Dear Brothers and Sisters
I am very happy to be with you today at the national shrine of Our Lady in Scotland. We have just celebrated the assumption of Our Blessed Mother into Heaven. There we look up to her with hope and consolation as
the Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon at her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars, in battle against the infernal dragon who wants to devour the son about to be born from her womb. This figure of the Lady represents first of all the Church. As Pope Francis remarked, she is “on the one hand, glorious and triumphant and yet, on the other, still in travail and the Church is like that”. “If in heaven she is already associated in some way with the glory of her Lord, in history she continually lives through the trials and challenges which the conflict between God and the evil one, the perennial enemy, brings.” So we need to struggle without truce to be faithful to God in our daily lives, the path of sanctity for us. It is our destiny on earth to struggle, out of love, right to the last moment. Sometimes we wish it was not such a constant struggle but, let us remember that without it, its victories and defeats and reconciliations in the Sacrament of Confession, we would become proud. Our Lady too, during her life on earth, experienced difficult moments and hard trials. But always keeping alive in her heart the
Yes she gave through the Angel Gabriel at Nazareth, she strove and struggled daily to be faithful to God at every moment to her vocation, and won! So the woman in the Apocalypse is also a figure of Our Lady. Like the Church, “Mary shares in this dual condition. She has of course already entered into heavenly glory. But this does not mean that she is distant or detached from us. Rather Mary accompanies us, struggles with us and sustains Christians in their fight against the forces of evil. Prayer with Mary, especially the Rosary has this dimension of struggle, a sustaining prayer in the battle against the evil one and his accomplices.
It is strange to think that our Mother Mary depended not just on the grace of the Holy Spirit to remain true but somehow also on the prayers of the faithful on earth. We can certainly say she was helped to fulfil her vocation through the intercession of St Joseph and the child Jesus as they gathered each night in family prayers. But, even before those days, from the moment of her birth, the youthful Mary was helped by the prayers of Saints Joachim and Anne. So, as the child Jesus benefitted from the care of his Mother Mary, he would have known her faithfulness to Him and the earthly wellbeing of His family were also thanks to the prayers of His grandparents, Joachim and Anne.
From them the Catholic Grandparents Association takes up its mission to help Grandparents pass on the faith and keep prayer in the heart of family life. Living in ever changing times, the love and devotion of grandparents is often the only constant feature in the lives of young people. All grandparents want the best for their grandchildren and, above all, for them to become caring, compassionate adults, strong in human virtues and in devotion to their Faith. In these times, indeed, when grandparents often retain health, youth and vitality and provide irreplaceable practical and spiritual help for their children and grandchildren, we could say that a new vocation is being born, the vocation of grandparents to guide and support their grandchildren as they pass from childhood to adulthood.
Today’s Gospel reminds us that the best support grandparents give to their families is the support of prayer. The woman who appealed on behalf of her little girl was the little girl’s mum but, in the absence of the mum’s appeal, it could just as well have been made by her grandparents. Look how the appeal is made. The woman says does not cry. ‘Have mercy on my daughter’, but ‘
Have mercy on me’. So much does she love the little one that her daughter’s life is as her own. This represents the love of grandparents for their grandchildren. The woman comes to Jesus because the young one’s sickness is moral and spiritual. There is no mention of a physical defect. In our own Western world it is often the case that our young ones do not want for material needs but are hungry and thirsty for God and His love. Often it is grandparents of faith who can perceive this hidden poverty and sickness in their grandchildren and cry to God for its cure. Finally life has taught grandparents a thing or two about patience, persistence and boldness. They will do anything, whatever it takes, to provide for their little ones, and their prayer -constant and unending- will not take, ‘No’ for an answer from the Heavenly Father, who will always grant their good prayers, even if He seems to delay, so that our young will be well again.
So the Gospel vision of grandparents is truly that of a fine wine which has, in fact, grown stronger, finer and more mature with age. As Pope Francis says, grandparents have the strength to leave us a noble inheritance. They uniquely pass on history to their families, they pass down doctrine, they hand on the faith and give it to us as an inheritance.
Such a vision is very far away from the tendencies of society of today, that cultural tendency which Pope Francis has often denounced, which is to discard those who are not young because they are out of date.
Eventually, of course, grandparents get very old and cannot provide the obvious practical or even spiritual assistance they once did but even then their value, though less obvious, is just as immense. To their very last breath they are the touchstone of our humanity and a challenge to the world to remain humane.
Recently the Pope told quite a poignant story of family life which he remembered from his childhood days and which points out the all too obvious trouble with this tendency to disregard what is old and inefficient. It was the story of a family with a mother, father, many children and a grandfather. The grandfather, who lived with them, would get food all over his face when he ate and so the father, quite embarrassed by it, bought a small table for him to eat at on his own and set it apart from the family table so as not to disturb them with his mess. But one day the father came home to find his sons playing with a piece of wood. “What are you making?” said the father. “A table,” they replied. “Why?” the father asked. “It’s for you, Dad, for when you’re old like grandpa,” As Pope Francis concluded, Grandparents are always a treasure. Often old age isn’t pretty, right? There is sickness and all that, but the wisdom our grandparents have is something we must welcome as an inheritance. A society or community that does not value, respect and care for its elderly doesn’t have a future because it has no memory.
We can conclude with good hope, depending on the First Reading from the Prophet Isaiah.
All who observe the Sabbath and cling to my covenant – these I will bring to my holy mountain and I will make them joyful in my house of prayer and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, says the Lord. If ever the Word of the Lord applied to anyone surely these words apply to our Catholic grandparents. They, who have a passionate love for the practice of the faith in Sunday Mass, a deep love for the Church, a constant readiness to offer the sacrifices of their lives a as fragrant offering to God, should not lose faith, for their prayers will be accepted joyfully by the Heavenly Father and answered at His favourable time from His Holy Mountain.