Mary is the "Mother of Hope"

In his third Lenten Sermon, the Preacher of the Papal Household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., reflects on the kenosis—or self-emptying—of Mary, the Mother of God, at the foot of the cross, describing her as "Mother of Hope":

On Calvary, therefore, Mary didn’t experience only the death of her Son but also the first fruit of the resurrection... On Calvary, she was not just the “Mother of Sorrows” but also the “Mother of Hope.”

Beneath the cross, he says, Mary “believed against hope” and “the Church, like Mary, lives the resurrection ‘in hope’… Just as Mary was close to her crucified son, so the Church is called to be close to the crucified of today: the poor, the suffering, the humiliated, the insulted… The Church must transmit hope, proclaiming that suffering is not absurd, that it is meaningful, because there will be a resurrection after death. She must give the reason for the hope that she has (see 1 Pet 3:15).

According to Fr. Cantalamessa, “we must become ‘accomplices of the child Hope,’ as the French poet Charles Péguy called that theological virtue. “This means you allow God to delude you, deceive you on this earth as often as he wishes. More than that, it means being happy deep down in some remote corner of your heart that God didn’t listen to you because, in this way, he has allowed you to show him another proof of your hope, to make yet another act of hope, which is increasingly more difficult for you each time.”

Hope, he warns, isn’t just a beautiful interior disposition. “On the contrary, to hope means precisely that there is still something we can do, a duty to be done, and that we are not, therefore, at the mercy of a vain or crippling inactivity. Therefore, even when in vain we have done our utmost to change a difficult situation, we still have something great to do that will keep us occupied and keep desperation far from us, and that is to endure patiently to the end.

Mary didn’t run away but remained there, standing, in silence, and she thus became in a very special way a martyr of faith, a supreme testimony of trust in God, after her Son.

However, the preacher makes the distinction between “staying close to the cross” and “staying close to the cross of Christ.” The two things are different, though inseparable. It is not sufficient to stay close to the cross in sorrow and silence. This might even seem heroic, and yet it is not the most important thing. It may not even signify anything. The vital thing is to stay close to the cross “of Jesus.” In other words, what counts is not one’s own cross but Christ’s cross. It is not suffering that counts but believing, thereby making Christ’s sufferings our own. The main thing is faith.

The greatest thing about Mary beneath the cross was her faith, which was even greater than her suffering.

Zenit