Thought for the Day – 10 May – Mary’s Patience

Thought for the Day – 10 May – “Mary’s Month” Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971)

Mary’s Patience

“Many people who honour the Cross of Jesus Christ, have no liking for their own cross.
Many of those who pray fervently to Jesus crucified, experience a sense of repugnance and rebellion when they are called upon to suffer with Him and to carry their own cross.
But Jesus has said:  “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Lk 9:23).
If a man does not love his own cross, he does not love the Cross of Jesus Christ.
If we are to be true Christians, we must suffer with resignation and love.
Mary gives us a wonderful example of this kind of loving patience.
She is the Mother of Sorrows, because, when Jesus was in agony for love of us on Mount Calvary, she knelt at His feet.
From the depths of her stricken mother’s heart, she offered up her divine Son and united her own sufferings to the infinite merits of His passion and death.
In this way, she became the co-redemptrix of the human race.
But, she had already suffered in patience throughout the earlier part of her life.
Let us recall to mind the coldness of her reception in Bethlehem, the birth of her infant Son in a damp cave, the persecution by Herod and the flight into Egypt, the daily privations in the home of Nazareth, the anxious devotion with which she followed our divine Redeemer on His long missionary journeys and the day, when He was finally betrayed and arrested.
She knew that her divine Son had it in His power to spare both Himself and her, all this suffering and humiliation.
Even, when they lived in Nazareth, she knew that He had power to multiply loaves of bread, change water into wine, or annihilate His enemies.
But she never asked Him to do any of these things.
All she ever asked for, was a life of intimacy with Jesus.
She was happy to co-operate patiently with Him, in the work of redeeming the human race.
By humbly following Him as far as Calvary, she merited to follow Him triumphantly into Heaven on the day of her Assumption.”

Antonio Cardinal Bacci