by Reverend Peter M. J. Stravinskas, Ph.D., S.T.D.
Homily preached at the Conference hosted by the Donahue Academy at Ave Maria, Florida, on 22 June 2024, entitled, Fiat! Devotion to Mary in the Life of the Catholic Classical Educator.
As I first glanced at the title of our conference, I thought it somewhat counter-intuitive since we generally think of the Blessed Virgin as a model of discipleship rather than as a model for teachers. On second thought, it came to me: Of course, a disciple by one’s very nature is intended to become a teacher. After all, didn’t Our Lord Himself say: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher” (Lk 6:40)?
So, how might we proceed? I would suggest that we take the cue from the Fathers of Vatican II as they launched onto presenting their doctrine of the Church in Lumen Gentium. Maintaining that the reality of the Church is so vast and that no single image could do justice to it, they resolved to consider the Church under a panoply of images, just as one might hold a diamond up to the light, turning it about in many directions the better to appreciate its complexity. And since the Fathers of the Church held that Mary and the Church were mirror images of each other, I thought we might benefit from the very same approach.
Let’s consider a baker’s dozen of such Marian images that might profit Catholic educators.
Image #1
Our Lady is the preeminent woman of faith. As we read in Lumen Gentium: “The Blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith” (n. 58). Centuries earlier, St. Augustine could declare that "Mary is more blessed because she embraces faith in Christ than because she conceives the flesh of Christ."1 That said, he would also assert:
You became sons and daughters of [Mother Church] at your baptism, you came to birth then as members of Christ. Now you in your turn must draw to the font of baptism as many as you possibly can. You became sons when you were born there yourselves, and now by bringing others to birth in the same way, you have it in your power to become the mothers of Christ.2
What does that have to do with us Catholic educators? First, we must remember always the need to be men and women of faith, mindful of the simple truth of the adage, Nemo dat quod non habet (No one can give what he doesn’t have). Our stock-in-trade is faith; if we don’t have that, we have nothing else. Surely, that is what Pope Paul VI meant when he first penned that now-oft-quoted line from Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (n. 41). Imitating Mary’s faith, we too bring forth Christ in the youngsters committed to our care.
Image #2
The tag-line for our conference is Fiat, the most important word ever uttered by a human being. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (Let it be done to me according to thy word), said the Virgin of Nazareth, reversing every previous egotistical sentence spoken throughout history, starting with the primeval egoism of our first parents. That young Jewish maiden knew, instinctively, that great things can happen only when one does, not one’s own thing, but God’s thing.
Dante presented that insight as a truism: “In His will is our peace.” That means two things simultaneously: First, that God wills us to live in peace; second, that we can achieve such peace only when we conform our wills to God’s. Mary is the exemplar of such an attitude, and we do well to follow her holy example. We also do well to enjoin such an attitude on our students, to whom the culture has lied by telling them that self-assertion is the path to fulfillment, while the very opposite is true.
Image #3
Mary is the “Woman of the Spirit,” par excellence. She gave free rein to the Holy Spirit in her life from the moment of the Annunciation to her Son’s dying moments on Calvary. She demonstrates that Spirit-lived life in extraordinary fashion in exercising her charism of prophecy. Here our friend Frank Sheed is helpful: "To prophesy does not mean to foretell but to speak out. [The prophets] were not there primarily to foretell the future but to utter the eternal and judge the present by it."3 Figures like Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Isaiah sought to make the divine agenda the human agenda, in urging their listeners to conform their wills to that of Almighty God.
Our Lady has donned the prophetic mantle in her messages of Mount Carmel or LaSalette or Fatima: the clarion call to repent, a strong echo of her Divine Son’s first public word.
Teaching, at its heart, is a prophetic ministry, from which we cannot shrink. The world inhabited by our students and the one in which we are called to “forth-tell” is one which has everything topsy-turvy: black is white; right is wrong; up is down. Hence, the importance of making a hallmark of our teaching the mandate of St. Paul to the Romans, an audience so like our own: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2). Here’s that “pop-up” of God’s will again!
Speaking the unvarnished truth in love is the only effective antidote to the poison of that “dictatorship of relativism” identified and made a mantra by Pope Benedict XVI. Our Blessed Lord declared that “the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). Speaking the truth is a liberating experience for the teacher and equally liberating for the young who hear it.
Image #4
Our Blessed Mother was (and is) a woman of prayer. We see that in the profound spirituality and soaring poetry of her Magnificat, which the Church makes her own at Vespers every evening. We see it as she joined the disciples in the Upper Room as they made the first novena in history – those nine days between Christ’s Ascension and His sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. In fact, St. Luke goes out of his way to note her presence as that fearful band awaited its birth (see Acts 1:14).
Can we not also suppose that, during that primal novena, Mary taught the apostolic community how to pray, as her Son had begun to do during His earthly life and ministry? Did she do so just as she had taught her own Son who, in His human nature, needed such lessons? Of course, that intuition gave rise to the touching, even if a bit saccharine, poem of Mary Dixon Taylor, popularized by none other than the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen in the 1950s, “Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue.” Do you remember it?
Lovely Lady dressed in blue –
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
And you know the way.
Mary, however, did not simply know how to pray and to teach others to pray; she was a genuine “prayer warrior” in her own right. Was it not her Jewish “motherliness” that prodded Jesus to work the first of His signs at Cana? That intercession of hers, Lumen Gentium teaches, was not “laid aside” upon her glorious Assumption: “On the contrary, she continues to obtain for us the graces of eternal salvation. By her maternal charity, she takes care of the brethren of her Son who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home” (n. 62).
We, too, must rely on prayer for the strength of our mission. Needless to say, we must teach others how to pray. But one more aspect of this question: We must heed the admonition of the Venerable Mother Luisita, foundress of the wonderful Carmelite Sisters of Alhambra, who asserted – without fear of contradiction: “Do not simply be good teachers. Be souls of prayer or you will have nothing to offer the children.” Her assertion brings to mind a recollection from third grade. I noticed that Sister Vera had a black spiral binder on her desk, whose pages she turned one by one every day. One morning, being a very nosey kid, I asked: “Sister, what’s in that big black binder?” “Ah, Peter,” she said, “next year you’ll be in that book. I have the name of every child I have ever taught there. And day by day, I pray for the children listed on the page for the day.” What a beautiful practice! What a consoling thought for a child to know that he will be remembered in prayer by one of his former teachers!
Image #5
Father John Lynch, in his eponymous book-length poem, called our Blessed Lady “A Woman Wrapped in Silence,” attributing her response of faith to her ability to rest in holy silence: “A woman wrapped in silence and the wait – Of silence was her heart that heard.” Her “hearing heart” imbued her with strength, passion, and serenity. Today we are awash in noise; indeed, noise pollution is more lethal than anything that can be placed at the door of climate change. Riffing on Cardinal Ratzinger’s “dictatorship of relativism,” Cardinal Robert Sarah pilloried “the dictatorship of noise,” drawing out all the disturbing aspects of that phenomenon in his sure-to-become-a-classic, The Power of Silence.
At least three generations (and probably more) have been infected with the disease of noise pollution: inseparable from phones, videos, computers, games. And, ironically, what was supposed to foster communication has done the exact opposite. It is incumbent upon us to share with our students the value and beauty of silence, which gives birth to genuine communication and wholesome relationships.
Silence also teaches us that presence is often more powerful than words, especially when compassion is called for. “Com-passio” in Latin signifies “suffering with” another. Virgil, the pagan poet “canonized” in the Middle Ages for his Christian predispositions, has the tragic Dido sing out: “Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco” (Having suffered myself, I know how to treat others who suffer).4 Nearly two millennia later, Cardinal Newman would make much of this disposition in his meditation on Mary as the "Consolatrix Afflictorum" (Consoler of the Afflicted):
St. Paul says that his Lord comforted him in all his tribulations, that he also might be able to comfort them who are in distress, by the encouragement which he received from God. This is the secret of true consolation: those are able to comfort others who, in their own case, have been much tried, and have felt the need of consolation, and have received it. So of our Lord Himself it is said: "In that He Himself hath suffered and been tempted, He is able to succour those also that are tempted."
St. Alphonsus Liguori, in his Fourth Station of the Cross, would have us “consider the meeting of the Son and the Mother, which took place on this journey. Jesus and Mary looked at each other, and their looks became as so many arrows to wound those hearts which loved each other so tenderly.” A worthy reflection anticipating that most poignant and gut-wrenching scene in The Passion of the Christ, no?
What have I been trying to say here? A teacher’s compassion, especially offered in a Christian context, may be required quite often today – and perhaps more often than in the past – for the child of divorce or one who has suffered the loss of a loved one; one who has flubbed a play in a key game or has failed an important test; or one who lives an intolerable home situation. A silent presence, accompanied by a knowing glance, at times, may mean more than a thousand words.
Image #6
The Litany of Loreto hails Mary as the "Turris Davidica" (Tower of David). Cardinal Newman explains that title thus: “A tower in its simplest idea is a fabric for defence against enemies. David, King of Israel, built for this purpose a notable tower; and as he is a figure or type of our Lord, so is his tower a figure denoting our Lord's Virgin Mother.”
Newman makes the intriguing observation that the countries which cast aside Marian doctrine and devotion “have in great measure ceased to worship Him, and have given up their belief in His Divinity while the Catholic Church, wherever she is to be found, adores Christ as true God and true Man, as firmly as ever she did; and strange indeed would it be, if it ever happened otherwise. Thus Mary is the ‘Tower of David.’"5
It is an indisputable fact that, down the ages, the Church’s teaching on Mary, especially as “Mother of God” has served as a rampart to guard the Church’s most fundamental teaching of Jesus as “true God and true Man.” For a millennium and more after the Early Church struggled with her Christological doctrine, that tenet of faith rested secure. That is no longer the case, so that a robust affirmation of that truth must be presented to our students who, in turn, will be able to explain and defend the God-Man’s true and full identity in the various spheres of influence they will occupy once they have left our tutelage. Of course, an effective apologetic, as in “explanation,” obviates the need for a defensive apologetic. The bottom-line, however, is that today’s society is not “Christian-friendly” or even “religion-friendly,” so that a Catholic education nowadays demands the preparation of confessors of the faith.
Image #7
Our Lady can also teach us much about how to offer correction and direction. In your mind’s eye, bring forth that episode of the supposed loss of the adolescent Jesus who, it turns out, wasn’t really lost at all. At any rate, upon His being found in the Temple, Mary – again, a real Jewish mother – doesn’t hesitate to chastise, albeit gently, even the Son of God: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously” (Lk 2:48). John Calvin actually proffers a charming apology for Mary’s behavior here; he says: “The weariness of three days was in that complaint!” Some two decades later, we shall hear her enjoin the waiters at the wedding feast of Cana: “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5).
In those two pericopes, I think we have the foundation for a healthy Catholic discipline policy: correction given honestly, fairly and lovingly; direction rooted in the mystery and Person of Jesus Christ. Gauging any particular disciplinary norm by those two standards, no teacher or administrator will ever go wrong.
Image #8
Holy Mary is the “Mulier Fortis” (Valiant Woman) of Proverbs 31, standing in the long line of other valiant women like: Sarah and Rebekah, Deborah and Esther and Judith, and that noble mother of the Maccabees.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux makes the case for her bearing this title: “A lady full of bravery: she traveled through her mortal life upon this evil world, yet through the majesty of her spirit she surpassed all creation. For it was to her, the valiant woman, that Gabriel was sent – this very name means ‘God’s valiant man.’ Was she not indeed valiant, this woman, Mary, whose love was stronger than death?”
Yes, she had “a love stronger than death” (Song of Solomon 8:6). At the foot of the Cross, St. John the Evangelist makes clear, she “stood” there (19:25); she took her stand there – no swooning for her. Not only did she “stand” there; her “standing” there reflected her fidelity to the end. Valiant and faithful.
Valor and fidelity are in short supply today. Inculcating those virtues in our students would make them true sons and daughters of Mary which, in turn, would make her their proud Mother.
Image #9
Blessed Mary was a woman of Tradition. It is apparent that she was steeped in the Sacred Scriptures, so that verses tripped off her tongue in the Magnificat. We also see her as observant of the Law: presenting her Child for circumcision on the eighth day, offering Him to His heavenly Father on the fortieth day, dutifully going on pilgrimage to the Temple.
In “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye sings a hymn to Tradition that would have gladdened the heart of Our Lady, I suspect:
Because of our traditions,
We've kept our balance for many, many years.
Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything...
how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes.
For instance, we always keep our heads covered
and always wear a little prayer shawl...
This shows our constant devotion to God.
You may ask, how did this tradition start?
I'll tell you – I don't know. But it's a tradition...
Because of our traditions,
Everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.
No student should emerge from a Catholic school without a full understanding of our Tradition, along with a deep appreciation for a Tradition that has spawned a culture of literature, art, music, architecture – and thousands upon thousands of saints. Yes, old Tevye got it right: “Everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” We can do no less than he.
Image #10
Mary was the quintessential counter-cultural woman. In her Magnificat, she identifies all the ways of God that go counter to those of the world:
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.
Along with her Son, Mary crushes the head of the serpent as that is graphically portrayed in Revelation 12.
The Church in America was never very good at being counter-cultural. In point of fact, she was all too often given to assimilationism. Sometimes one hears well-meaning but poorly informed “conservative” Catholics bemoan the current state of affairs by asserting, “Before Vatican II, Catholics didn’t divorce or abort or contracept.” That’s true but only half the story: Nobody did! Catholics were no different from the mainstream, and once the mainstream changed course, so did most Catholics.
The present moment calls for raising up a generation of genuine Catholic counter-cultural agents, comfortable in their Catholic skin and desirous of sharing our Catholic vision of life with a society that desperately needs such a vision – whether it knows so or not.
Image #11
The Blessed Mother was an icon of charity and sensitivity. Hearing the joyful news of Elizabeth’s totally unexpected but potentially fraught pregnancy, Mary – forgetting her own needful situation – embarks on a dangerous journey through the hill country to attend to the even more needful situation of her kinswoman. As a guest at Cana, her desire to save the newly-weds from embarrassment has her importune her rather unwilling Son to hasten His “hour.”
Young people growing up in an egocentric culture of entitlement will need heavy doses of education in altruism, which lessons can most effectively be taught through the holy example of our Blessed Mother.
Image #12
St. Luke, perhaps aptly called the first “Mariologist,” shares an important piece of information in his Infancy Narrative: “But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (2:19). What would he have us take from that verse?
Cardinal Newman sees therein Mary as a model of one who seamlessly unites Faith and Reason and so he instructs his congregation:
Thus St. Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she developes it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.6
St. John Paul II opened his landmark encyclical, Fides et Ratio, with these stirring words: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” The union of Faith and Reason is the Magna Carta and Ratio Studiorum for all Catholic education.
Image #13
The Holy Virgin is the “Sedes Sapientiae” (Seat of Wisdom) and Hodegetria (Indicator of the Way), which is to say that Mary is the first and best Evangelist. At the Visitation, she – literally – brings Christ to Elizabeth. She gives a seat to Wisdom Incarnate as she points Him out to both the shepherds and the wise men. The first of our saints of the day, John Fisher, asks this rhetorical question: “But as to the most Blessed Virgin, who bore for us the Lord Jesus, we need have no surprise if she, by a special privilege, still teaches the whole Church by her canticle. Can we wonder if she, the mother of the Word, proclaims the word to all?”
The Greeks sent a delegation to Philip with the request, “We wish to see Jesus” (Jn 12:21). If our students could articulate it, I think that would be their plea to us: They wish to see Jesus – and it is our bounden duty and high privilege to grant that holy request, following the path first trod by none other than the Seat of Wisdom herself.
Well, dear friends and colleagues, we have reached the end of what may have been a bit long reflection on Our Lady the Educator, but I hope that it has provided you with salutary food for thought and imitation. Mary is at the Finish Line, waiting to welcome us home; we, too, should be cheering on our students and families, in the holy hope that, in the last words of the second of our saints of the day, Thomas More, “we may merrily meet in Heaven.”
Every offering of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is an anticipation of that final gathering. And so, as our worship now moves us from the ambo to the altar, I want to commend to each of you this beautiful prayer of Cardinal Newman; make it your own prayer of preparation, and teach it to your young charges:
O Holy Mother, stand by me now at Mass time, when Christ comes to me, as thou didst minister to Thy infant Lord—as Thou didst hang upon His words when He grew up, as Thou wast found under His cross. Stand by me, Holy Mother, that I may gain somewhat of thy purity, thy innocence, thy faith, and He may be the one object of my love and my adoration, as He was of thine. Amen.