Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina.
O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.
The Gospel of John (8:46-59) for Passion Sunday has Our Lord finally proclaiming Himself to be God. Those who were hearing Him and questioning Him, did not have ears to hear. When they asked if He was greater than Abraham (by reason of His casting out devils), He told them, "Before Abraham was made I AM." God told Moses who He was, in the same way, that he might tell the people. He said, "I AM WHO AM." Jesus, therefore, knew that He would anger them by claiming to be God, which is of course what He did. "They took up stones therefore to cast at Him: but Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the temple." Notice how many times Christ has had to hide Himself; and somehow in the midst of many people, He was able to simply disappear, it seems. Why? Because His time had not yet come. When it did, and that will be soon now, as we approach Palm Sunday, He allowed Himself to be captured. The time had come for His great sacrifice for the souls of mankind. Are we prepared to suffer with Him? St. Paul says, "If we suffer with Him, we also shall be glorified with Him." Our sufferings here on earth are as of nothing compared to the agony of Our Lord. Great or small, we should offer our physical, mental, and all types of misfortunes for our own salvation, accepting them as our contribution to suffering with Christ. We simply build up merits in Heaven by so doing.
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Passion Sunday was on March 25 this year. Ordinarily that date is the date to celebrate the Annunciation by Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary. This year the Feast is transferred to the following day, Monday, March 26. What a fitting day to celebrate, being so close to the Feast of St. Gabriel last Saturday.
On this day we remember with gratitude that Our Lord became flesh in the womb of a Virgin, as prophesied in the Old Testament. St. John the Evangelist says, "The WORD was made flesh and dwelt amongst us." The Word of God became a human person. In His humanity He became the mediator between God and man. The mystery of the Incarnation earned Mary the title of "Mother of God," the Greek "Theotokos," a name which the Eastern Church always insribed in gold letters like a diadem, on the forehead of her images. St. Anselm says, "The Son of the Father and the Son of the Virgin naturally become a single and identical son." To Catholics, Mary is Queen of our human race and our spiritual Mother, as given to us in the form of St.John at the foot of the Cross. "Behold your Mother," and to Mary, "Behold your son." We honor her as such. Her "fiat" at the Annunciation, was known by God Almighty before the world was made. We worship only God, but we honor the Virgin Mary as no other person is honored, or could be.
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Pope Benedict XVI has just completed his visit to Mexico. Since I am talking about Mary, I would be remiss in not mentioning her own very visible visit to that country in the sixteenth century.
The Americas have been given a great gift. God manifested His power and His love through symbolism in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, miraculously imprinted on the tilma (cape) of the Indian, Juan Diego in 1531. In brief, Juan Diego had gone to the Bishop after her first and second appearances to him. The Bishop, being skeptical asked for a sign. Juan Diego went back to where the Lady had been. She told him to gather some roses to take to the Bishop. It was winter and roses did not grow there, but Juan Diego found them. He folded the roses into his cape and went to the Bishop. When he opened it, the roses fell out and the now world-famous image was there.
Close examination has shown that her mantle depicts the constellations, from the top down, as if seen through the eyes of God. They are configured as they were in the sky when she appeared to Juan Diego. Her dress design represented earth to the Aztecs and has their symbols in it for heaven, truth and civilization. Juan Diego's image can be seen in her eyes. The eyes have the three effects of refraction seen in a living human eye. The black sash she wears was worn by pregnant Aztec women. A stethoscope held to her abdomen detects a baby's rapid heartbeat. These things have been studeid and re-studied by doctors and scientists. No scientific explanation exists. The image is not painted. The fiber is of a plant used for such a cape as Juan Diego wore in those days and should have disintegrated after a few years.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the model of pro-life. Catholics consider her our patroness in the Americas. Because of her, bloody human sacrifice ended and Aztecs were converted to Christianity in a very short time. 8,000,000 were baptized. The early Franciscan and Dominican missionaries baptized and administered the sacraments on average, day and night, 3,000 per day for seven years. Catholic pray for her intercession to end abortion, today's bloody human sacrifice to the Devil.
Guadalupe, in Spanish, sounds phonetically like the Nahuatl coatlaxopeuh, which means, "I smashed the serpent with the foot." (Remember the Bible verse, "she shall crush his head." There is a Muslim connection, as well. "Guadalupe" was the name of a river in Spain, in a region named by the Moors, in Arabic, wad(i)-al-hub, meaning "river of love" and also pronounced like guadalup(e). So, the name "Our Lady of Guadalupe" (she called herself that) could be seen as Our Lady, the River of Love. She demonstrated God's love of Spanish Christian, Moorish/Arab Mulim and Aztec Indians in Mexico, and through them - all the Americas, and indeed the world. It is interesting that the Muslims honor Mary and even today visit with reverence her house in Ephesus.
Those who think such appearances are of the Devil, ignore the fact that everything she does and says points to God, not Satan. Her pleadings for prayer, acts of penance, repentance, living life in the spirit are things of God, not Lucifer. These things she stresses in the Name and for the love of Jesus, in every apparition down the centuries. Remember, in the Gospel of Passion Sunday, Christ Himself was accused of working miracles by the Devil.
Look at Mexico today. The place where God chose to convert a whole people was later controlled for 200 years by freemasonic forces determined to destroy the Faith. They have been very successful. Persecutions, executions of priests, secularization to the point that men of God could not wear the signs and clothing of their office, Mass could not even be celebrated, and now the murderous, barbarous drug cartels. Why is Mexico so tormented and so many of its people kept poor and without hope? We all know that the Devil hates God. He especially hates the Mother of Christ, destined to crush his head. Since she played such a prominent role in the conversion of Mexico, he has done all he can to stamp out her influence and plunge Mexico oncve again into savagery. Far-fetched? I don't think so. Look what he is doing in our own country. A once Christian nation with "In God we Trust" as its motto and proclaimed on its currency, is spiraling into socialism promoted by secular progressives and open exponents of atheistic communism. We are more a civilization of death that of life. THESE are the works of the Devil.
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