Mother’s Day

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We're told in the Psalms: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb” (Ps. 139:13).

Mother's Day honors the sacrifices that mothers have made for their children.

The Bible consistently asks its followers to honor and to love their mothers. We're told: "Honor your father and your mother” (Ex. 20:12; Deut. 5:16). And in the Book of Leviticus: "Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father” (Lev. 19:3).

Down through the ages, the concept of motherhood has always been revered, even on the natural level.

The concept of motherhood has been enhanced very much by the lofty Christian view, in which motherhood takes on an almost sacred character. This is reflected very much in the paintings of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem by the Renaissance painters in the 16th century.

“Motherhood is not a hobby; it's a calling. You don't collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It's not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It's what God has given you time for.”

Often motherhood has come to “represent everything that our culture hates, because motherhood represents the laying down of your life for another—and the laying down of your life for another represents the Gospel (Rachel Jankovic, Motherhood is a Calling).

The Bible is very clear about the value of children. Jesus loved them. “Let the little children come unto me” (Luke 18:16; Mark 10:14; Matt. 19:14).

We're commanded to love them. We're meant to imitate God and take pleasure in our children.

Kimberly Hann, the wife of Scott Hann, before she converted, said that she scoured the Bible in order to try and find somewhere where children are spoken of in a derogatory manner, or that they're seen in some way as a curse, in order to justify her position on contraception.

But to her amazement, she couldn't find a single instance where the Bible ever speaks badly about children. Children were always seen as a blessing.

And so, we have to try and work at that vocation to motherhood.

“Children know the difference between a mother who's saving face to a stranger and a mother who defends their life and their worth with her smile, her love, and her absolute loyalty.”

That doesn't mean that she never says No to her children. Stenson likes to say, “No is also a loving word. … Children need to hear words of loving self-denial from time to time. It's one of the ways they learn to say No to themselves” (James Stenson, Educating in Virtue).

Mothers are called to “live the Gospel in the things that no one sees,” to sacrifice themselves for their children “in places that only the children will know about.”

They're called to put the value of their children ahead of their own, to help them to grow up in the clean air of Gospel living.

John Paul II liked to talk a lot about a human ecology. In the world today we hear a lot about ecological matters.

He said the most important ecology is a human ecology, not just a rat-free or an insect-free environment, or a cockroach-free environment, but an environment fundamentally that's healthy for the soul, for all the higher aspects of the human person.

The testimony that a mother gives to the Gospel in the little details of her life is of more value to her children than she can possibly imagine. “If you tell your children the Gospel but you don't live it, they will never believe it.”

“Mothers are called to give their life for their children every day, joyfully, to lay down their pettiness, lay down their fussiness, lay down their resentment about the dishes, about the laundry, about how no one knows how hard ‘you’ work” (Rachel Jankovic).

Motherhood is one of the most important roles that Our Lord has assigned to women.

I was in a get-together once in a university residence with a hundred male university residents. It was in Pamplona in Spain.

After lunch every day, there was a get-together that everyone was supposed to attend, but it competed with the siesta, so it usually had about 30 percent attendance. If there was an invited guest, who was always a male, the attendance might go to 50 percent.

One day they invited a lady and suddenly the attendance was 100 percent. Nobody wanted to miss this historical occasion. This lady was a mother of eight children. She was a professor of psychology.

In the get-together she began to talk about what it meant to be a mother. I wondered if she had got her topic wrong, as these were all first-year university students. They were never going to be mothers.

But I looked around the room. I found that all the jaws were hanging open. They all knew what a mother was, but it never entered their head for one moment to think about what it meant to be a mother.

This mother said that a mother has to be different things to her growing children at different stages of their development.

To the two-year-old she has to be the diaper changer, because that's one of the most crucial services that she provides.

To the five or six-year-old she has to be the mom that gets down on her hands and knees and plays with the doll's house from time to time.

To the ten-year-old son she has to be the good-looking mom, puts on a bit of make-up, some earrings, gets her hair one, so that, when she comes to collect her son from school, he can elbow his friends and say, "That's my mom over there, the good-looking one.”

And to the 16-year-old she has to be the intellectual mom who knows how to carry on an intellectual conversation with her budding intellectual child and doesn't give the impression that the last time that an idea went through her head was before she got married.

This lady gave a very interesting description, in just a few sentences, of what it meant to be a mother, and the challenges of motherhood. It was reminiscent of what St. Paul says: that we have to be "all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22).

St. Paul in his letter to Titus says that women are expected to “love their husbands and children, to be pure-minded, self-controlled, to care for the home, and be kind and dutiful to their husbands” (cf. Titus 2:4-5).

A mother teaches her child everything that she knows, right from talking, to walking, to living a fulfilling life. She's also the one who disciplines and educates a child for a better living. “Right from getting up to sleeping, a mother teaches all she knows.”

In the Psalms, motherhood is seen as a blessing. It says, “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him” (Ps. 127:3). They’re full of hope.

In the Book of Proverbs: “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they're old they will not turn from it” (Prov. 22:6).

The Book of Proverbs talks about them being full of joy: “May your father and mother rejoice, may she who gave you birth be joyful!" (Prov. 23:25).

“Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her” (Prov. 31:28).

They're worthy of honor, we're told in St. Paul to the Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother.’ This is the first commandment with a promise ‘that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy a long life on the earth’” (Eph. 6:1-3; Ex. 20:12; Deut. 5:16).

In St. Paul’s letter to Timothy, motherhood is spoken of as a gift from the Lord, one of the ways we can glorify and serve Him (1 Tim. 5:10). It offers many opportunities to grow in our understanding of God's mercy, love, and grace.

Motherhood is sanctifying, but it's also sweet. The Book of Proverbs also says that mothers point their children towards Christ by praying for them, modeling their faith and character, training them in wisdom (Prov. 1:8, 29:15).

Somebody once defined character as “that which you have left when you lose everything else” (Evan Esar). It's often the mother who shapes that: what you have left, that's there for always.

Christian mothers in history have always made a great contribution.

In the Book of Timothy, we're told about Lois and Eunice (2 Tim. 1:5). Paul says that the “sincere faith” that Timothy possesses was from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice.

It seems that even though godly men were lacking in Timothy's upbringing, the influence of these women helped form him into the pastor and leader he became, for the benefit of the whole early Church.

St. Monica had great influence on her son Augustine's life. Her example and her prayers—even without support from her husband—eventually led Augustine to the Lord.

In his autobiography, he says that his mother “shed more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son” (St. Augustine, Confessions). He became one of the leading theologians of the early Church.

In practice, the woman is the primary educator.

James Stenson likes to say that every baby that comes into the world does so as a self-satisfying hedonistic gorilla: ‘I want my milk and I want it now, and I'm going to scream and scream and scream until I get my milk, even if it's three in the morning, because I am the most important person in the world.’

He says the role of parents is to turn this little gorilla into an adult. An adult is not somebody who can take care of themselves, because a dog or a cat or a household plant can do that.

An adult is fundamentally someone who can take care of others; someone who can forget about themselves. That's what love is.

John Paul II says that these great lessons that a child learns—he learns them fundamentally from the mother. A father has a role to play, but the mother has a much greater role to play.

I often like to encourage kids to go home and ask your Mom, ‘What was my pregnancy like? How did you feel as you carried me for nine months, and what was my labor like, contraction by contraction?’ These are good questions to ask our mothers, because then we know who has sacrificed themselves so much for us.

Children are often closest to their mother in their early years. They need her as a constant point of reference and the mother is endowed with a number of specific dispositions to help this. The ability to feed the infant from her own body shows the closeness of the relationship.

Radical feminists tend to view man as woman’s arch enemy or, in the best of cases, as her rival.

The Christian view is that men and women are made for each other. They complement each other. They don’t complete each other, because they are already complete as persons. They complement each other. And the closer they come to God, the more beautiful will their relationship be.

By developing and purifying his own male characteristics, the man will become the woman's ideal help, friend, and companion.

And it's by becoming truly feminine that a woman can give man the greatest human gift: true love, self-donation, the gift of self.

A woman will not fulfill herself and realize her complete potential if she doesn't develop her specific feminine faculties and prepare herself for maternity, from the spiritual point of view at least, whatever about physically.

Some writers say that nothing characterizes the state of the world today more deeply and more tragically than the complete absence of the maternal outlook.

To the radical feminist, the problems of a woman's plight can largely be solved only by taking the woman out of the home.

These women need to develop their special capacity to love, to accentuate their natural attention to personal needs, maternal sensibility.

To the masculine professional world, a woman brings a more human dimension. Christian motherhood is about raising children for eternity.

Their souls have been entrusted to me. “Souls, Lord, they're for you, they're for your glory” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 804). The soul of this child is destined to live forever.

The mother is the queen of the family, the corner at which the whole foundation of the human community rests.

The contribution made by women to the family and human relations can be very great. It should be protected in the law, perhaps remunerated, mindful of the fact that the Gospel is caught; it’s not taught.

The documents of the Second Vatican Council like to talk about the domestic Church. It’s a very powerful phrase: the Church of the home, the Church where the child learns so many things, grows up in a spirit of faith.

John Paul II liked to say that “the family is the school of deeper humanity” (Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, Point 21; Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, Point 52); school of love; school of self-giving; school of the soul.

It's through this that we build the civilization of love, the culture of life.

And so we have to learn how to build the domestic Church. We never stop building. When we enrich ourselves with a deeper spirituality, with deeper ideas, greater affection, greater education, we're enriching the gift of self that we make to our spouse and to our children.

We cannot give what we do not have, so we have to continually work at that greater formation.

“We need to be a Mary who sits at the feet of Christ, not a Martha who just gets the job done. Children can smell hypocrisy a mile off.”

“Mothering starts with loving the Lord with our own heart and soul and might. Love for God is inextricably linked to the act of taking hold of God's word and passing it on to our children, day in and day out, like a baton in a relay. Love for God and obeying his design for godly parenting cannot be separated” (Rosie Moore). It's a role that never ends.

If children get to a certain age, mid-teens, and they know all your lectures, it may be the time for the mother to go silent—to use the supernatural means more, to grow in faith and trust in God, and to keep her mouth shut in order to have a greater influence. Silence can be golden.

If a mother objects to being her child's teacher, the Bible takes issue with that. Your work as a Mom is done line upon line, precept upon precept, over a long period of time. Christian motherhood is not a fixed-term contract.

One mother says, ‘I have more opportunities to teach my teenagers today than I ever did when they were small. We talk about everything: from politics to evolution, from transgenderism to the post-truth culture that is shaping everything they learn at school and university.’

Our children need to become thinkers as opposed to robots, who simply process information and accept ideas without exploring the implications for all of life.

Our children need to learn what we're told in the Letter of St Peter: “to give a reason for the hope that is within them” (1 Pet. 3:15).

But all these conversations are built on the earthly foundation. They remember the time spent reading, reciting memory verses, and praying together.

The Holy Spirit, who comes down upon them, makes sure that His Word “does not come back empty” (Isa. 55:11).

Small family habits, rituals and casual conversations over many years do not have the power to save our children. But they are like the careful laying down of paper, twigs, and firelighters in a hearth—ready for the Holy Spirit to light the match and breathe the life into their hearts.

I was working for a surgeon once over an operation one morning, and he was saying how he was going out the door of his house the previous night to some surgical meeting, and his eldest son, maybe 10 or 11, asked him a question. The question wasn't very clear. There was something else behind the question.

He was going out the door; his coat was on. He stopped where he was going, took off his coat, sat down with his 11-year-old son until he got to the bottom of the question. Then he went off to his meeting. He said, “I arrived 45 minutes late, but I had a good conversation with my son.”

Sometimes those questions can come like a thief in the night—the wrong moment, the wrong time—but often those are very important opportunities.

“In the monumental task of Christian motherhood, it can be easy to feel that your potential is being wasted, that your work is futile, endless, and invisible. But your mothering matters to the King of Kings. He made you in His own image to be fruitful and multiply, to rule and reign over His creation, which is your home for much of your life.

“Your work is not just giving birth, putting food on the table, and tolerating your children until they're civilized. It's correcting and training your children day by day, building good habits, and creating order from chaos, just as God did at Creation” (Rosie Moore).

Our Lord invites us to try and live like great human beings so that we can teach our children what that means, so that they can grow to be great human beings, and build great families, a whole new “civilization of love” (John Paul II, Letter to Families, February 2, 1994).

For that we have to lean on Christ, derive our love from the sacraments and from His Sacred Heart.

“On those days when you might be staggering from an unbearable weight or find yourself controlling your family with an iron fist, remember that parenting is God's work, not yours. Jesus is the boss and the Savior, not you!

“Moms need to learn early about the hidden power of surrender: surrender in rest and restoration, surrender in repentance. Surrender in prayer, surrender in dependence. Because it's not all up to you” (Rosie Moore).

Christian mothers have to try and honor and encourage their family. St. Paul says those beautiful words: “keep encouraging one another” (1 Thess. 5:11).

Every child needs encouragement, needs affection, has heart. Don't waste a single day on needless fretting. Keep looking into the eyes of your children and know that God loves these little people deeply.

He invited all the children to come to Him (Luke 18:16). God has entrusted them specifically to you so that you would lead them to Himself. He's not made a mistake in making you the mother of your children. They're your home group, your mission field, and your closest community. And your work is never done.

Your children are the lambs you feed first, because you've been appointed as their shepherd. They're your first port of call for Christ's great commission “to go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

Starting at home, you have to teach them to observe all that Christ has taught us. Use those ordinary simple moments when the family is together to say the Morning Offering, or the prayer to the Guardian Angel, or the Angelus, or the Regina Coeli, or a bit of the Rosary, or to practice some devotion, or some act of piety.

If we believe all the truth that's in the Gospel, then this is one job we have to do diligently.

Some writers say that every culture that becomes increasingly anti-feminine detaches itself from its ties to the eternal, the divine. Children begin to ‘rank below college, below world travel, below the ability to go out at night at your leisure, below honing your body at the gym, below any job you may have to get or hope to get. Children can rank below everything. They’re the last thing you should ever spend your time on.’

But Christianity teaches the opposite, as do many other religions. There's a beautiful Buddhist prayer from the Buddhist scriptures that talks about motherhood and her love for a child.

It says, “The kindness of providing protection and care while the child is in the womb, the kindness of bearing suffering during childbirth, the kindness of forgetting all the pain once the child is born, the kindness of eating the bitter herself and saving the sweet for the child, the kindness of suckling the child at her breast, nourishing and bringing up the child, the kindness of washing away the unclean, the kindness of always thinking of the child when it has travelled far, the kindness of deep care and devotion, the kindness of ultimate pity and sympathy” (Buddhist Studies, Filial Piety).

On this Mother's Day, we could try and do something for mothers. Be more pro-life. John Paul II says in the “Gospel of Life” that we have “to be unconditionally pro-life” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Point 28, March 25, 1995).

Be generous in your gestures of respect, of courtesy, and appreciation for mothers. Hold a door for her. Say something nice to a woman who is with child. Let her go first in the queue. Give her your seat.

Admire a young mother with small children. Look for compliments, because possibly her mother or her aunt is complaining, ‘Another one? Don't you know how to count?’ She needs to hear those compliments, those little bits of encouragement.

I was at a medical conference in Singapore in 1999. There was a Canadian professor of obstetrics speaking. He said a couple of interesting things, but one of them encouraged all the doctors present to try and do something for mothers for the 21st century.

He said the United Nations and radical feminists talk about women, women, women. The Catholic Church talks about mothers, mothers, mothers.

He held up the document of the United Nations about women and the “Gospel of Life” of the Holy See of John Paul II. He said, “Here are two organizations talking about the same thing but saying completely different things.”

It would be interesting to be informed about the maternal mortality rate in the developing world. It leaves an awful lot to be desired.

There are some home truths there. A lot of organizations talk about women, women, women, but they forget all about mothers.

That professor of obstetrics has written articles that say, “Who cares about mothers? Look at the statistics. Often the medical world has forgotten all about mothers.”

Another good thing to be informed about is the presence of obstetric fistula in the developing world. It’s something that disappeared 150 years ago in the developed world but still enormously, shamefully, common in the developing world.

We need to be informed on these issues. Look them up on the Internet. Make more noise about them. Do something for mothers, because we've got to build that civilization of love to transmit values.

John Paul II liked to say that every man coming into the world is entrusted to the care of a woman. She's the one who teaches them how to love. The woman humanizes culture. Every man is entrusted to a mother.

In a document of John Paul II called 'The Mission in the Church and in the World for Lay People” he says, “Every human being is entrusted to each and every other human being, but in a special way the human being is entrusted to a woman, precisely because the woman, in virtue of her special experience of motherhood, is seen to have a specific sensitivity towards the human person” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles laici, Point 51, December 30, 1988).

Other writers have said that the position which women occupy in society is a primary barometer of the cultural and human level of its people.

A famous French saying says that: "The worth of a country can be gauged by the work of its women."

In Christian literature, the most beautiful things are said about women—in Dante, in Shakespeare, in Dickens, in Claudel. A French writer says there's no such thing as an old woman. Any woman at any age, when she is good and when she loves, can give a man a taste of the infinite.

The concept of donna angelica, a woman as an angel, in the Divine Comedy is a typical expression of the Christian concept of womanhood and of motherhood.

In our world today, where radical feminism often looks for the complete abolition of the traditional division of roles between men and women, they reject motherhood and marriage and the family.

Even when a woman can achieve great greatness and recognition in the intellectual and artistic domain, the fact remains that their supreme creativity is to be found in the unique privilege granted them of giving birth to a human person.

Chesterton said, “No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes” (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World).

Good and gentle God, we pray in gratitude for our mothers today and for all the women who have joined with you in the wonder of bringing forth new life. You who became human through a woman, grant to all mothers the courage they need to face the uncertain future that life with children always brings (A Prayer in Gratitude for Our Mothers).

In a recent Apostolic Exhortation on the “Joy of Love”, Pope Francis said, “Motherhood is the fruit of a ‘particular creative potential of the female body, directed to the conception and birth of a new human being.’ Every woman shares in ‘the mystery of creation, which is renewed with each birth’ (John Paul II, Catechesis, March 12, 1980). The Psalmist says: ‘You knit me together in my mother’s womb’ (Ps. 139:13).”

He said, “Every child growing within the mother's womb is part of the eternal loving plan of God the Father: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I consecrated you’ (Jer. 1:5). Each child has a place in God's heart from all eternity; once he or she is conceived, the Creator's eternal dream comes true. Let us pause to think of the great value of that embryo from the moment of conception. We need to see it with the eyes of God, who always looks beyond mere appearances” (Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Point 168, March 19, 2016).

Elsewhere in the same document he says, “With great affection I urge all future mothers: keep happy and let nothing rob you of the interior joy of motherhood. Your child deserves your happiness. Don't let fears, worries, or other people's comments or problems lessen your joy at being God's means of bringing a new life into the world.

“Prepare yourself for the birth of your child, but without obsessing, and join in Mary's song of joy: ‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant’ (Luke 1:46-48). Try to experience this serene excitement amid all your many concerns, and ask the Lord to preserve your joy, so that you can pass it on to your child” (Ibid., Point 171).

He says, “Mothers are the strongest antidote to the spread of self-centered individualism. … It is they who testify to the beauty of life. Certainly, a society without mothers would be dehumanized, for mothers are always, even in the worst of times, witnesses to tenderness, dedication, and moral strength. Mothers often communicate the deepest meaning of religious practice in the first prayers and acts of devotion that their children learn. Without mothers, not only would there be no new faithful, but the faith itself would lose a good part of its simple and profound warmth. … Dear mothers: thank you! Thank you for what you are in your family and for what you give to the Church and the world” (Ibid., Point 174).

Pope St. John Paul says the supreme dignity of the Mother of God puts her in a world apart. She is the great wonder work of God. She stands above all beings in the universe.

Through her vocation, she enjoys an unprecedented intimacy with the three divine Persons. The foundation of the mystery of Mary lies in her divine motherhood. All her privileges are linked to that.

Her divine maternity is an unparalleled privilege. No greater union is possible between humanity and the deity.

Mary, on this day when we honor all mothers, we turn to you. We thank the Lord whom you served for the great gift of motherhood.

Never has it been known that anyone who sought your intercession was left unaided by grace.

Dear Mother, thank you for your Yes to the invitation of the angel, which brought heaven to earth and changed human history. You opened yourself to God's Word “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

Dear Mother, intercede for all our mothers. Ask your Divine Son to give them the grace of surrendered love so that they could join with you in giving their own fiat.

May they find grace and strength to say Yes to the call of sacrificial love, the very heart of the vocation of motherhood. May their love and witness be a source of great inspiration for all of us called to follow your Son.

On this Mother's Day, Mother of the Word Incarnate, pray for us who have recourse to you.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OLV