Mary, our model of faith

This Saturday we celebrate the feast of St Joachim and St Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Having become a parent myself in the past 12 months, this feast has taken on a new significance for me.

I marvel at the incredible job that Sts Joachim and Anne must have done in raising the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly as regards her faith.

Between sleep deprivation, full-time work (the mortgage still stubbornly refuses to pay itself) and battling the various forms of plague that my daughter brings home from daycare on a weekly basis, my wife and I are operating largely on autopilot.

There is limited time for us to explicitly instruct our daughter in the faith, to say the least.

For some months I was praying the rosary as part of her bedtime “routine” while I attempted to pat her to sleep.

I have now learnt that “shhhhhhhh” is a much more effective sound in bringing about the desired result, so that dulcet noise is now accompanied by silent prayer while I am slumped over the cot, patting away.

All of this is recounted by way of broad-brush illustration: in our contemporary context, transmitting the faith to the next generation is difficult.

We all lead busy lives, the society around us is often inimical to the faith, and our capacity to compete with the cacophony of voices that barrage our children is necessarily limited.

When I attended the National Eucharistic Congress in the United States last year, while standing in the (hours-long) queue to collect my lanyard and bag of materials on the first day, there was plenty of opportunity to talk to the other registered attendees.

Americans being the famously garrulous and friendly people that they are, those around me had soon shared their life stories, and I had the opportunity to quiz them on what they hoped to gain from the congress.

Many of those I spoke to were parents or grandparents and the litany with which they responded to my questions was always a variation on the same theme.

How do we properly pass on the faith to our children and grandchildren?

How do I answer questions about “transgenderism” from a faith perspective, when my teenage son comes home from school and recounts what he was taught that day?

How can we properly articulate our shared belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist to a generation reared on cynicism and scepticism?

There are, of course, no quick and easy answers to any of those questions.

But it is our firm intention that the International Eucharistic Congress in Sydney in 2028 will provide a platform for parents, grandparents, educators and children to discuss their concerns and share their own faith-informed approaches.

St Joachim and St Anne managed to raise their daughter in such a way that, as a teenage girl, she was responsive enough to the will of God to say, “Let it be done unto me according to Thy word.” (Luke 1:38)

And that is why the Blessed Virgin is our true model of faith, not Jesus.

Jesus cannot be the subject of Christian faith because he is its object.

Nowhere in the New Testament is faith attributed to Jesus.

Jesus is the “founder and perfecter of faith” (Hebrews 12:2), the one on whom our faith depends from beginning to end.

But he is not one of the believers.

Faith is a relation between God and man as person to person, but Jesus is God and man in the same person.

He cannot relate to the Father through faith because he relates to him through nature.

Thus our model of faith is his blessed mother, Mary.

There is a reason the theme of the 1928 IEC in Sydney was “The Madonna and the Eucharist.”

It is our hope that, as we all join in silent adoration of her son at the 2028 IEC in Sydney, it is her example that ultimately speaks to our sons and daughters.

As Sts Joachim and Anne undoubtedly understood, raising our families in the faith is ultimately about fostering receptivity to the workings of grace and encouraging one another to become “cooperators of the truth” (the papal motto of Benedict XVI).

Mary is our model in that cooperation.

She had to say “yes” to the incarnation before Christ could say “yes” to the crucifixion.

If you would like more information on the Eucharistic Congress in 2028, or to be added to the mailing list for updates, please email: iec2028@sydneycatholic.org