BENEDICT XVI

Through the Incarnation, God Calls
Us to Friendship with Him
HOMILY AT THE CELEBRATION OF FIRST VESPERS OF THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT FOR UNBORN LIFE. Vatican Basilica, November 27, 2010
ADDRESS DURING THE SOLEMNITY OF THE IMMACULATE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, Rome, December 8, 2010

In this Advent Season we shall be granted once again to experience the closeness of the One who created the world, who guides history and who cared for us to the point of deigning to become a man.
This great and fascinating mystery of the God-with-us, indeed, of the God who becomes one of us, is what we shall celebrate in the coming weeks journeying toward holy Christmas. During the Season of Advent we shall feel the Church which takes us by the hand and–in the image of Mary Most Holy, expresses her motherhood, enabling us to experience the joyful expectation of the coming of the Lord, who embraces us all in His love that saves and consoles. (…)
The Liturgy does not cease to encourage and support us, putting on our lips, in the days of Advent, the cry with which the whole of Sacred Scripture ends, on the last page of the Revelation to St John: “Come, Lord Jesus” (22:20). (…) Precisely, the beginning of the Liturgical Year helps us live anew the expectation of God who took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, God who makes Himself little, who becomes a child; it speaks to us of the coming of a God who is close, who chose to experience human life from the very beginning in order to save it totally, in its fullness. And so the mystery of the Lord’s Incarnation and the beginning of human life are closely and harmoniously connected and in tune with each other in the one saving plan of God, the Lord of the life of each and everyone. The Incarnation reveals to us, with intense light and in a surprising way, that every human life has a very lofty and incomparable dignity.

IN COMPARISON WITH ALL THE other living beings that populate the earth man has an unmistakable originality. He is presented as the one unique being, endowed with intelligence and free will, as well as consisting of material reality. He lives simultaneously and inseparably in both the spiritual and the corporal dimension. (…)
God loves us deeply, totally, and without making distinctions. He calls us to friendship with Him, He makes us part of a reality beyond every imagination and every thought and word: His divine life itself. With feeling and gratitude, let us be aware of the value of every human person’s incomparable dignity and of our great responsibility to all. “Christ, the final Adam,” the Second Vatican Council states, “by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes His supreme calling clear… by His Incarnation, the Son of God has in a certain way united Himself with each man” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
Believing in Jesus Christ also means seeing man in a new way, with trust and hope. Moreover, experience itself and right reason testify that the human being is capable of understanding and of wanting, conscious of himself and free, unrepeatable and irreplaceable, the summit of all earthly realities, and who demands to be recognized as a value in himself and deserves always to be accepted with respect and love. He is entitled not to be treated as an object to be possessed or a thing to be manipulated at will, and not to be exploited as a means for the benefit of others and their interests.
The human person is a good in himself and his integral development must always be sought. (…) This explains the Church’s concern for the unborn, the frailest, those most threatened by the selfishness of adults and the clouding of consciences. (…)
Let us entrust our prayers and our commitment to unborn life to the Virgin Mary, who welcomed the Son of God made man with her faith, with her maternal womb, with her attentive care, with her nurturing support, vibrant with love. Let us do so in the Liturgy–which is the place where we live the truth and where truth lives with us–adoring the divine Eucharist in which we contemplate Christ’s Body, that Body which took flesh from Mary through the action of the Holy Spirit, and was born of her in Bethlehem for our salvation. Ave, verum Corpus, natum de Maria Virgine!
This year too we have arranged to meet here, in Piazza di Spagna, to pay homage to the Immaculate Virgin on the occasion of her solemn Feast. (...)
But when we come here, especially on this occasion of December 8th, what we receive from Mary is far more important than what we offer her. In fact, she gives us a message destined for each one of us, for the City of Rome and for the whole world. I, who am the Bishop of this City, also come to listen, not only for myself, but for everyone. And what does Mary say? She speaks to us with the Word of God who was made flesh in her womb. Her “message” is nothing other than Jesus, the One who is the whole of her life. It is thanks to Him and for Him that she is Immaculate. And just as the Son of God became a man for our sake, so too she, the Mother, was preserved from sin for our sake, for everyone, in anticipation of God’s salvation for every human being.

THUS MARY TELLS US THAT we are all called to open ourselves to the action of the Holy Spirit in order, in our ultimate destiny, to attain an immaculate state, fully and definitively free from evil. She tells us this with her own holiness, with her gaze full of hope and compassion which evokes words such as these: “Do not fear, my child, God loves you; He loves you personally; He thought of you before you came into the world and called you into being to fill you with love and with life; and for this reason He came to meet you, He made Himself like you, He became Jesus, God-man, like you in all things but without sin; He gave Himself for your sake to the point of dying on the Cross, and thus He gave you a new life, free, holy, and immaculate” (cf. Eph 1:3-5).
Mary gives us this message and, when I come here on this Feast, it impresses me because I feel it is addressed to the whole City, to all the men and women who live in Rome: even to those who do not think of it, who do not even remember that today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception; to those who feel lonely and forsaken.
Mary’s gaze is God’s gaze upon each one of us. She looks at us with the Father’s love itself and blesses us. She acts as our “advocate” and we invoke her thus in the Salve Regina: “Advocata nostra”. Even if everyone were to speak badly of us, she, the Mother, would speak well of us because her immaculate Heart is in tune with God’s mercy. So it is that she sees the City: not as an anonymous agglomeration but as a constellation in which God knows each one personally by name, one by one, and calls us to shine with His light. And those who in the world’s eyes are the first, to God are the lowliest; those who are little to God are great.
The Mother looks at us as God looked at her, a humble young girl of Nazareth, insignificant in the world’s eyes but chosen and precious to God. He recognizes in each one his or her likeness to His Son Jesus, even though we are so different! But who knows the power of divine Grace better than her? Who knows better than her that nothing is impossible for God who can even draw good from evil?
This, dear brothers and sisters, is the message we receive here, at the feet of Mary Immaculate. It is a message of trust for every person of this City and of the whole world; a message of hope not made of words but of her history itself. She, a woman of our lineage, who gave birth to the Son of God and shared her whole life with him! And today she tells us: this is also your destiny, your own destiny and the destiny of all: to be holy like our Father, to be immaculate like our Brother Jesus Christ, to be loved children, all adopted in order to form a great family with no boundaries of color or language, because God, Father of every human being, is one.
Thank you, O Mother Immaculate, for being with us always! May you never cease to watch over our City: comfort the sick, encourage the young, and sustain families. Instill in them the strength to reject evil in all its forms and to choose good, even when it comes at a cost and entails going against the tide. Give us the joy to feel loved by God, blessed by Him, predestined to be His children. Immaculate Virgin, our sweetest Mother, pray for us!