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The Easter Vigil with the Queen of Heaven

Homily for the Easter Vigil
Religious Sisters of Mercy, Domus Guadalupe
7 April 2012
+ J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Irresistibly, as we have contemplated the mysteries of the Passion of Christ in Mary’s company, our attention has been drawn to the mystery of his Holy Nativity. As Blessed John Paul wrote, “No one has ever devoted himself to the contemplation of the face of Christ as faithfully as Mary” (John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, §10). Why? Because “in a unique way the face of the Son belongs to Mary. It was in her womb that Christ was formed, receiving from her a human resemblance which points to an even greater spiritual closeness” (ibid.). As we sang at Christmas, “O that birth forever blessed, / When the Virgin full of grace, /By the Holy Ghost conceiving,/ Bore the Savior of our race; / And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer, / First revealed his sacred face, / Evermore and evermore” (Prudentius, Of the Father’s Love Begotten).

As tonight we sing, not Stabat Mater Dolorosa but Regina coeli laetare, Alleluia, we cannot fail to notice that the next lines of the antiphon recall precisely her divine maternity to identify the Risen One: Quia quem meruisti portare, Alleluia / Resurrexit sicut dixit, Alleluia. Our Lady’s “gaze of sorrow” is now “transformed into a gaze radiant with the joy of the Resurrection”(John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, 10) because it is the face of one formed in her womb upon which the glory of the resurrection now blazes forth.

As part of its continuing commitment to Health Care, The Dominican Friars Health Care Ministry of New York will host the Sixth Annual Mass honoring Men and Women of the Health Care Professions. The celebration will take place on Monday, 30 April 2012, during the Noon Mass at the Church of Saint Catherine of Siena, 411 East 68^th Street, Manhattan. His Eminence, Donald Cardinal Wuerl of Washington, D.C., will be the Principal Celebrant and Homilist.

Since its establishment in 2006, the Dominican Friars Health Care Ministry of New York has bestowed the Saint Catherine of Siena Award upon those who have demonstrated a lifelong commitment to health care through excellence in leadership, education, and distinguished service as a Catholic – Health Care – Professional. Former recipients include: Dr. Edmund Pellegrino; Dr. William Hurlbut, MD; Sr. Carol Keehan, DC; Dr. Thomas Fahey; Mother Agnes Mary Donovan, SV; and His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan.

This year’s Saint Catherine Siena Award will be given to His Eminence Donald Cardinal Wuerl of Washington, D.C. and Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Sister Elaine Goodell, a member of the chaplaincy staff at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Included in this year’s celebration will be the announcement of the establishment of the Saint Catherine of Siena Chair in Health Care Ethics at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. 

Standing at the Foot of the Cross with Mary

Homily for Good Friday
Religious Sisters of Mercy, Domus Guadalupe
6 April 2012
+ J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.

 “O God, who in this season give your Church the grace to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary in contemplating the Passion of Christ, grant, we pray, through her intercession, that we may cling more firmly each day to your Only Begotten Son and come at last to the fullness of his grace.” (Roman Missal, alternate collect, Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent).

My brothers and sisters in Christ. Although silence would perhaps be preferable, this beautiful collect inspires us to turn to Mary again today to find the right words to speak of the Passion of the Lord. “The contemplation of Christ has an incomparable model in Mary. In a unique way the face of the Son belongs to Mary. It was in her womb that Christ was formed, receiving from her a human resemblance which points to an even greater spiritual closeness. No one has ever devoted himself to the contemplation of the face of Christ as faithfully as Mary” (John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, §10).

We dare not imagine Mary’s state of mind as she gazed on the ruined face of her Son on that terrible first Good Friday. Such meditation may be fit for other settings, but not for the solemn liturgical commemoration of the Lord’s Passion. Here an attitude of serene contemplation of the mystery must prevail, even as, with compunction and sorrow for our sins and the sins of the whole world, we acknowledge the devastation they wrought on the body of our blessed Savior. Contemplating the Paschal Mystery with Mary, we know that the story of Christ’s passion and death ends with his resurrection.

If we look for Mary in the passion of Christ, we will find her standing at the foot of the Cross only in the Gospel of St. John. The other evangelists do not mention her presence, but tradition and popular devotion place her as well on the path to Golgotha where she meets her Son as he carries his cross; then at the descent from the cross as she receives his dead body in her arms; and at the end when the body of Jesus is laid in the tomb. Theologians who stress the full participation of Our Lady in the work of our redemption argue that she had to have been present throughout her Son’s terrible ordeal that day—something that is captured beautifully by Mel Gibson’s film The Passion. To be honest, I see no reason to think otherwise. But contemplating the passion and death of Christ with Mary during the solemn liturgy of Good Friday, our attention must focus primarily on her presence at the foot of the Cross.

Stabat mater dolorosa. Stabat! Pope Pius IX was struck by this word. In an allocution delivered in 1874, he noted that Our Lady did not claim weakness at the prospect before her, but “as a courageous woman…ascended the summit of Golgotha….Therefore Mary most holy was standing with head raised at the foot of the Cross… while she heard the blasphemies of the soldiers, the ugly jokes of the Pharisees, the insults of the priests, standing and with her eyes turned to her Divine Son, she felt her courage redoubling, even in the fullness of her sorrows. Standing!…she remained a motionless onlooker…as a woman meditating, suffering and hoping” (quoted in James Card. Hickey, Mary at the Foot of the Cross [1988], 15). Stabat mater dolorosa / juxta Crucem lacrimosa /dum pendebat Filius.

Allow me to quote another hymn, this one by a Dominican—Blessed Henry Suso’s Christmas carol In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men Rejoice)—to help us see this moment through Mary’s eyes. “Good Christian men rejoice / With heart and soul and voice / Now ye hear of endless bliss: / Jesus Christ was born for this! /He hath op’nd the heavenly door, / And man is blesséd evermore. / Christ was born for this! / Christ was born for this!” When we sing this carol at Christmas, we know that the meaning of these words will be realized on Good Friday and bring us to the foot of the Cross. At the first Christmas, Mary may not have known all this (theologians debate this, of course), but, as Pius IX said, when she saw the sword piercing the side of her Son, “the words of the aged Simeon came back to her: that that dear Child would be a sword of great sorrow which would pierce his Mother’s heart” (ibid.). Christ was born for this, she now knew without doubt, and, turning to us in this solemn commemoration of the Lord’s Passion, she reminds us: Christ was born for this.

One of the striking features of the Gospels—which may fittingly be considered to be passion narratives with long introductions—is the way they portray Christ’s intention to go up to Jerusalem in order to fulfill the Father’s will to save us, whatever that might entail for him. Already, as a child, he seems almost to reprove his anxious parents when they find him sitting among the doctors in the temple: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?”  And then, much later, when Mary met him on the way to Golgotha, what would she have seen in his eyes but the determination and resolution to do his Father’s will for our sake?

More than the agony of the passion as such, Aquinas rightly insists, it was this inner spiritual disposition, this perfect obedience to the Father, this uncompromising conformity to his will, that, with overwhelming power, wiped out the disobedience of Adam’s race and reconciled us to God.

“Pro peccatis suae gentis / Vidit Iesum in tormentis / Et flagellis subditum.” Standing with her at the foot of the Cross, this is what she wants us to see. “For the sins of His own nation / She saw Jesus wracked with torment / All with scourges rent.” As she is the Mother of the Redeemer, at the foot of the Cross she became our Mother too, the Mother of all the brothers and sisters of her Son who would share in the benefits of his bitter but saving passion. Christ was born for this. Our Blessed Mother has the right to tell us what she knows now without any doubt: Christ was born for this.

“O God, who in this season give your Church the grace to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary in contemplating the Passion of Christ, grant, we pray, through her intercession, that we may cling more firmly each day to your Only Begotten Son and come at last to the fullness of his grace” in communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

[Image source: Fra Angelico, "Crucifixion and Saints," Convento di San Marco, Florence.]

The Institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood Through Mary’s Eyes

Homily for Holy Thursday
Religious Sisters of Mercy, Domus Guadalupe
5 April 2012
+ J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.

“O God, who in this season give your Church the grace to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary in contemplating the Passion of Christ, grant, we pray, through her intercession, that we may cling more firmly each day to your Only Begotten Son and come at last to the fullness of his grace.” (Roman Missal, alternate Collect, Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent).

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, this beautiful collect invites us to view the mysteries of Christ’s passion through the eyes of Mary, to discover their meaning for the Church and for us under her tutelage—and not only to learn about them but to experience their power, for which we pray elsewhere, “…grant that, celebrating your Son’s passion in mystery, we may experience the grace of its effects”(ibid., Prayer over the Offerings, Wed. of Holy Week).

The mysteries of Christ’s Passion—as seen through the eyes of Our Lady—are not recalled in these solemn liturgies of the Easter Triduum simply as a series of past events. Certainly, they are that, and importantly so: in these events, things happened in Jerusalem that altered—absolutely and irreversibly—the course of history and the conditions of human existence. With the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, nothing could be as it had been before in the relations of the human race with the Triune God. Fittingly, the mysteries are celebrated in their proper chronological order—recounted with exquisitely reverent detail in the Gospels—not as if we were in suspense as to their final outcome, but precisely in view of the triumphant Easter morning for which they form the prelude and through which we will draw joyfully from the overflowing Paschal grace.

Thus the force of these mysteries lies not merely in the past, but in the way they draw us to God and become vehicles for his grace now, this evening, in these days, throughout our lives—“not as things past and abolished, but as things present, living, and even eternal, from which also we have to gather a present and eternal fruit” (Bérulle, quoted in Aumann [1985], 226). In the celebration and contemplation of these mysteries, we are drawn to God, who, though “by nature incomprehensible and unthinkable…wished to be understood, to be seen, to be thought of.” How? Through his nativity, his preaching, his prayer, his crucifixion, his death (in which he “grew pale”), his rising from the dead on the third day, his post-resurrection sojourn with his apostles, and finally his ascension into the sanctuary of heaven where he would make room for us as well. “Whatever of all this I consider, it is God I am considering,” said St. Bernard, and “in all this, he is my God.” Hence “it is wise to meditate on these truths…and right to recall the abundant goodness, given by the fruits of this priestly root; and Mary, drawing abundantly from heaven, has caused this sweetness to overflow for us” (St. Bernard, Liturgy of the Hours IV [October 7], 1471-2).

In our experience of the grace of the effects of Christ’s passion, the liturgy invites us to imitate Mary in the contemplation of the mystery of Christ’s passion, for which she is an “incomparable model” (John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, §10). From the very first moment of Christ’s conception, the “eyes of her heart were already turned to him” and thereafter her “gaze, ever filled with adoration and wonder, would never leave him”(ibid.). Expert in the mysteries of Christ, Mary never fails to turn our eyes to what is most important for us to see and grasp there. To remember and contemplate with Mary is “to be open to the grace which Christ won for us by the mysteries of his life, death and resurrection” (ibid. §13).

In this celebration of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the central mystery we commemorate is the institution of the Eucharist. She from whom the Word of God took human flesh can see with penetrating clarity the wonder of this mystery. For, as St. Bernard reminded us, God wants to be understood, seen, thought of—and, we can add, loved—by us. Christ took flesh from the Blessed Virgin Mary in order to make us sharers in the divine Trinitarian life. Once having been among us, he never wants to be apart from us. “It is a law of friendship,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “that friends should live together….Christ has not left us without his bodily presence on our pilgrimage, but he joins us to himself in this sacrament in the reality of his body and blood” (Summa Theologiae III, 75, 1). The Incarnation of the Word of God in Mary’s womb is sacramentally perpetuated in the Mass which makes God present for our sake. God desires to leave us the extraordinary gift of the real presence of his Son in the Eucharist, the gesture of our divine friend and an extension of the mystery of the Incarnation itself.

What is more, God, in his mercy, does not allow our sins to obstruct his desire or to wreck his plan to share this friendship with us. Looking at our condition through the eyes of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we also see in the Eucharist the reconciling sacrifice of love that makes divine friendship a real possibility. Not only does our divine friend want to stay with us; he wants to do so precisely in virtue of the power of his death and resurrection which guarantees what must now, always and everywhere, be a reconciled friendship won at the price of his blood—even for Our Blessed Lady—she who, by her Immaculate Conception was preserved from sin by the foreseen merits of this immense sacrifice in which the Body and Blood of her Son were offered up for our sake.

When he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, “Jesus did not simply state that what he was giving them to eat and drink was his body and blood; he also expressed its sacrificial meaning and made sacramentally present his sacrifice which would soon be offered on the Cross for the salvation of all” (John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia §12). By overcoming the effects of sin, the sacrificial passion and death of Christ and his glorious resurrection restored our friendship with God. “This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there” (ibid. §11).

The mystery of the Priesthood is a further extension of the Incarnation. The possibility is always available to us of sharing in the Eucharist: this Christ ensured by giving to his disciples, and through them, to his successors, the power of the priesthood to commemorate, in persona Christi, in his Person, this very sacrifice of his love and his friendship for us as if we had been present at the Lord’s Supper on that Thursday evening centuries ago. Our Lady is not reported to have been present at that table, but her gaze penetrates the mystery. Priests are the instruments through whom God willed to pour out his grace on us in the Church through the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the Sacraments. In this way, God adapted himself to our human nature—by sending his only Son who in turn commissioned the Apostles and their successors—so that we might receive his word and his grace from other human beings. The hand of another human being blesses us, pours the water of Baptism on our heads, offers the body and blood of Christ to us in the Eucharist, and is raised in absolution unto the forgiveness of sins—visible actions through which God’s invisible grace is bestowed on us.

Contemplating the mystery of the Eucharist with Mary, Blessed John Paul II suggested that we re-read the Magnificat in a Eucharistic key. “The Eucharist, like the Canticle of Mary, is first and foremost praise and thanksgiving….The Eucharist has been given to us so that our life, like that of Mary, may become completely a Magnificat.” (ibid. §58).

Contemplating the mystery of the Priesthood with Mary, Pope Benedict XVI recalls that “before dying, Jesus sees his Mother beneath the Cross and he sees the beloved son. This beloved son…is an example, a prefiguration of all beloved disciples, of all the people called by the Lord to be the ‘beloved disciple’ and thus also particularly of priests.” This is the basis for the “special predilection” that Mary has for priests, “because they are more like Jesus, the supreme love of her heart, and because, like her, they are committed to the mission of proclaiming, bearing witness to and giving Christ to the world” (General Audience, 12 August 2009).

“O God, who in this season give your Church the grace to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary in contemplating the Passion of Christ, grant, we pray, through her intercession, that we may cling more firmly each day to your Only Begotten Son and come at last to the fullness of his grace” in communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

[Image source: Fra Angelico, "Institution of the Eucharist," Convento di San Marco, Florence.]

Homilies from Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion to Easter Sunday of the Lord’s Resurrection at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, NYC.

Palm Sunday – Fr. Walter Wagner, OP Play Now
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Palm Sunday – Fr. Bruno M. Shah, OP Play Now
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Holy Thursday – Fr. Darren Pierre, OP Play Now
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Good Friday – Fr. Walter Wagner, OP Play Now
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Easter Vigil – Fr. Bruno M. Shah, OP Play Now
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Easter Day – Fr. Walter Wagner, OP Play Now
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Easter Day – Fr. Brian Mulcahy, OP Play Now
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Fr. Ferrer Quigley, OP, continues his series of reflections on the virtues of Lent. For a complete list of his video reflections, see the Providence College YouTube channel.

Fr. Quigley is the Associate Chaplain for the National Alumni Association of Providence College. Fr. Quigley also teaches Homiletics at the North American College in Rome. This reflection was filmed at the chapel of St. Dominic at Providence College.

Fr. Ferrer Quigley, OP, continues his series of reflections on the virtues of Lent. For a complete list of his video reflections, see the Providence College YouTube channel.

Fr. Quigley is the Associate Chaplain for the National Alumni Association of Providence College. Fr. Quigley also teaches Homiletics at the North American College in Rome. This reflection was filmed at the chapel of St. Dominic at Providence College.

Fr. Ferrer Quigley, OP, continues his series of reflections on the virtues of Lent.  For a complete list of his video reflections, see the Providence College YouTube channel.

Fr. Quigley is the Associate Chaplain for the National Alumni Association of Providence College. Fr. Quigley also teaches Homiletics at the North American College in Rome. This reflection was filmed at the chapel of St. Dominic at Providence College.

Below is a Lenten Reflection offered by Fr. Ferrer Quigley, OP. Fr. Quigley is the Associate Chaplain for the National Alumni Association of Providence College. Fr. Quigley also teaches Homiletics at the North American College in Rome. This reflection was filmed at the chapel of St. Dominic at Providence College.