December 12, 2011

Our Lady of Guadalupe

On my walk to the Poor Clares for Mass this morning, I was reflecting on Our Lady of Guadalupe, and what I might say by way of a homily for her feast day today.

I think she is a great encouragement for the Church and the world. That our Blessed Mother should have appeared from among the indigenous people of the Americas precisely as the eschatological Mary, the apocalyptic woman clothed with the sun from Revelation 12, is hope in the midst of the mess and ambivalence of human history.

Whatever the sins of history and the abiding injuries and injustices of Christianity coming to the 'New World,' our Lady of Guadalupe assures us that Babylon the great is already fallen, and that the king of the nations she bears has been preserved from the destructive dragon. The one she bears to the world is the Eternal Word who empties his divinity into the suffering humanity of this world, offering salvation to all of us who have insisted on such misery for ourselves and each other with our violence and sin.

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