Today is the Feast of the Birth of the Virgin Mary. Here, we are featuring a past homily from Father Barron on the inexhaustibly rich figure of Mary as well as an excerpt about her from Father's book, The Priority of Christ.
"Mary is a rich and multivalent figure in all of the Gospels. In Luke’s infancy narrative, she emerges as the spokesperson for ancient Israel, speaking, in her Magnificat, in the words and cadences of Hannah; and as the recipient of an angelic announcement of a miraculous birth, she calls to mind not only Hannah but also Sarah and the mother of Samson as well..."
Today is the Feast Day of St. Teresa Benedicta a Croce, or St. Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism turned Carmelite nun who was martyred in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in 1942. Father Barron explores some of the biographical details of this great Saint in his book, The Priority of Christ, wherein he displays the pervasive virtue that characterized Edith Stein’s vocation and witness.
“For the classical version that Aquinas inherited, courage (fortitudo) is the virtue that enables a person to resist those fears that would prevent him from fulfilling the demands of reason. The performance of the morally right act is relatively easy when it meets no opposition either from within the agent himself or from the external environment. But there are times in the course of life when we are compelled by conscience to take a particular action even though some threat, perhaps mild, perhaps grave, looms over its performance. To do the right thing would result in the loss of one’s job, or the harsh criticism of one’s peers, or in the limit case, the forfeit of one’s life. The virtus by which a moral subject is able to face down those fears is courage...
“[Just] as the arrival of Jesus awakened the enmity of Herod and the emergence of the Son of God on the public scene stirred the opposition of demons and humans, so the climactic expression of coinherence, the laying bare of who Jesus is, brings forth the dark powers. Immediately after the cup has been shared, Jesus says, ‘But see, the one who betrays me is with me, and his hand is on the table’ (Luke 22:21). Earlier, Luke told us that ‘Satan [had] entered into Judas called the Iscariot, who was one of the twelve’ (Luke 22:3), and thus we see the accusing and scattering power that had dogged Jesus from the outset of his work was still operative, even (we might say especially) here where the anti-Satanic act of coinherence was most vividly on display. How telling the detail of the betrayer’s ‘hand on the table,’ soiling the beauty and interrupting the flow of grace at that sacred spot...