A reflection for Saturday of Our Lady — Sanctæ Mariæ Sabbato, IV classis (7 November), Sabbato infra Hebdomadam XXIII post Octavam Pentecostes, I. Novembris
This is the first Saturday of November. The month belongs to the dead. A week ago the Church kept the vigil of All Saints. On Monday she put on black for All Souls. Since then she has prayed every day for the souls still being purified, and through tomorrow the faithful who visit a cemetery and pray for the departed may gain the indulgence she grants to help them. Into the middle of this week of remembering, the Church sets the Saturday Mass of Our Lady, Salve, sancta Parens. The day is free in the General Calendar, so the Saturday belongs to her. The Roman Martyrology today recalls St. Willibrord, the English monk who carried the Gospel to the Frisians and died at Echternach. Many keep this day too as the first of the month’s First Saturdays, a day of reparation offered to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
All these strands meet in one question that November puts to every Christian: what lasts? The grass withers and the flower falls. The names on the stones in the cemetery wear away. Families forget. What is there in a human life that does not pass?
Today’s Mass answers with a single word. The Gospel calls blessed those who hear the word of God and keep it. The Epistle tells us what kind of word that is. It is a Wisdom that says of herself, usque ad futurum sæculum non desinam: “unto the world to come I shall not cease to be.”
The ferias of this week have repeated the Mass of the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, whose own day was taken by All Saints. It is worth holding that Mass beside today’s. Its Gospel shows two women in a crowd: one who touched the hem of the Lord’s garment and was healed, and a ruler’s daughter who lay dead until He said, “the girl is not dead, but sleepeth” (Matt. 9:24). Today’s Gospel also gives us a woman in a crowd. She did not touch the Lord. She lifted up her voice.
I. Usque ad futurum sæculum non desinam: the Epistle
“From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be, and in the holy dwelling place I have ministered before him. And so was I established in Sion, and in the holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the portion of my God his inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of saints.” (Ecclus. 24:14-16)
A Wisdom with no end. Wisdom speaks here of two horizons. Behind her lies ab initio et ante sæcula, “from the beginning, and before the world.” Before her lies usque ad futurum sæculum, “unto the world to come.” She stands at both ends of time. Everything between, the whole span in which men are born, labour and die, is held between her beginning and her endlessness.
The Fathers heard in these words the voice of the eternal Son. St. Cyprian, gathering the Old Testament witnesses to Christ for his friend Quirinus (Ad Quirinum II.1), sets this chapter of Ecclesiasticus among the texts that show Christ to be the Wisdom of God, the one who “came out of the mouth of the most High” (Ecclus. 24:5). St. Paul says the same thing plainly: Christ is “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). And Our Lord says it of His own teaching: “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass” (Matt. 24:35).
So the first claim of the Epistle is this: the Word of God does not pass. It was before the world, and it will be after the world. Isaias put it in the language of the fields: “The grass is withered, and the flower is fallen: but the word of our Lord endureth for ever” (Is. 40:8). St. Peter repeats the prophet and adds, “this is the word which by the gospel hath been preached unto you” (1 Pet. 1:25). In November, when the Church makes us look at the grass and the fallen flower, this is the consolation she gives first. There is one thing in the world that does not wither, and it has been spoken to us.
Why the Church gives these words to Mary. The Church reads this Wisdom-text in the Masses and Office of Our Lady because the eternal Wisdom, when He entered time, chose a dwelling. “He that made me, rested in my tabernacle” (Ecclus. 24:12). That tabernacle was the Virgin. The Gradual of the day sings it: Virgo, Dei Genitrix, quem totus non capit orbis, in tua se clausit viscera factus homo. “O Virgin Mother of God, He whom the whole world cannot contain, being made man, enclosed Himself in thy womb.” The Wisdom that has no end was, for nine months, held within a creature.
There is a quiet word at the close of the reading that is easy to pass over: detentio mea. “My abode,” the Douay translates it. But the Latin means a holding, a being kept fast. In plenitudine sanctorum detentio mea: “in the fullness of the saints I am held.” Eternal Wisdom consents to be held. He was held first in Mary’s womb, then in her arms, then in her heart. In the end He is held in the whole assembly of the saints, who keep Him and are kept by Him for ever. That word, held, is the bridge to the Gospel.
II. Beati qui custodiunt: the Gospel
“At that time, as Jesus was speaking to the multitudes, a certain woman from the crowd, lifting up her voice, said to him: Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck. But he said: Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.” (Luke 11:27-28)
A voice from the crowd. The woman in the Sunday Gospel touched the Lord in silence. The woman in today’s Gospel speaks aloud. Both come out of a crowd. Both do what the crowd does not. St. Ambrose, commenting on St. Luke’s account of the woman who touched the hem (Expositio in Lucam VI, on Luke 8:43-48), observes in substance that the crowd pressed upon Christ, but only faith touched Him. Many were near Him in the body. One reached Him by believing.
Today the crowd is listening, and many are disputing. Some had just said that He cast out devils by Beelzebub (Luke 11:15). St. Bede, in the commentary the Church reads at Matins on the feasts of Our Lady (In Lucæ Evangelium expositio IV), sees in this woman a figure of the Catholic Church. While the Lord’s enemies slandered Him, she confessed, in great faith, that He was truly born of a woman and nursed at a woman’s breast. Her cry is a profession of the real Incarnation. The Wisdom that was before the ages really took flesh, and the flesh was taken from a real mother.
The early writers saw the force of this. Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, who would not allow that Christ had a true body born of Mary, points to this very scene (Adversus Marcionem IV.26). The Lord does not deny the womb or the breasts, he argues in substance. He could not turn away the praise of a mother He did not have; He shows rather where the greater blessing lies.
“Yea rather.” That is the heart of the Gospel. The Vulgate’s word is quinimmo: not “no,” but “yes, and more.” The Lord does not take back the woman’s blessing. He opens it. St. Cyril of Alexandria, preaching on this passage to his people (Commentarius in Lucam, on 11:27-28), explains in substance that Christ confirms the praise of His Mother and then extends the blessing to all who receive His word, so that what was given to one by nature might be shared by many through faith and obedience.
St. Augustine gives the classic statement of why this is no lowering of Mary. In his book On Holy Virginity (ch. 3) he teaches, in substance, that her motherly nearness to Christ would have profited her nothing had she not borne Him more happily in her heart than in her flesh. She is the most blessed of those who hear and keep, and therefore her womb is blessed. St. Luke had already told us twice what kind of hearer she was: “Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19), and again, “his mother kept all these words in her heart” (Luke 2:51). The verb of the Infancy narrative and the verb of today’s Gospel are the same act. She kept. The Lord blesses those who keep.
What it means to keep. The Latin custodire is a guard’s word. It is what a sentry does at a gate, or a steward with a treasure. To keep the word of God is more than to remember it. It is to guard it against the things that would carry it off: the cares of the world, the noise of the crowd, the slow erosion of forgetting. Our Lord described those enemies in the parable of the sower, which St. Luke places just before this scene (Luke 8:11-15). The good ground, He said, is those who “in a good and very good heart, hearing the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit in patience.” Mary is the first and best of that good ground.
St. Bede draws out what follows for us. Those who conceive the Word by the hearing of faith, he says in substance, and bring Him to birth in the hearts of others by their words and example, may in their own way be called mothers of Christ. The blessing of the womb that bore Him passes, by the Lord’s own “yea rather,” to every soul that keeps His word.
The Communion verse. The Church takes up the woman’s cry at the altar: Beata viscera Mariæ Virginis, quæ portaverunt æterni Patris Filium. “Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary, which bore the Son of the eternal Father.” It is sung while the faithful receive the very Son whom that womb bore. In that moment the communicant holds, for a time, what she held. The Wisdom who said in plenitudine sanctorum detentio mea consents once more to be held, and asks only to be kept.
III. The Mass as a whole: what is kept, keeps
The Thomistic pattern of exitus and reditus, all things going forth from God and returning to Him, gives this Mass its shape.
The exitus is in the Epistle. Wisdom goes forth from before the ages and enters time. She seeks a resting place among men, finds it in Sion, and at last finds it perfectly in the Virgin. The Word who cannot pass enters a world in which everything passes. He takes flesh that can die, from a mother who could die.
The reditus is in the Gospel. The Word returns to God through those who keep it, and here is the November mystery: what is kept, keeps. The soul that guards the word of God is guarded by it. Because the Word does not pass, the one who holds Him is carried beyond the passing of things. “If any man keep my word,” the Lord says elsewhere, “he shall not see death for ever” (John 8:51). The same verb again.
Our Lady shows the end of that road. She kept the Word perfectly, and she was kept perfectly. In 1950 Pope Pius XII defined, in the constitution Munificentissimus Deus, that the Immaculate Mother of God, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. She who held the Word that does not pass did not see the corruption of the grave. St. Paul’s words in last Sunday’s Epistle are fulfilled in her first: Christ “will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory” (Phil. 3:21). What He did for her at once, He promises to all who keep His word, at the resurrection.
This is why the Mass of Our Lady belongs inside the month of the dead. The holy souls in Purgatory heard the word of God and kept it, but not perfectly. They are being made fit for the fullness of the saints where Wisdom is held. We help them by our prayers and by the Sacrifice. And when we look at Mary, we see what they are being brought toward. The Church’s word for the dead in Christ is “blessed.” The Epistle of the daily Mass for the departed says: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Apoc. 14:13). It is the same beati the Lord spoke from the crowd. Blessed are they who hear and keep. Blessed are the dead who die in Him. These are one blessing, seen at two ends of a life.
IV. The Collect and the Postcommunion
Concede nos famulos tuos, quæsumus, Domine Deus, perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere: et gloriosa beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis intercessione, a præsenti liberari tristitia, et æterna perfrui lætitia.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord God, that we Thy servants may rejoice in continual health of mind and body; and by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary ever Virgin, be delivered from present sorrow, and enjoy eternal gladness.”
The Collect asks for perpetua mentis et corporis sanitas, continual health of mind and body. The Church never prays for the soul alone. In November that small phrase carries weight. We pray for health of body knowing the body will die, because we believe the body will rise. Mary, assumed body and soul, is the pledge that the prayer is not in vain. And the passage the Collect asks for, a præsenti tristitia to æterna lætitia, from present sorrow to eternal gladness, is the passage every soul in Purgatory is making now.
The Postcommunion, said after the Word has been received, asks for protection:
Sumptis, Domine, salutis nostræ subsidiis: da, quæsumus, beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis patrociniis nos ubique protegi; in cujus veneratione hæc tuæ obtulimus majestati.
“Having received, O Lord, the helps of our salvation, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may everywhere be protected by the patronage of blessed Mary ever Virgin, in whose honour we have offered these gifts to Thy majesty.”
Nos ubique protegi: “that we may everywhere be protected.” Having received the Word, we ask to be guarded. It is the Gospel’s custodire turned into prayer. We cannot keep what we have received by our own strength, so we ask the one who kept Him best to keep us while we keep Him.
V. A word for practice
Examine. What have I been keeping? Of all the words I have heard this week, which have I guarded, and which have I let the crowd carry away? Is there a word of God, from Scripture, a sermon, or my own conscience, that I heard and then let go? When I think of my own death, do I think of it as the end of what I have, or as the moment when I will be found keeping, or not keeping, the Word who does not pass?
Do. If you are able, visit a cemetery today or tomorrow and pray there for the dead, while the Church’s November indulgence for the holy souls is still open. Pray by name for those you have lost. Then choose one sentence from today’s Mass, perhaps Beati qui audiunt verbum Dei, et custodiunt illud, and keep it through the day as Mary kept the words she pondered. If you make the First Saturdays, go to confession, receive Communion in reparation, pray five decades of the Rosary, and spend a quarter of an hour meditating on its mysteries with Our Lady.
Pray. The Collect of the day, resting on perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate. Then, for the dead, the De profundis (Ps. 129) and the Requiem æternam. Close with the Litany of Loreto, lingering on Vas spirituale, Vas honorabile: the vessel in which the Word was kept.
Aspiration. Beati qui audiunt verbum Dei, et custodiunt illud. “Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.” (Luke 11:28)
Devote. Saturday is Our Lady’s day, and this is the first of November’s. Offer the Rosary today to the Immaculate Heart, the heart that kept all these words, and ask her to apply its merits to the holy souls, especially the most forgotten.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path explains the Saturday Mass of Our Lady, the Marian reading of the Wisdom books, and the Church’s November prayer for the dead, including the Mass of All Souls and the daily Mass for the departed. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Assumption as defined in Munificentissimus Deus, the doctrine of Purgatory and the suffrages of the living for the dead, and the reality of Christ’s flesh as the Fathers defended it against Marcion. The Lives of the Saints path tells the story of St. Willibrord and the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Low Countries. The Spiritual Practices path offers the First Saturdays devotion, lectio divina in the spirit of Luke 2:19, and the traditional customs of the month of the holy souls.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Cyprian, Ad Quirinum (Testimoniorum libri) II.1; St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VI, on Luke 8:43-48; St. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium expositio IV, on Luke 11:27-28; Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem IV.26; St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Lucam, on Luke 11:27-28; St. Augustine, De sancta virginitate 3. Magisterial text: Ven. Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus (1 November 1950). Liturgical texts: the Mass Salve, sancta Parens for the Saturday of Our Lady, with the Mass of the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost and the Masses for the dead from the 1962 Missale Romanum.
Beati qui audiunt verbum Dei, et custodiunt illud.