Mary’s gaze makes us brothers and sisters

Celebrating Mary is, first and foremost, remembering our mother. (..)  It has always impressed me to see, in different Latin American peoples, those struggling mothers who, often alone, manage to support their children. This is how Mary is. Mary is this way with us: we are her children: a woman who fights against the society of distrust and blindness, the society of apathy and dispersion; a woman who fights to strengthen the joy of the Gospel, who fights to give “flesh” to the Gospel.

Looking to Our Lady of Guadalupe reminds us that the Lord’s visit always passes through those who manage to “make flesh” his Word, who seek to embody the life of God within themselves, becoming living signs of his mercy.

To celebrate the remembrance of Mary is to assert against all odds that “in the heart and life of our peoples there beats a strong sense of hope, notwithstanding the conditions of life that seem to overshadow all hope” (Fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean, Aparecida Document, 29 June 2007, 536).

Because Mary believed, she loved; because she is the handmaid of the Lord and a servant of her brothers. To celebrate the remembrance of Mary is to celebrate that, like her, we are invited to go out and to encounter others with the same gaze, with the same mercy within, with the same gestures. To contemplate her is to feel the strong invitation to imitate her faith. Her presence leads us to reconciliation, giving us strength to create bonds in our blessed Latin American land, by saying ‘yes’ to life and ‘no’ to every kind of indifference, exclusion, and rejection of peoples and persons.

Let us not be afraid to go out and look upon others with the same gaze. A gaze that makes us brothers and sisters. We do so because, like Juan Diego, we know that our mother is here, we know that we are beneath her shadow and under her protection, which is the source of our joy, that we are within her embrace

Pope Francis, Homily on the occasion of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Monday, December 12, 2016 - Vatican Basilica 

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