The feast of Our Lady Help of Christians was instituted by Pius VII in thanksgiving for his return to Rome after being imprisoned by Napoleon.
Newsroom (25/05/2022 10:53, Gaudium Press) How extreme, discreet, and devoted Our Lady’s presence is at each of our sides! However, it is difficult for us to always keep in mind the immensity of Mary’s mercy. In our misery, we are often those who do not believe because we do not see.
We don’t doubt, but we forget the graces we have received in this regard. Tempted, we are led to think: “This happened to me, this happened to me, that happened to me, I asked Our Lady for help and was not helped. Will I be helped now? Sure, She is the Mother of mercy, but sometimes I don’t feel her help…”
More than ever, at such times, we must say, “Help of Christians, pray for us!” When we don’t understand a situation and don’t know how to get out of it, what is going to happen to us, etc., we need to repeat with insistence: “Mary, Help of Christians! Mary, Help of Christians! Mary, Help the Christians!”
For the Mother of God, every problem has a solution. Sometimes we don’t see it, but She is already giving the case a monumental and favorable outcome.
Wrong View of charity
In today’s world, it is not unusual for someone to get carried away with the idea that relationships should be based exclusively on an exchange of rights and duties. In other words, each man has certain rights that imply duties for others toward him. Once these rights are respected, man has his needs met.
According to this mentality, all human relations would be reduced to a system of checks. Therefore, the act of kindness, of charity, of love for one’s neighbor, entirely gratuitous, has no reason to exist.
If a person transposes this way of looking at things to the supernatural order, he will say, “I don’t understand God’s mercy toward me, for He is willing to forgive me and help me, even when I don’t like Him. If I have done wrong, let Him punish me, for that is the logical attitude. Charity, kindness… are meaningless. I base my actions on my rights, which God must attend to.
Now, this is not the mentality with which we should consider our earthly life, and even less our life of piety, our relationship with God.
God has loved us freely, and He wants us to love Him too. We are burdened with debts, and the only way to pay them off is to manifest this love and worship to God.
Secondly, by humbly understanding that we need divine help, as a son depends on his father, without making great accounts, but receiving everything from Him – I would say – with a kind of holy semi-ceremoniousness.
Our Lady Help of Christians
With this presupposition, we better understand the foundation of the title of Our Lady Help of Christians. For what is said of God’s infinite goodness toward us, we must say of Mary’s unfathomable solicitude for her children.
She helps us at every moment, granting us mercy and favors to which we have no right, and she grants us all this with a superabundance of love, smiles, and forgiveness, often giving us what we did not ask for, or more than we begged for, and even moving our hearts to accept benefits we did not want to receive.
Therefore, the whole idea of Our Lady’s help is pervaded by the principle that the relationship between man and God is based not only on justice, but to a very large extent on mercy, on generosity without limits, on benevolence, and on the gratuitousness of favors.
All the more reason to never stop invoking Her: Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
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