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Mary
When Fr. William Joseph Chaminade, Founder of the Society of Mary,
was exiled from his beloved Bordeaux during the French Revolution,
he went to Saragossa, Spain. There, as a refugee from a war that
threatened to destroy the very fabric of the society and the Church
he loved, he spent many hours in the cathedral before the revered
statue of Our Lady of the Pillar. Kneeling in prayer, this man of
God began to understand deeply the shape of the Christian mystery:
its energy, its pain, and the hope of its Good News.
The shape of the Christian story, he realized, is Jesus. If the
Church of France were to be reborn, it had to re-tell and re-live
the story of Jesus, especially in community. Through believers who
reproduced in their communities and their ministries the faith and
dynamism that had inspired the original Jerusalem community, the
rebirth of the Church could occur.
This image of the Jerusalem community led Father Chaminade to
entrust the thrust of community building and multiplication of
Christians to the inspiration and energy of Mary, the Mother of God.
Although Mary is mentioned few times in the recording of the gospels
for early Christian communities, she was for these communities the
preeminent symbol of Christian discipleship. She is, as the Second
Vatican Council proclaims her, "the first among believers."
Mary is to be for Marianist communities the model of discipleship,
simplicity, and hospitality to both the action of God in her
personal life and the action of God as demonstrated in the
community. Father Chaminade believed if communities adopted these
Marian attitudes, they could recreate the Church of France. Our
"alliance with Mary," as Father Chaminade called it, is to be the
binding force, the energy that will enable communities to become
images of a people of saints -- dynamic images of the Church.
Professed Marianist religious seal and state their commitment and
their constant striving toward these attitudes of Mary at their
perpetual profession by the Vow of Stability. They receive a gold
ring to symbolize this commitment.
As with all of us, the language of Father Chaminade was conditioned
and formed by the theology and spirituality of his time. Our
brothers and sisters in Latin America and South America today speak
to the church community of a new imaging of Mary: the woman who in
her fidelity to her discipleship and her simplicity stands with the
poor and oppressed in the hope of the Magnificat, "that the Most
High God has indeed visited us and is with us. Our God will indeed
remember the promise of mercy, will shine like the dawn from on
high, will bring the haughty low, and raise the poor to new
heights." Mary is for them a radical sign of hope in a world not
unlike the world of Father Chaminade. Each age of the Church will be
given new insight into re-articulating and re-imagining the
unfathomable mystery of God, who chose a woman of the earth to bear
to it, historically and for all ages, Jesus the Christ.
Today communities of men and women, single and married, lay and
religious continue to gather and bind themselves to the image and
energy of Mary as they search to bring Jesus' saving message to each
time and place within communities of hope and communities of faith.
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