The Divine Maternity: "Blessed Is She Who Believed"

This feast of the Mother of God has been moved from October 11 from 431 (The Council of Ephesus) to January 1. It is an important feast of faith that Benedict XVI established for the Year of Faith (2012-2013) within which Benedict resigned the papacy and Francis was elected Pope.

Our Mission: To engender Christ in us by the total giving of ourselves - in obedience - to the Divine Will in the ordinariness of today and tomorrow. 

Caryll Houselander on Divine Maternity 

Our Lady is the protagonist of faith in ordinary life even with pre-eminence over Abraham1
 since she was called to an even greater humility in the actual execution of her Son. Her vocation was the most exceptional: the call to be the mother of God, but in a most unexceptional way. Caryll 
Houselander wrote: “She was not asked to lead a special kind of life, to retire to the temple 
and live as a nun, to cultivate suitable virtues or claim special privileges. She was simply to 
remain in the world, to go forward with her marriage to Joseph, to live the life of an artisan’s 
wife, just what she had planned to do when she had no idea that anything out of the ordinary 
would ever happen to her. It almost seemed as if God’s becoming man and being born of a 
woman were ordinary.” 2

 Houselander then moves to the positive: “The one thing that He did ask of her was 
the gift of her humanity. She was to give Him her body and soul unconditionally, and… she 
was to give Him her daily life… She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love 
for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child On the contrary, the hands and feet, 
the heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form Him in 
service to Joseph… Our Lady said yes. She said yes for us all.”3

- Then: This is how the “quid divinum” referred to by St. Josemaria Escriva freely 
occurs in the most ordinary situations. That is, we discover the “re-incarnation” of 
the Son of God in ourselves performing the most ordinary work and living the most 

1
 ” John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater #18: “At the foot of the Cross Mary shares through faith in the shocking 
mystery of this self-emptying. This is perhaps the deepest ‘kenosis’ of faith’ in human history:” John Paul II, 
Redemptoris Mater #18. 
2
 Caryll Houselander “The Reed of God,” Christian Classics, Notre Dame, IN (2006) 33-35. 
3
 Ibid. ordinary family life in the world. That is, we ourselves become “Ipse Christus” by 
becoming the mother. And we do that by “hearing the Word of God and doing it.”4

This is the meaning of faith. It means becoming Christ and staying where we are in the 
world without changing states. If we do that, by the hand of the Virgin, we will be 
Christ Himself present at the summit of all human activities. There will be “a new 
culture, new legislation, new fashions that respect human dignity.” It will not be a 
sterile lamenting about today’s culture, a criticism of the problems we see around us 
and a nostalgia for a better past. The future belongs to our freedom of being the mother 
of God in 2012 and engendering Jesus Christ in us. 


4
 “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and k