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Thy Kingdom Come!
To the Regnum Christi members
Dear fathers and brothers and friends,
On this solemnity of Our Lady of Sorrows, I send each one of you my greetings and prayers for your intentions, your families, and your apostolic mission.
Today the Church invites us to contemplate, from the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the triumph of her Son on the cross, in order to draw all men to himself. We are also invited to venerate the Mother who shares in his sorrow. The compassion of Mary, who remained faithful at the foot of the cross, can give us many lessons to better answer our call to be apostles of the Kingdom, to announce the merciful love of Christ and to invite others to let themselves be won over by him and therefore become his apostles. I am writing to you to share some of these lessons that seem especially important to me.
Today’s gospel describes one of the decisive moments of our salvation with a few quick brushstrokes, “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother´s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. Seeing his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his home” (Jn 19:25-27).
Contemplating Mary at the foot of the cross helps us to understand the reality of human pain and suffering, with our heart and with our faith, in all of its dimensions. All of us have a personal experience of sorrow in our own lives. The Blessed Virgin Mary, who suffered when she saw her Son being hurt, invites us to lift our gaze and to discover so many suffering members of the mystical body. If we look ahead, we can discover around us the sick and the elderly, the unemployed, men and women with marriage difficulties or difficulties with one of their children, orphans, widows, people wounded by life, people with broken ideals, prisoners, victims of violence, of wars, of persecution, of solitude, of fidelity to their own consciences, and maybe also of our own indifference…
Today too Jesus Christ crucified wishes to comfort those who are going through the valley of sorrow and who, maybe with tears in their eyes, raise to God that question that is so human and so dramatic, “Why?”
Jesus responds from the cross, sometimes even in an almost unperceivable way, inviting those who suffer to help in the work of redemption by participating in his own suffering, doing good with Christ through suffering. (cf. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, n. 26).
But if human pain is like an invitation from Christ to complete what is lacking in his passion, the presence of the Mother of Sorrows on Calvary becomes a challenge for every one of us: what you have done to the smallest of my brothers, you have done to me (see Mt 25:40). It is a call to feel the pain of souls with Christ; to feel it with Mary who is the Mother of all people. She invites us not to close our eyes to suffering, but to have pity, show mercy, do good to those who suffer. With her example, she urges us to look with faith at the brother or sister who suffers and she opens before them the horizons of the Kingdom, this Kingdom that is made present through service and charity. Sometimes the only thing that can be done will be to accompany others with prayer and being discreetly close to them. But also often much more can be done.
Our Lady of Sorrows, at the foot of the cross, teaches us to be audacious in charity, to “touch the suffering flesh of Christ,” as Pope Francis likes to repeat. Mary invites us to shake off our indifference and to get to work, to know how to put our own worries aside, just as the good Samaritan did: to pause, to become interested in others, to cure wounds, to pour the balm of charity, to accompany, to know how to be there for others, and if necessary, how to ask for forgiveness.
Mary’s charity at the foot of the cross also has a dimension that we can forget: She did not want to be Christ’s only consolation, but rather she let John and the other women accompany her to learn from the Lord how to love together. Those who invite us to conquer our natural fears of suffering and to seek to alleviate them in our neighbor do us so much good! John, thanks to Mary, was there to see the Heart pierced by the lance, and to experience God’s love personally, and to announce it with passion.
Pain in one’s own life and in that of others can also darken our horizons. I am very comforted by the thought of Mary. She saw her Son dying like a criminal as the angel’s words echoed in her heart, “He will be great… he will reign… he will be seated on the throne of David… he will be called the son of the Most High.” I imagine her fighting as a believer, upright, while the foundations of her faith were shaken. She trusted in the Word of God, independently from what she perceived with her eyes. She trusted that God is faithful and repeated her “be it done unto me according to thy word.”
The Virgin Mary invites us to face sorrow together with her, full of faith and Christian hope. She encourages us to trust more in the Lord than in our own strength. She encourages us to do what we can to follow God’s plan with the certainty that we will not be short on grace. Mary remains standing next to her Son and becomes a model of hope for us. She reminds us that the greatness of a man or woman – or of all of society – “is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer,” (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 38) and she asks us to allow her to accompany us and to help us to give meaning to the crosses of our life.
I will leave these reflections here, and I invite you to imitate Mary, who was standing next to the cross of Christ, so that like her and with her we pause before all the crosses of the men of today to help. May this be a characteristic of all the apostles of the Kingdom, that they do not fear going to the existential outskirts.
I assure you of my prayers and I ask you for yours,
Fr. Eduardo Robles-Gil LC
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