Our Lady of Peace

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 are told in the Gospel today, “Every kingdom divided against itself…cannot stand” (Matt. 12:25). It's a statement of unity.

Today is also the Feast of Our Lady of Peace, the title entrusted to the Prelatic Church. It’s very appropriate that we talk a little bit about unity, and we ask Our Lady Queen of Peace to give us a greater spirit of unity and a greater spirit of peace in our souls.

That building, Our Lady Queen of Peace, was given that particular title by St. Josemaría.

He could have given it many other titles. But it is as though he wanted us to be very united to him and to that Prelatic Church in it through Our Lady Queen of Peace, so that everything in our life gives us a deep interior peace, a peace that can only come from God (John 14:27).

And so, today is a very good day to ask Our Lady for that interior peace, and also, for all the things that the Father has in his mind and heart, all the things that he brings to that Prelatic Church, a center of unity.

It's a church that has witnessed many special events, including the funeral of St. Josemaría and of the successors.

It was built at a difficult time, a place of pilgrimage for us both spiritually and physically. It contains many special things of the history of the Work, including the remains of Our Father, Don Álvaro, Don Javier, Dora.

Our Lady is the Queen of Peace. It's a very special title. We refer to her by this title every day in the Litany. We ask Our Lady for that grace of peace, that we might always reflect that peace.

But it doesn't mean that we feel peaceful. The peace that we're talking about is not a genetic peace, a chemical peace. It's an ascetical peace.

There are some people, that you would explode a bomb beside them, they wouldn't even blink. That's not the sort of peace we're talking about.

In the biography of Don Álvaro, there is a statement there which says this: The virtues that Don Álvaro reflected, that people commented on, were very often his humility, his cheerfulness, and his peace.

Often, high-ranking officials of the Curia would say that whenever they went to a meeting, they said they never came away with less peace than when they went. They came to a transmitted peace.

But then Salvador Bernal, the biographer, adds a special detail which says: You could see that it was “an acquired peace.” An acquired peace, not a genetic or a chemical peace, something you'd only work at over time.

There was a Cooperator once in Singapore who used to travel a lot in the world and liked to visit centers of the Work.

One time, he came back from (he worked in the government), and he came back from some of his trips and said, “I have discovered what it is that makes all the members of Opus Dei similar.

Of course, St. Josemaría had told us that none of us are similar; we're all very different. So I was rather curious to find out what it was that this person had discovered.

He said, “It's their peace.”

Now if you ask any member of Opus Dei anywhere in the world: Do they feel peaceful? Sometimes it's the last thing that they'll tell you that they feel, because they've got to get their norms done, they've got to do something impossible, they've got to finish jobs in their work, they're trying to run a club, they have to call their mother, they have to do this, that, and the other, they've got to-do lists as long as a mile, and it's not exactly the first thing that they feel.

But really, what this person was saying was that deep down in their heart and soul, there is a profound peace, as though God is there in their soul, in their heart. The work of grace in our soul.

We ask Our Lady to be that Queen of that reality inside us. The Entrance Antiphon of Our Lady the Queen says, “The Queen stands at your right hand arrayed in cloth of gold” (Ps. 45:9).

It's all the beautiful titles we give to Our Lady that she’s our Queen. We ask her to reign over everything that we do.

Here in this center, while we do many, many things, and possibly, we don't see the fruit of everything we do. That's part of the equation.

We sow enough of seeds, and maybe those seeds will germinate in the souls and hearts and minds of the people we're dealing with in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years' time.

We're building for the future with our words, with our example, with our activity. But we know it's faith, that every soul is important.

Every single person that comes through the door to this cultural center of apostolic formation goes away with something. That something is in the mind and heart of God.

Our Lady wants us to be filled with a great peace—peace in the assurance that all the efforts that we make will be repaid a hundredfold.

“If you, evil as you are,” we're told in Scripture, “know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask?” (Luke 11:13).

There's a lot to add to that word, “more.” Our Queen is there, more or less standing over that “more.”

She asked her Son for the miracle at Cana in Galilee (John 2:1-11). She didn't really ask for it; she made a statement: “They have no wine.”

But there's a great superabundance of what Our Lord did—many jars, filled to the brim, contained gallons and gallons.

Our Lady didn't ask for gallons and gallons; and she didn't ask for the most exclusive of wines; any ordinary thing would have done, any little amount for just getting over the hump. But there's a superabundance in what Our Lord did.

We could ask Our Lady to help us to dream of that superabundance, the great fruits that have become in all the souls who pass through here, that will have their impact on families and society. We can't really grasp the greatness of what we're involved in.

We go forward day by day with faith, entrusting every single little effort to the Queen, and asking her at the same time that we might be filled with a great peace, irrespective of what may be happening on the surface of the sea of our life.

We find that peace through our unity. We're just doing what we're told, being united to the Father, united to the Prelatic Church and everything that takes place there.

In the Opening Prayer of that Mass, it says, “You have given us the Mother of your Son to be our Queen and Mother.”

The Queen is a very powerful person, the Mother of the King. We can turn to her at any moment and ask her for things, entrust to her all those seeds that we sow with this activity and that activity.

T. S. Eliot has a phrase—there was a meeting of priests in Singapore one time and one rather well-read priest stood up to say something. I can't remember what topic we were talking about, but he quoted T. S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot has a phrase where he says, “Ours is only the trying. The rest is none of our business” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: East Coker).

In all our apostolic endeavors, we respect, “Ours is only the trying.” We do what we can. We “launch out into the deep” (Luke 5:4). We sow the seeds. We give the formation.

The rest is “none of our business.” It's in the hands of God. It's in the hands of the Queen.

But at the same time, Our Lady the Queen wants us to be asking and asking for the great things that we want—vocations—but to remain with a great peace because we know that Our Lady the Queen is taking care of it.

In the Preface of the Mass for Our Lady, we’re told, “In celebrating the memory of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it is our special joy to echo her song of thanksgiving. What wonders you have worked throughout the world!

“All generations have shared the greatness of your love. When you looked on Mary, your lowly servant, you raised her to be the Mother of Jesus Christ, your Son, Our Lord, the Savior of all mankind.”

So, we thank Our Lord for this great Queen that we have.

Don Javier, in one of his letters, said, “In calling us to share in his intimate life, God has incorporated us to the infinite communion of love that exists in the heart of the Trinity” (Javier Echevarría, Letter of the Prelate, January 1, 2007).

“Infinite communion of love,” which brings with it a great gaudium cum pace–joy with peace–that can be present in everything that we do.

“Since then, and right to the end of time,” he says, “he pours out through the Church, God's family on earth, his love, joy, and peace.”

Peace is a great goal to which we can aspire. Pope Benedict says, “Peace is the goal to which the whole of humanity aspires!” (Benedict XVI, Homily, December 2, 2006).

Everybody who comes into the center—in some ways they're looking for peace, peace in their heart, peace in their soul. And we transmit it with the atmosphere of this house and the things we do.

Pope Benedict says, “‘Peace is one of God's most beautiful names’” (Ibid.). Everybody wants peace.

There may be people around us—in our workplace, in our family environment—that need a bit more peace—maybe not just deep interior peace, but perhaps peace in their life, peace in their mind, peace in their family, peace in their work, peace in their nerves.

When they need a bit more than others, we could ask Our Lady: I need peace for them today.

Pope Benedict says, “He ‘came to instill peace’ (Eph. 2:17), not only between Jews and non-Jews, but between all nations, since all have their origin in the same God, the one Creator and Lord of the universe” (Benedict XVI, Homily, November 29, 2006).

Often, we hear how the United Nations may send peacekeepers to different places to keep the peace in different countries. But we're not just peacekeepers; we are peacemakers.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9).

“If peace,” he says, “is the aspiration of every person of good will, for Christ's disciples it is a permanent mandate that involves all; it is a demanding mission that impels them to announce and witness to ‘the Gospel of peace’” (Benedict XVI, Homily, January 1, 2006).

So, every little talk that we give, every Circle that we transmit, every time we invite people, or sit down with each individual person, in some ways, we're transmitting this message of peace—transmitting truth and doctrine and beauty and love.

It's a great mission. There's no greater mission that we could be involved in. Something very wonderful.

Why do we sow seeds? We don't see the fruit; we don't know what it is going to bring. But we do know that those fruits will come.

In the last few weeks, I was given a book entitled The History of the Diocese of Kitui, which I've just finished. Really, it's a very beautiful story.

Missionaries went there in the 1950s. The book is subtitled From Bishop Dunne to Bishop Lele in 1996, so it covers about 50 years.

It describes the aridity, the little rain. There was very little evangelization down there before the missionaries came. Sometimes the nearest priest was fourteen miles away walking.

Transport arrangements improved when they caught a donkey. The next priest was another sixteen miles.

Sometimes people tried to be helpful, but they weren't very helpful. One priest describes how he went to relieve another missionary in a certain parish, and he was told, This man now is the factotum around her; he's the guy who knows everything. He can organize anything for you. You can rely on him.

The following day he had to go to a distant outstation to say Mass. He found that this particular man, who was supposed to know everything, had filled the tank of the car with water, and not with petrol. All sorts of contradictions arise.

In one particular parish, one particular place that was very distant from one part of the area, the missionary … This book is compiled on notes from the missionaries. It's very lively, because it's full of anecdotes; particular histories of particular people.

This person had written in his diary that “it will take a million years before Christianity influences these people.”

The author of this book, who lives there, Fr. PJ McCamphill SPS, told me, “You know, two months ago the new bishop of Kitui, Bishop Mwongela, opened a parish in that town.”

He was saying, “It didn't take a million years; it just took a couple of decades.” Sometimes we have to be very patient in our apostolate, very peaceful.

You might think we're sowing in very arid land, but enormous fruits are to come. The book tells how after fifty years, now there are 220 primary schools, and there are 26 secondary schools, and 19 parishes, and two hospitals, etc., etc., etc., and something like 70 priests in the diocese, and 20 or 30 seminarians.

There's just no comparison with what it was fifty years previously. It's a beautiful story. Of course, this is what the missionaries of the Church have done all over the world. They've changed the world, they've changed society.

We are missionaries in the middle of the world, called to do similar things. While all these people were sowing the seeds, not knowing where those seeds would fall, or what the fruits would come, now you look back and you see something unbelievable.

As we sow and witness to this “Gospel of peace” (Eph. 6:15), we know we're sowing treasures in the hearts and souls of these young people to build a whole new society.

St. Bernard writes, “Now our peace is not promised but sent to us. It is not deferred, but granted; not prophesied, but achieved. It is as if God the Father has sent upon the earth a sackful of his mercy, which will burst open during the Lord's passion to pour forth its hidden contents—the price of our redemption.

“It was only a small sack, but it was very full. As Scripture tells us: ‘A little child has been given to us, but in him dwells all the fullness of the divine nature (Col. 2:9)’” (St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon).

We can be peaceful, united to the mind and heart of St. Josemaría and the successors of that Prelatic Church, because we know all the wonderful things that have come to be in the last hundred years will have to come to be again in the coming hundred years.

We're building for the future, and the hundred years that have passed will have many lessons to tell us.

If God has given us so many great things in the past, what will He not give us in the future?

This coming Saturday, I've been invited to a celebratory mass in Msongari for 100 years of the Loreto sisters in Kenya.

As always, there's an awful lot to be learned from their histories. They came here in 1921 from South Africa, I think, and before that from India and Australia, just three or four people, and they changed the whole society.

They started their schools, and then they realized there was no school for African girls. They started Limuru, the first school for African girls in the whole of East Africa.

It's an enormous thing when you think about it: the impact that was going to happen. Great women have done great things. They've changed society, changed our way of being and thinking.

They talked about how they talked to the local chiefs to try and encourage their daughters to come for education. The chiefs ordered some of their daughters to come, maybe ten or fifteen of them, very reluctant.

They didn't know what education was. Women had never been educated before. Within a week, they all ran away.

So the whole enterprise started with, you could say, a great failure. But on that then, they built the future.

Then, more students came. They taught in English. They spoke to them in English. That's why the early people had very little Swahili. They wanted their girls to learn English. They saw this was the future.

They built up that school, and eventually they were able to get them to the level of taking the Cambridge Exam. When they sent the papers off to England, they kept a carbon copy of the answers of the girls, in case the ship went down.

Nothing was to stand in the way of the education of these girls. Beautiful little anecdotes.

It's usually the mentality of these pioneers, how focused they were, how committed they were, how they loved what they were doing. How they sowed—they sowed with a great peace.

From all of those people, among them came Wangarĩ Maathai, as well as thousands of others who went on to found great Christian families on the basis of today's society.

We have great people who went before us. Now they look back on a hundred years, and we're also beginning to start to look back on a hundred years.

“Peace I leave you, my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27).

The joy and peace that we get from the seeds that we sow, from the lives that we lead, is something that this world cannot give.

Queen of Peace, come and sow those seeds of peace in my soul, irrespective of what may be happening.

Gaudium et Spes says, “That earthly peace which comes from love of our fellow man is a type and a result of the peace of Christ issuing from God the Father. The incarnate Son himself, the Prince of Peace, reconciled all men to God through his cross. … In his own flesh, he killed hatred; and after he had risen, he poured out the spirit of charity into the hearts of men.”

The peace of God completely transcends the earthly peace. Christ is our peace. We come to the tabernacle to find our peace. We draw peace from Christ, from His real presence.

Cor Iesus sacratissimum et misericors, dona nobis pacem. If ever on some occasion we need a bit more peace, we'll know where to get it. We know that Christ is the go-to person when we need peace.

Then often, we need a little bit more peace in our souls, as we bring things to Him and leave things in His hands.

When I was being toured around the Vatican Gardens one time with the UNIV group, by a Clotidian priest precisely, who was the secretary of John Paul II.

Somebody said, “When the Pope appears on the balcony in public places, he looks so peaceful. And yet he has all the problems of the Church on his shoulders. How does he manage that?”

The secretary said, “He doesn't carry those problems with him. He leaves all of them at the tabernacle, at the foot of the Cross, and carries on.

Peace is the result of an interior order. The consequence of order is peace. We try to impose order in our life, in our schedules, in our wardrobes, in our drawers, in our cabinets.

In every aspect of our life, we try and place order, and that helps us to have a greater peace and order in our lives, because we know what we should be doing, and we know what we should be doing next, because we have a to-do list.

That helps us to see the number one thing that I should be focusing on in this hour, in this period of the day; what is most urgent, what is most important.

That peace is often a consequence of our humility, a confidence in God, a divine filiation. We are children of God. Therefore, we leave everything in His hands.

A parish priest told a story of a four-year-old girl who was to come into this church, standing in front of the image of Our Lady, and moved her lips.

He was rather curious about this little girl. She was a bit too young to know any prayers, but she would come every day, and she would stand in front of Our Lady and move her lips.

One day, curiosity got the better of him, and he went over to her and said, “What prayers do you say when you come in here like this?”

“Oh, I don't know any prayers. I just know the alphabet. So, I recite the alphabet and I say to Our Lady, you arrange the letters in the way that you want. You untangle all this alphabet and these words.”

We come to Our Lady, we leave things in her hands.

Mothers and queens are there to untangle and disentangle things—little knots get placed here and there, and plaits in the hair, and other things that mothers disentangle.

We lose our peace through pride, through anger, through impatience, when we're not able to see the providential hand of God in all that happens to us.

Mary, help me to see that my pride gets a bit too much. A fast temper can be fast pride.

Or when I need to be a bit more patient—patient with life, patient with the world, patient with my work, patient with other people, patient with every little aspect of the world around me—because I see the providential hand of God working, at times at a very fast pace, but at times also at a very slow pace.

Sometimes, God's pace is the slow pace. He wants us to go slowly, finish things well, to make sure we have the full picture of what's happening around us.

The humble Confession of our sins can be the greatest way to recover our peace, if ever we've lost it a little bit, or fail to correspond to the graces that God gives us.

We get a great peace in our soul, as opposed to the loneliness, or the anxiety, or the sadness that may be in the soul when we don't correspond as well as we should, or in the way that we should.

We love that sacrament and promote it as much as possible, so that many other people can find their peace.

In the Furrow, we're told, “As soon as you truly abandon yourself in the Lord, you will know how to be content with whatever happens. You will not lose your peace if your undertakings do not turn out the way you had hoped, even if you put everything into them and used all the means necessary. For they will have ‘turned out’ the way God wants them to” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 860).

We know that wonderful prayer of St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

There was a documentary on the BBC about the, it's called the Thatcher Years, very impressive years, I think it was thirteen or fifteen years, she was Prime Minister.

Throughout this, there's an interview with her, and then she had a lot of enemies within her own political party. She says something, and then they allow one of her enemies to comment on what she has said, so it's very entertaining, very interesting.

But one of the moments is when she's standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street. This is a very special moment in British history, because this is the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

She was asked by the journalists: As you stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street, what is going through your mind?

She said, I asked my PR person what to say on this historic moment. He recommended to me to “tell people that you were praying the Prayer of St. Francis.”

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon.”

She went through the whole prayer.

Then they go to her opponent in the Tory party and they say, “This is total nonsense, she never made peace with anybody. Her whole history was a history of war, fighting, contradiction, etc., etc.” It was quite amusing, the whole comment.

But, we ask Our Lord to make us instruments of His peace.

“Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light.”

Our Lord stood up in the boat in the midst of this great storm and spoke to the elements who had become like children, a bit too noisy at play: “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 37-41).

“O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

Mary is the Queen of Peace, a new peace in our hearts, a peace that we can give to many other people.

Don Javier said, “Let us go to her intercession filled with trust, placing in her hands our personal struggle for sanctity and our prayer for peace. Our Lady, Regina Pacis, will obtain from Jesus, “the Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6), this divine gift so longed for by souls, by the Church, and by the whole world” (Javier Echevarría, Letter of the Prelate, January 1, 2007).

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.

EW