Ave Maria Meditations

He chose his Mother … When we reflect upon the joy which it is to ourselves to think of Mary, to brood upon her supernatural loveliness, and to study the greatness of her gifts and the surpassing purity of her virtues, we shall get such faint idea, as lies within our compass, of the unspeakable gladness which it must have been to the Word to have chosen Mary, and to have created her through that very choice.

He must choose a Mother who shall be worthy of being the Mother of God, a Mother suitable to that tremendous mystery of the Hypostatic Union, a Mother fitted to minister that marvelous Body out of her own heart’s blood, and to be herself for months the tabernacle of that most heavenly Soul. All God’s works are in proportion. When He appoints to an office, His appointment is marked by extreme fitness. He ele­vates nature to the level of His own purposes. He enables it to compass the most supernatural destinies by fulfilling it with the most incredible graces. There was no accident about His choice of Mary.

She was not merely the holiest of living women on earth at the time when He resolved to come. She was not a mere tool, an instrument for the passing necessity of the hour, to be used, and flung aside, and lie indistinguishable in the crowd, when her use was gone. This is not God’s way. He does not deal thus with the least of His elect. His whole revelation of Himself renders such a supposition as impossible as it would be profane. There is nothing accidental or of mere ornament in the works of the Most High. His operations have no excrescences, no extrinsic appendages. God does not use His creatures. They enter into His purposes, and are an integral part of them; and every part of a divine work is one of that work’s perfections. This is a characteristic of divine working, that everything about it is a special perfection.

Mary thus lies high up in the very fountain-head of creation. She was the choice of God himself, and He chose her to be his Mother. She was the gate by which the Creator entered into His own creation. She ministered to Him in a way and for an end unlike those of any other creature whatsoever. What then must have been her beauty, what her holiness, what her privileges, what her exaltation! To depreciate them is to depreciate the wisdom and the goodness of God!

When we have said that Mary was the Word’s eternal choice, we have said that which already involves all the doctrine of the Church about her, and all the homage of Christians to her. When we consider the Word’s desire to assume a created nature, when we ponder His choice of a human nature, when we reflect on His further choice of his Soul and Body, and add to all these con­siderations the remembrance of His immense love, we can see how His goodness would exult in the choice of His Mother, whom to love exceedingly was to become one of His chief graces, one of the greatest of all His human perfections.

All possible creatures were before Him, out of which to choose the creature that was to come nearest Him, the creature that was to love Him, and to have a natural right to love Him, best of all, and the creature to whom duty as well as preference was to bind Him to love with the in­tensest love. Then, out of all He chose Mary.

What more can be said? She fulfilled His idea, or rather she did not so much suit His idea, but she was herself the idea, and His idea of her was the cause of her creation. The whole theology of Mary lies in this eternal and efficacious choice of her in the Bosom of the Father.

+Father Frederick William Faber from “Bethlehem”

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The Holy Ghost was to be to the Church what our Lord had been to His disciples while He was upon the earth. Nay, incredible as it seems, He was to be more. He was to be so much more that it was to be expedient for them that Jesus should go away, in order that the Holy Ghost might come. He wants to be our Lord’s successor, so to speak…

The office of the Holy Ghost was to protract our Lord’s sojourn upon earth. Under Him the disciples were to do greater miracles then even their Lord had done. The hierarchy, the Sacraments, the preaching of the Cross, the miraculous gifts, the empire of grace, all these things were to be developed in the Church under the personal ministry and reign of the Third Person of the undivided Trinity, God the Holy Ghost.

What the tabernacle is to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, that the Church is to the Holy Ghost: only that the Church is a living tabernacle in mortal souls, not of metal, or of marble, or wood…(The Holy Ghost): His powers, His gifts, His operations, His energies, His presence, inform everything in and about the Church. So that he who speaks against the Church speaks against the Holy Ghost! We are saying that devotion to the Holy Ghost implies and contains in a very special way a devotion to the Church. We read that the sin against the Holy Ghost is to be the great sin of the last age of the Church…

This warning must have been practical to all times and to all souls, because our blessed Savior gave it…The indefectibility of the Church is from the Holy Ghost. It cannot fail.  It is not in its power to die.  Heresies cannot corrode it. Persecutions cannot waste it…the indefectibility of the Church is the standing miracle of history.

+Fr. Frederick Faber, D.D.

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