My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord…
These are the first words of the Magnificat prayer uttered by the Virgin Mary as she greets her cousin Elizabeth in the tale of the Visitation, detailed in the Gospel of Luke. This was the scripture passage read at the Mass celebrating the feast of the Assumption this year. Catholics around the world celebrated this great feast on August 15, commemorating God’s lifting up of the body and soul of our Blessed Mother into Heaven at the end of her earthly life. In this, she precedes all her “children” who hope for the same gift when Jesus comes to take us with Him at the end of time.
As Elizabeth said at their famous meeting, Mary is “blessed among women” both because she was given the honor of bringing into the world the Son of God, our Savior and Redeemer, and because she was favored for this role with the unique privilege of the Immaculate Conception. She was conceived in the womb of her own mother, St. Anne, free of original sin. God, the creator of space and time, who operates without such human limitations, applied the merits of His Son’s redemption to His mother before Jesus was even born.
The amazing scripture story of the Visitation illustrates the great dignity, not only of Mary herself, but of the gift of motherhood and the sanctity of life from the moment of conception. This dignity is relived again and again every time any child is conceived under the beating heart of his or her mother. God ordained that women would cooperate with Him in propagation of the human species. When a woman gives her body in love and sacrifice for the life of her child, she is not only cooperating in God’s creative activity, but participating with Christ in the redemptive act of salvation. Mary was the ultimate example of this.
Perhaps that is why Jesus, in some of His most famous words addressing His mother in Scripture — at the wedding at Cana and at the foot of the cross — calls her “Woman.” (Click here for a wonderful description by Catholic apologist Jason Evert of Woman as God’s masterpiece.)
Mary, archetype of woman, masterpiece of God’s masterpiece, pray for us.
