Scripture:
Genesis 41:55-57; 42:5-7a, 17-24a
Matthew 10:1-7
Reflection:
Hope
The Passionist community celebrates the feast of “Mary Mother of Hope” today. The origin of this devotion is found in the mission preaching of Thomas Struzzieri, CP, later bishop, who spoke of Mary, the Mother of Hope. This devotion is echoed by Bl. Dominic Barbari, CP. and the martyred Bulgarian Bishop, Eugene Bassilkov, CP. Pope Francis in his autobiography, “Hope”, reflects poetically on this virtue. Along side our daily readings from Genesis and Matthew, readings from the common of Mary may be chosen. Mass prayers and preface are in the “Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary”, Volume 1.
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars which devastated the Church and religious life in Europe, the superior of the Passionists, instead of retrenching with a smaller number of religious, chose to expand, to preach the passion in new places. Dominic Barbari, CP who wanted to go to England, found himself in Belgium as the first religious superior in 1840. It took this rather rotund, gentle and quiet man only two years to lead a few Passionists off to England. He was a theologian and teacher driven to work for unity with the Church of England, something we find in the prayer of St. Paul of the Cross, the founder of the Passionists. In the nine years before his death in Reading, England, although he did not realize his goal, he did receive a great consolation. It was Dominic Barbari who welcomed John Henry Newman into the Church!
Dominic says this of Mary and hope: Hope is that virtue than anchors the ship of our soul in the stormy sea of this troubled world…Though endowed with extraordinary graces and unstained by original sin, Mary never counted on any resource of her own. She knew God as the source of every good. She confided in God, fleeing from persecution from her own country, and she hoped in God even when she saw her divine Son die on the Cross. She encouraged the weak, lifted up the fallen…even now she reaches with a mother’s hand to those who go to her. She is Mother of holy hope.
In 1952 Bl. Eugene Bassilkov, bishop of the church of Bulgaria during the Communist persecution was taken from his prison cell and shot by a firing squad. We have a letter from Bassilkov where he says, ‘things are bad, but as a son of the Province of Our Lady of Hope, (the province in Belgium). Mary, Mother of Hope is my inspiration’.
Advertising uses words to make sales, poetry uses words that make us wonder why we rarely see the obvious until someone expresses it simply. Poetry safeguards not sales but souls. So Pope Francis uses the poetry of Charles Péguy: ‘Faith, he says, is a loyal wife/Charity is a Mother, but Hope is a little girl not even noticed, who will endure worlds. She alone, carrying the others, is lost among her sister’s skirts. Hope, the little one, carries them all./Because Faith sees only what is. But she, she sees what will be./Charity only loves what is. But she, she loves what will be’. There is a saying, “When the seas rise, those without ideas are the first to go under”. So for those without hope. Christian hope is the humble, strong virtue that sustains us and does not let us drown in the many difficulties of life. Hope, the anchor, Mary, the vessel. She pulls us aboard dripping and tired. ‘Here’s a towel, there’s an oar! I knew you were there’, she says.
Fr. William Murphy, CP is a member of Immaculate Conception Community in Jamaica, New York.