The gospel readings at Mass after the Feast of the Epiphany are connected to that great feast.
The Magi represent the nations, the Gentiles, seeking Jesus as their Savior. In our reading for Monday Jesus after his baptism by John goes into Galilee. Matthew’s gospel calls it “The Galilee of the Gentiles.” Jesus brings light “to a people who sit in darkness.” (Matthew 4,12-17,24-25) In Galilee Jesus fulfills the promise made to the Magi.
He repeats the words John used to define his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Yet, while John speaks to the Jewish world, (Saturday, John 3,22-3); Jesus calls a Gentile world as well to turn to God, for the kingdom of God at hand.
Humanly speaking, it wasn’t a good time for such a mission. It’s “after John was arrested,” a dangerous time. Galilee, when Jesus began his mission, was ruled by Herod Antipas, who imprisoned John and then beheaded him. (Matthew 4, 12-25)
It probably wasn’t a good time either for the Magi to come to Bethlehem, in the days of Herod the Great. But God’s time is not our time; God’s ways are not our ways. We can miss the opportunities of grace when we think of time in too human a way.
Accounts of the miracle of the loaves and the crossing of the Sea of Galilee from Mark’s gospel are read on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. Commentators note that in Mark’s gospel the Sea of Galilee is a stormy path Jesus takes to reach the Gentile world of his day. The other side of the lake, the western side, was predominantly a Gentile area. They are given the same Bread he provides for the children of Israel.
It’s to “all of Galilee” that Jesus goes and consequently “his reputation traveled the length of Syria. They carried to him all those afflicted with various diseases and racked with pain: the possessed, the lunatics, the paralyzed. He cured them all.” (Matthew 4, 23-25)
Jesus brings good news to both Jew and Gentiles in Galilee, the”Galilee of the Gentiles.”
Visiting Elizabeth Seton’s New York? Start with a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It’s free and offers a view of New York City that takes you back to the city’s beginning.
Early European explorers sailed into this harbor. In 1524 Giovanni Verranzano reached New York harbor and thought it was a lake. The Verranzano Bridge stands at the entrance to the harbor today. He thought the Hudson River might be a passage to the Pacific, but never went further than the harbor.
In 1609 Henry Hudson, exploring for the Dutch, sailed up the river that bears his name as far as Albany. The Dutch realized how valuable the place was and started a trading post on Manhattan Island. They called it New Amsterdam and traded with Indian tribes here and along the Hudson River.
Before the Europeans came, the harbor was a favorite place where the native tribes fished, hunted and traded.
The English had their eyes on the place too and in 1642 took it over. New Amsterdam became New York, and remained under English control till the American Revolution in 1776.
Millions of immigrants have come through New York harbor since then. The harbor was their gateway to the new world. The Statue of Liberty stands on the harbor’s western side along with Ellis Island, a major center for processing immigrants.
New York harbor became the place where early New York City traded with the rest of the world. Elizabeth Seton and her family were closely connected to the harbor. Her husband, William Seton, invested in the ships that made the city one of the richest ports in the world. But ships were a risky investment; they brought handsome profits yet could also bring bankruptcy if they didn’t come in. The Setons experienced both the riches and the risk.
I suppose you could call William Seton one of Wall Street’s first venture capitalists. In 1801 the Seton’s went bankrupt after the loss of a ship at sea and the family moved to the rented house on State Street, our first stop off the ferry.
Elizabeth Seton’s father, Doctor Richard Bayley, was the first Health Officer for the Port of New York (1796), caring for many of the first immigrants and travellers arriving here.
His job was to keep New York City safe from disease and keep travellers who were dangerous health threats isolated. So, quarantine stations were set up in the harbor for immigrants with yellow fever, cholera and small pox.
Within the harbor are some of the city’s early quarantine stations. Bedloe’s Island (1758-1796), Governor’s Island (1796-1799), Thomkinsville in Staten Island (1799-1858), just south of the St. George ferry station.
In the summer of 1801, Elizabeth was staying with her father at the Thomkinsville quarantine station when a boatload of sick Irish immigrants were brought in. She describes the dreadful conditions in a letter:
“I cannot sleep–the dying and the dead possess my mind. Babies perishing at the empty breast of the expiring mother…Father says such was never known before: twelve children must die for want of sustenance…parents deprived of it as they have lain for many days ill in a ship without food or air or changing…There are tents pitched over the yard of the convalescent house and a large one at the death house.” (Letter July 28, 1801)
That same year, Richard Bayley himself died from yellow fever contacted from the Irish immigrants off Thomkinsville. He’s buried in the family plot next to the Episcopal Church of St. Andrew in Richmond, Staten Island.
Seton Shrine, State Street, South Ferry
Arriving back in the city you can see the Seton house and a shrine near the ferry terminal at the end of Manhattan Island where Elizabeth Seton and her family lived for a short time. Stop in for a visit; many mementoes of her are found there. Most of Elizabeth Seton’s New York years were lived in this early section of the city.
From Mother Seton’s shrine and house on State Street walk up Broadway to Trinity Church and then St. Paul’s Chapel, the Anglican parish she belonged to until her conversion to Catholicism in 1805. She lived her early years as a happily married woman with five children on Wall Street and Stone Street, close by these colonial churches.
St. Paul’s Chapel
As a devout Anglican, Elizabeth devoted herself to her family and to the poor. In 1797 she and other public-spirited church women began an aid society for destitute women and their children. “The poor increase fast: immigrants from all quarters come to us. And when they come to us they must not be allowed to die.” (Description of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Small Children.)
Looking eastward down Wall Street from Trinity Church on Broadway , you can see many of the institutions the fueled America’s economy: the docks and slave market (newly marked) on the East River, the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal building, a short walk from Broadway, and finally Trinity Church and King’s College on the western side of Manhattan. King’s College built on lands belonging to Trinity Church became Columbia University after the Revolutionary War, and later relocated in northern Manhattan.
St. Peter’s Catholic Church
Our final stop visiting Elizabeth Seton’s New York is St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Barclay Street, near to World Trade Center. Here she was received into the Catholic Church. Notice the beautiful painting of the crucifixion above the altar. Elizabeth Seton mentioned how moved she was as she prayed before that painting after becoming a Catholic.
In June 1808, she left New York City with her family for Baltimore, where she founded a school on Paca Street, the beginning of the Catholic parochial schools system in the United States. Shortly after, Mother Seton moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where other women gathered around her and took vows as the Sisters of Charity. Her religious followers continued her work through schools, orphanages and hospitals found throughout the United States.
Mother Seton died at the age of 46 in 1821. She was canonized on September 14,1975. There’s a good biography of Mother Seton written by Catherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, Blackstone, 2018
Today’s the feast of St. Elizabeth Seton (1774-1821), a woman born at the time of the American revolution and a founder of the American Catholic Church.
The United States Catholic Catechism for Adults sees her as a woman searching for God. We find God through Jesus Christ, but also through creation, through human relationships and through various circumstances of our lives.
Elizabeth Seton found God in all those ways. As a little girl after her mother’s death she was neglected by her father and at odds with her stepmother, and she found God in the beauties of nature, in the fields around New Rochelle, NY, where she played as a child.
Then, as a young woman, she married a prominent New York business man, William Seton. They had five children and Elizabeth enjoyed a happy married life, lots of friends; she was active in her Episcopal church, Trinity Church, on Wall Street in New York City.
New York was a city inspired by the optimism and the Enlightenment, a movement that believed life was for pursuing human knowledge and progress more than the pursuit of God. Alexander Pope summed up the time in his famous couplet in “An Essay of Man” (“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of mankind is man”)
In a society and a church largely influenced by those values, Elizabeth felt drawn to Jesus Christ, whom she searched for in the scriptures and found in the care of the poor. Her life changed when her husband’s business failed. After his health also failed, Elizabeth took him to Italy to see if a better climate could revive him. As they arrived in Livorno, Italy, he died in her arms in a cold quarantine station at the Italian port.
Some Italian friends took Elizabeth and her daughter into their home and there she began to think about becoming a Catholic. Her conversion after her return to New York City caused her to lose old friends and left her to face hard times as a widow with small children.
She moved to Baltimore, then Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she opened her first Catholic school and gathered other women to form a religious community. She is one of the great saints and founders of the American Church. She’s also a woman who had an important role in establishing the Catholic Church in America.
Her quest for God was many sided, touched by sorrows and joys. She’s a good example of how our relationship with God is formed by creation, by the people around us, and the varied circumstances we face as we go through life and the times in which we live.
People like Mother Seton show how faith grows in us. That’s why the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults sees her as an example of how we find God in real life. More important than books, people tell us what believing means. They’re good catechisms.
Happy Feast Day to all her daughters throughout the world who continue in her spirit. They are following her and their journey isn’t over.
Our yearly calendar features saints from different times and places The saints are catechisms of faith and examples for living. They’re more interesting than celebrities–the media darlings today. Elizabeth Seton and John Neumann, whom we recalled recently, have great stories to tell. Like Mother Cabrini, featured in a recent major film. Too bad we don’t pay more attention them.
Dorothy Day is another holy person whose life would be perfect for a major film. Her autobiography “The Long Loneliness” is a spiritual classic. She was a woman of faith at home with broken humanity. She made hard choices. “‘Diligo’, to love means also to choose”, she writes.
She was an uncompromising advocate for the poor. She also knew she needed people and a home: “I had heard many say that they wanted to worship God in their own way and did not need a Church in which to praise him, nor a body of people with whom to associate themselves. But I did not agree to this. My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God.” (p. 139)
Robert Ellsberg edited her diaries (“The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg, Milwaukee University Press, 2008) He chose the title from her entry for February 24, 1961. ‘Today I thought of a title for my book ‘The Duty of Delight’ as a sequel to “The Long Loneliness.” I was thinking how, as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the Cross. And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.”
The trend in hagiography – the study of the saints – is to see them in communion with the world that was theirs, which helps us live in the world that’s ours.“From their place in heaven, they guide us still.” (Preface of the Apostles) They shaped their world. We must do that too.
Contemporary studies of the saints recognize they weren’t perfect. They were part the political, social, intellectual and religious worlds they lived in.
Matthew’s gospel was written for Jewish Christians in Galilee and Syria sometime after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. They were shocked by the complete destruction of the temple and the city itself, because they believed God’s promises would be fulfilled in those places. The Messiah would appear there. All nations would stream to Jerusalem, prophets like Isaiah said. Now they’re gone.
Matthew’s gospel reminds his hearers that Jesus must be known by all nations before he comes again. “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Matthew 28, 18-20)
Can we see his story of the Magi Matthew’s reminder that even as Jesus is born, even as innocent children are being killed by King Herod, messengers, strangers, wise men from afar, approach him and acknowledge him as their king and their God.
Jesus Christ came, our gospel story says, not for only one people or nation, he came for all. His ministry was first to the Jews, but Jesus wishes to make the world one. God doesn’t wish to save a few. He wants to save all, all the world.
The Magi came from the east, so they may come from Iran or Yemen; two places we hardly view positively today in our country. More and more, today as we look at the world through the lens of politics and economics, we fear the stranger, reject the immigrant and create enemies. We reject people who are not like us. We’re becoming tribal, not global. As the old song said, “With someone like you, a pal good and true, I’d like to leave it all behind and go and find, a place that’s known to God alone, and let the rest of the world go by.”
Why aren’t we more jealous to bring our faith to others? Why are we so slow to see the promise our faith brings to the world? Why do we hesitate to talk about Jesus Christ, his teachings and the example of his life? We can’t let the rest of the world go by. We’re living in a big world and God wants it to be one.
That’s what the story of the magi reminds us. We have a commission on this Feast of the Epiphany to receive them. Next Sunday is the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. “Go to the whole world, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” teaching them to observe all that Jesus commands. And he will be with us, even to the end of time.
And the newcomers come with gifts.
I like Pope Benedict’s reflection on Matthew’s account of the Magi i: “The key point is this: the wise men from the east are a new beginning. They represent the journeying of humanity toward Christ. They initiate a procession that continues throughout history. Not only do they represent the people who have found the way to Christ: they represent the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religions and human reason toward him.”
Benedict, at the end of his study reflecting on the historicity of the infancy accounts notes a changing attitude favoring their historical reliability. The evangelists do not wish to deceive their readers, but inform them concerning historical facts.
“ With this view I can only agree. The two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought through and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.”
Pope Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives . The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Eastern Christian churches celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation somewhat differently than the western Christian churches. For the western Christian church Christmas is the key celebration. Visually in our western celebrations the Magi come to the stable at Bethlehem after the shepherds.
In the western world the creches are mostly put away, the Christmas trees are down, the carols no longer sung. The popular celebrations of Christ seem to end on Christmas day. The feasts of Epiphany/Baptism seem almost an afterthought in our western celebrations.
For eastern Christians, the feasts of Epiphany and the Baptism are the climax of the Christmas celebrations. Why?
Saint Proclus of Constantinople explains what these feasts mean to the eastern churches:
“The feast of the Epiphany manifests even more wonders than the feast of Christmas. At Christmas the King puts on the royal robe of his body. At Epiphany the very source unfolds and, as it were, clothes the river. On the feast of the Savior’s birth, the earth rejoiced because it bore the Lord in a manger. On today’s feast the sea is glad because it receives the blessing of holiness in the river Jordan.”
The mystery of the incarnation is complete for the eastern churches when the magi return home, the gospel is preached in their lands and their people are baptized. “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel.
For the eastern church, when Jesus enters the waters of the Jordan he immediately reaches the whole of creation and all its people, represented by the Magi and their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This approach strongly promotes God’s plan for the global church and, especially today, an environmental spirituality. The waters of the world are blessed; they share in the mystery.
Maximus of Turin, another early Christian writer, offers this reflection on Jesus’ birth and his baptism: “Then he was born from a virgin; at his baptism he is born in mystery. When he was born, his mother Mary held him close to her heart; when he is born in mystery, God the Father embraces him with his voice and says: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.’ The mother caresses the tender baby on her lap; the Father serves his Son by loving testimony. His mother holds the child for the Magi to adore; the Father reveals that his Son is to be worshiped by all the nations.
Some historians of the liturgy see the western emphasis on Christmas and not on the Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus originating in a fear of adoptianism– the notion that Jesus Christ took on divine status when he was baptized in the Jordan, a belief that might be suggested by the Gospel of Mark. (cf. Advent to Pentecost, Patrick Regan, Liturgical Press, 2012 62 ff )
Though their emphasis in their liturgies differ the two churches are one in their belief in the essential mysteries of faith. “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” In its reform of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church has emphasized the feasts of the Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus. There is a new appreciation of the spirituality and liturgy of the eastern churches.
In the days before Christmas Luke’s gospel linked the birth of John the Baptist closely to the birth of Jesus, noting carefully Jesus’ superiority to John. At the same time Luke indicates that John had a privileged role in announcing Jesus as the Messiah. Luke alone mentions John and Jesus are related.
In these day’s after Christmas John’s gospel offers the Baptist’s testimony to Jesus. “I am not the Christ,” John responds to the Jewish leaders who question him about his ministry near the Jordan River. “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert,‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”
The lower Jordan valley where John preached and baptized was a place hallowed by heroic events and figures of the Jewish past. There, for example, Joshua led the Israelites over the Jordan to conquer the city of Jericho and enter the “land flowing with milk and honey.”
Late in the 8th century B.C., the prophet Elijah began preaching reform there as Israel turned to the false gods of the wicked Queen Jezebel. God sent ravens to the Wadi Cerith near the Jordan to feed Elijah in a terrible drought. Returning to the lower Jordan, Elijah disappeared mysteriously there at the end of his life,.
Later Jewish tradition said that Elijah would return – most likely to the Jordan valley – to announce the Day of the Lord, God’s final coming. And so, when John came dressed in a rough camel hair cloak, like Elijah of old, and preached with great power at this memorable place, people wondered: “Has Elijah returned?”
For the Jews the Jordan valley was a place to recapture the ancient faith of their forebears. The desert air was purer and life more simpler in that hard, memorable land that seemed to belong to God alone.
Strongly religious people, like the communities of Qumran, preferred living in the desert to Jerusalem, rejecting what they saw was the compromise and spiritual lukewarmness of smainstream Judaism. Living there, they hoped for a Messiah and Teacher to bring renewal to their people.
Besides the communities of Qumran, Jewish revolutionaries were also associated with the Judean wilderness. In 6 A.D. after the failure of a bloody revolt led by Judas the Galilean against Roman rule, bands of his followers waged a guerrilla campaign for Jewish independence from these barren hills.
And so, the Roman authorities and their local allies kept a wary eye on anyone like John the Baptist preaching in a place so significant, a major pilgrim road to Jerusalem.
Pilgrims from Galilee came this way. Jesus himself and some of his followers were among them, John’s gospel points out. I suspect the authorities watching John the Baptist also associated Jesus and his followers with him. They needed to be watched too.
January 2nd is the feast of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen, saints of the eastern church of the 4th century. They were not martyrs like Stephen and others we celebrate after the feast of Christmas. Rather, they fought for a truth so often questioned in the Christmas mystery: Who was Jesus Christ?
Basil defended our belief in the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He upheld the divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arians who denied he was fully divine. When we say Jesus is “consubstantial” with the Father – as we do at Mass in our creed – we repeat a word used by Basil, “homoousios” (of the same essence), to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son.
Basil belonged to a well-to-do Christian family from Caesaria in Asian Minor, a major center of the Christian world. Other members of his family are also honored as saints: his mother Emily, his grandmother Macrina, his sister, also Macrina, and his brothers Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste.
Gregory of Nazianzen, a school mate and friend of Basil, later became bishop of Constantinople. Like Basil, he is an important theologian who articulated the doctrine of the Trinity, He saw the trinity as “a triple light gathered into one splendor,” Family and friendship were important to Gregory and Basil. They saw the Arian heresy to be, not just a theological error, but an evil bringing fear and suspicion to the Christian community.
Basil and Gregory are considered among the greatest of the early church’s teachers.
“God’s gifts can’t be numbered,” St. Basil writes, “The blessings of God can’t be named or understood, they’re more numerous than everything in this world of ours. Yet, one blessing stands out – God’s mercy. Keep it in mind. Mercy is God’s surprising gift, a gift that lifts us from failure.
“God never abandons us, even when we fail and persist in our failure. His mercy is beyond our expectations. The cross is mercy’s great sign, bringing us life. Nor was God content merely to bring us back from death to life;, God gives us also the dignity of his own divine nature and prepares a place of joy for us that surpasses anything we imagine.”
We forget mercy so easily, the saint says.
Here’s a prayer Gregory of Nazianzen offered on the occasion of his friend Basil’s death.
Good and kind God, in this life and the next, you ask so little and give so much. If only we could be what we should be.
Hoping in you and loving you, let us accept everything and give thanks for everything, since everything brings us to salvation through you. To you we commend ourselves and those who have reached the place of rest before us, walking the same road we do. Lord and Creator of all, our God and Father, Ruler of your children,
Lord of life and death, guide and friend of our souls. You fashion and transform all things in due time through your creative Word, In your deep wisdom and providence, receive those who have gone ahead in our journey from this life.
Receive us too when our time comes and guide us through the years, as long as they last. Receive us as we come humbly before you, not troubled, nor shrinking back before the day of death, like those who love this world too much. Instead, may we set out eagerly for that everlasting and blessed life which is in Christ Jesus.
Looking at the New Year, Karl Rahner speaks of our need for “a mysticism of everyday life.” It’s not in big things God’s grace will be found, but in steady, commonplace living. Accepting time in small dimensions readies us for its big moments.
“The New Year is coming. A year like all the rest. A year of trouble and disappointment with myself and others. When God is building the house of our eternity, he puts up fine scaffolding in order to carry out the work. So fine, that we may prefer to live in it.
“The trouble is we find it is taken down again and again. We call that dismantling the painful fragility of life. We lament and become melancholy if we look at the new year and see only the demolition of the house of our life, which is really being quietly built up for eternity behind this scaffolding that’s put up and taken down again.
“No, the coming year is not a year of disappointment or a year of pleasing illusions. It’s God’s year. The year when decisive hours are approaching me quietly and unobtrusively, and the fullness of my time is coming. Shall I notice these hours? Or will they be empty, because they seem too small, too humble and commonplace?
“Outwardly they won’t look different and can be overlooked: the slight patience it takes to make life slightly more tolerable for those around me; the omission of an excuse; risking good faith in someone I’m inclined to mistrust because I’ve had an bad experience with them before; accepting someone’s criticism of me; allowing an injury done to me to die away, without complaining, bitterness or revenge; being faithful to prayer without being rewarded by “consolations” or “religious experience”; trying to love those who get on my nerves (through their fault, of course); trying to see in someone else’s stupidity an intelligence that is not mine; not trading on my virtues to justify my faults; suppressing my complaints and omitting self-praise.”
Rahner doesn’t glamorize everyday mysticism. It can be both tough and boring. “Even the saints yawn sometimes, and have to shave.”
K. Rahner, The Great Church Year, New York 1994 p. 85
Today we celebrate the oldest feast in the Roman calendar honoring Mary, the mother of God. We celebrate it in the Christmas season because she is the unique witness who guarantees the mysteries of Jesus, born of Mary..
Who else but Mary could tell us about the early life of Jesus? It had to be her. “Mary kept all these things in her heart,” Luke says in his gospel.
Mary and Joseph are our key witnesses to the early life of Jesus. People after the resurrection of Jesus must have asked Mary about those early years: How was he born, what was he like growing up? They must have questioned her.
She must have told them of God’s invitation to bear his Son, of his birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds, the strangers from the east, Herod’s attempt to kill her child, the old people in the temple who recognized him, their flight into Egypt.
She would have told them he grew up like other children, She and Jospeh were mother and father to him. They held him in their arms, fed him, clothed him, taught him his first words, helped him take his first steps, brought him to the synagogue, instructed him in their tradition, taught him to pray, listened to his questions. Angels didn’t bring him up. They did.
The words we hear in Luke’s story of their journey to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover are surely hers: “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you.”
Yet, he was a Child beyond others. Her witness to that was so important. All looked to Mary for her word. He was God’s Son. She was God’s humble servant, She was the Mother of God.
This ancient feast celebrates Mary’s witness to the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ. Churches of the Byzantine and Syrian rites celebrate this feast on December 26. The Coptic rite celebrates it on January 16.
From earliest days to later councils, the church turned to Mary when it asks “Who is Jesus?” We call on her this Christmas season to tell us who he is.
“Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God, we praise, bless, and glorify your nameon the Solemnity of the Motherhood of the Blessed ever-Virgin Mary. For by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit she conceived your Only Begotten Son, and without losing the glory of virginity, she brought forth into the world the eternal Light, Jesus Christ our Lord. “ (Preface for the feast)
The papal Mass for her feast in Rome begins with this chant:
Hail Mary, most beautiful of our human race, Virgin worthier than all others, enthroned in the heavens above.
Hail Mary, Virgin bearing the Child who sits at the Father’s right hand, ruling heaven and earth and all things, once hidden in your womb.
Hail Mary, the Uncreated God created you, the Only-Begotten Son loved you deeply, the Holy Spirit made you pregnant in a wholly divine way.
God wonderfully made and called you, his hand-maid, to be the mother of his Son. No other was made like you.
Be our mother, our comfort, our joy, and after this our exile, may we be with you in heaven forever.
The Victor's Place 