will be our comfort in the hour of death: yours our final kiss as life ebbs away. And the last word from our lips will be your sweet name, O Queen of the Rosary of Pompei, O dearest Mother, O Refuge of Sinners, O Sovereign Consoler of the Afflicted may you be everywhere blessed, today and always, on earth and in heaven. Amen.”
Rev. Brian Mulcahy, O.P.