Dear Saints,

Although Mother’s Day is given no liturgical recognition like the feasts we mark throughout the year, the secular holiday is a great opportunity to celebrate our mothers. I hope you are doing so this weekend!

Motherly love is self-effacing. No, it is self-sacrificial. This for-the-other love of true mothers, biological or not, brings to life the love of God in a way we so desperately need today. Thank you to all of our parish’s women, our sisters in Christ who so faithfully make God’s love a reality for us!

It is fitting that we honor Mary as the Mother of God and our mother this month. The more our hearts swell for love of her, the more we are made to honor the motherly – and properly feminine – love that she embodies. Be sure to read the quote below from Pope Saint John Paul II, which gives substance to this sentiment.

I understand also, my friends, that some of us have been deprived of a mother’s love for any number of reasons. Please know that we are united in prayer, wrapped in the mantle of our Blessed Mother.

In the Peace of our Risen Lord,

Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ

“It can thus be said that women, by looking to Mary, find in her the secret of living their femininity with dignity and of achieving their own true advancement. In the light of Mary, the Church sees in the face of women the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love; the strength that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and tireless devotion to work; the ability to combine penetrating intuition with words of support and encouragement.”
– Pope St. John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater, paragraph 46