Homily for Mass for Aid to the Church in Need on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

If you know our church, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, you will be aware that we have a lot of images of Our Lady. Among our various representations of the mother of the Lord is a new commission by Andrew White, our artist-in-residence, called Mother Mary. Andrew wanted to represent Mary as faithfully as he could to what she would have been like as a very young teenage girl who had just received the news that she was to give birth to Jesus. The painting is on the home page of the Farm Street website if you’d like to take a look at it later. And so a 12 year-old girl sat for him and a friend of hers from the same village made some simple clothes as close as possible to those worn by young girls in first century Palestine.

The painting and my conversations with Andrew White have challenged me to wonder who Mary really was. The indescribable but deeply engaging is captured so well in this portrait. The beauty of her as a person, her gentle loving disposition, her serenely prayerful heart are all captured as, almost unconsciously, her arms cradle the child she expects and a serene comforting smile lights up her radiant face. And that leads us to ask why she is so important for us. To appreciate more fully what she did out of love for us in saying yes to the Lord’s call to be mother, to be mother of Jesus and so in the divine plan for all time the mother of God and so also mother of us all. A simple but courageous young girl. Playing the most pivotal role in God’s plan a Christian disciple ever has.

Encounters we have through statues, painting, different images, is at the heart of our Catholic life – they unlock treasures of our faith through the emotional and devotional response they elicit in us. They help us see Our Lord, the saints, and Our Lady in a more realistic way. When it comes to Mary they invite us to ask who she is for us: the mother who brought our saviour into the world, the human being whose generosity was so great she was given that special privilege from all time to give birth to God in our world. That’s worth thinking of, praying about, reflecting on – perhaps spending time today on this feast day considering the image of Mary in our mind – the Mary who is our mother too whom we are called to encounter today.

Today is an important feast day for us as the Aid to the Church in Need family and for the whole Church. It’s a day to ask ourselves what does she want to show to us today? The apparitions at Fatima represented a challenge to the whole world at a time when the world was torn apart by war, extremist ideologies, when it was in crisis. And seeing the mother of God for the visionaries clearly touched their hearts to bring a message to the world which it needed to heed badly. Just as at Lourdes these messages of peace and call to conversion of hearts, call to come back to God, were of course given to mere children. The paradox that the simplest purest messages break through the hardened hearts of arrogant thinking we know what we should be doing.

I invite us to turn to Mary again today, to encounter her in prayer – the Mary who was this young uneducated girl who had a pure serene heart, who said the ultimate yes to bring Christ to the earth in darkened times. And to allow her to speak to us at this time of darkness for our world. This time when the experience of global pandemic calls us to conversion, as Pope Francis is constantly reminding us to draw us to contemplation, to that pondering in the heart which challenges us to put an end to all the ways in which the evil one has been allowed to step in and contaminate our world. Yes, we need a new contagion, the Holy Father tells us, which proclaims the reign of God.

As we look at our world at this time of crisis we see much suffering as a result of the pandemic, and we also see great inequalities as the most vulnerable to the virus are those who are poor and marginalised in society. And perhaps, as Pope Francis is challenging us, we may have time and the benefit of the longer view to see just how ravaged our planet is becoming, yes the planet itself, but also war and conflict, global debt, the evil of abortion and voluntary euthanasia, and as we ponder that we see we see at the heart of this the evil still of ideological extremism which refuses to allow freedom of association and belief, not the communism which was the threat to religious freedom and world peace in the first years of Aid to the Church in Need, but the threat actually from a falsely attributed religious extremism and that is where our organisation comes in so importantly and prophetically as we see it is especially Christians who are the most persecuted religious group in our world today.

This is not to minimise the threat to religious freedom of other religions – in fact as Christians all the more our role in countries where persecution is great must be to build bridges there not to put up more walls. Thank God many are beginning to see this as one of the dark spots in our world, thanks also to the great work of our organisation here in the UK bringing this to the attention of government through the good work done on the report led by the Bishop of Truro.

On this Feast of Our Lady of Fatima may we heed the signs of the times here, be challenged by the call to conversion which stirs within our hearts. Even, especially at this time of pandemic may we commit ourselves to a fresh start for our country and our world. For Mary shows us the way through her example, she shows us what compassion is about, what a heart full of love and peace is about, in a word she shows us Jesus – the one who saves us, frees us, unlocks meaning for our lives. For us Christians – of so many different traditions in east and west, with our varied theologies and spiritualities – Mary’s role is always simple but always greatly challenging as she leads us to the Son of God in a singular way in which no other human being who was not also God could because she knew him better than any human being ever has and could. Because she is his mother and so for the Christian called to be leaven in the world she is our mother, the mother of the Church.
In November 2018 I was part of a delegation with ACN in northern Iraq. As most of you know a region which has been devastated by the evil of extremism and Christians driven out apart from the odd few. We saw much of that devastation and yet also encountered so much faith, so much of a desire to learn from these years of persecution and boldly reclaim towns and villages. In the town of Batnaya we had an eerie experience. The town had just been reopened by the government 10 days before and we encountered it as it was when the terrorists left – the church partly burnt out with statues decapitated, IS logos on the walls, all buildings reduced to rubble. And as we walked through the streets we stopped to look into what were houses, now left as ruins. Daesh had got out quickly so had left things eerily unfinished. There were still children’s shoes, desecrated religious objects lying around – we were advised not to touch.

And in a corner of one ruined dwelling I came across a statue of Our Lady, decapitated in a burnt out space alongside a sofa and an oven. Decapitated but still with hands outstretched overlooking this sorry pile of rubble, forgotten houses, lives truncated, a people forced out of their home. Coming back out a car sped by and stopped. It was the group of parishioners who were going to show us around the burnt-out church. Now living in makeshift accommodation in a nearby town they were here to tell their story. I’m not going to go into that detail now but just the obvious questions again: are you going to return? Yes – of course, this is our home and this is our faith, our parish, our Church. And can you forgive and live side by side with those who committed these dreadful crimes? We have to wait and see but our faith calls us to forgive, to reconcile, to live in a peaceful respectful society.

That kind of encounter teaches me not just about the current situation in Iraq but teaches me so much about faith, about what it is to be Church, about what it is to be the Christian community even in the midst of division, suffering, evil. Our Lady may have lost her head but her heart was reaching out to the Christians of this town calling them to constant conversion, to reconciliation, to work for a better world, to bring the Kingdom of her son back to this sorry place where the evil one had had to flee. And our friends in Batnaya said something else. They will pray for us. Yes, our beneficiaries have become our benefactors. So many of our persecuted brothers and sisters have said they pray for us now as we take the brunt of this pandemic. We can learn so much from them. Yes, our communion with our suffering brothers and sisters in Iraq teaches me about what it is to be a Christian and how much we as Christians are needed to shed rays of light in a world often darkened by the evil inflicted on fellow human beings, the freedom stolen from whole generations, yes, in the false name of religion. May we learn from their experience so we can make this world a better place.

And as we do Mary is looking down on us too to protect us and call us to that conversion of heart. As such Mary becomes the Mother of the Church and the Image of the Church. And these titles are redolent with meaning. She protects each one of us as does a mother because she loves us as only a mother could. And she teaches us who we are to become as authentic disciples, responding to his call as she did as a human being who was not God. The greatest human being who was not also God as was Our Lord Himself. As such she teaches us how to be authentically human in the theatre of warfare between good and evil in this world. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says: Mary shows us how we, like her, mere human beings who are not God become ‘co-actors in theo-drama’ as we engage in it as Mary did, to turn her heart towards the world lovingly so we may bring to it the peace of her son whose reign will never end.

Fr Dominic Robinson, S.J.