A Purpose-Driven Life

I like being Catholic in October, when the church calendar has as many surprises in it as a goodie bag on Halloween night. This month is notable for commemorating the life and faith of such remarkable people as Teresa of the Child Jesus (October 1) Francis of Assisi (October 4), and (hat tip to Bill S) Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Herbert George Otto Maria the First of Austria (October 21).

Today is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, but it's also known as the feast of Our Lady of Victories. The feast is unusual in that it resonates both spiritually and politically. The little picture harks back to when “the church militant” really was:

In the 16th Century Eastern Europe had been overrun by the Moslems. The Moslems intended to continue their push and conquer the rest of Europe and destroy the Christian religion. Pope Pius V in order to save Christendom called for a crusade. In 1571, Spain and Italy responded by sending a fleet of 255 ships and 65,000 men under Don John of Austria to meet the Turkish fleet.

Pope Pius V and the faithful spent the whole of the night of 6-7 October 1571 in public recitation of the Rosary praying for victory...That morning the opposing forces met in the Bay of Lepanto, today known as the Bay of Pathos... The forces of Don John of Austria crushed the Turkish fleet [some 290 ships and 88,000 men] and put its remnants to flight.

The Feast of the Most Holy Rosary (also known as the Feast of Our Ladyof Victories) is celebrated on 7 October and [was] started by Pope Pius V in gratitude for Mary's aid in the great naval victory over the Turks. The feast was extended to the Universal Church in 1716, when Prince Eugene won another important victory over the same enemy in Hungary.

There is more to this feast than martial gratitude, however. As with any Marian feast, the Big Picture opens the door to mystery itself. From Thomas Howard's book, On Being Catholic:

The Virgin Mary is the icon, from among us mortals, of this strange property of the Divine Will, that it chooses to place itself in our debt…There are no cul-de-sacs in the economy of the Divine Mercy. One is never a mere recipient. One is also a conduit.

This builds on a theme that Howard, a convert to Catholicism, first introduced in the book, Evangelical is Not Enough:

“What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows. The plumes, cockades, coronets, diadems, mantles, and rosettes that deck his retinue testify to one thing alone, his own majesty and magnificence. He is a very great king, to have figures of such immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity…We are taught by Scripture that nothing may be worshiped but God alone… But, below this worship paid to the Most High, there is a whole scale of exultation and exaltation that rejoices in the plenitude of divine glory and leaps to hail every creature in whom that glory is seen.”

Mark Shea, meanwhile, comes to Marian theology through the gospel according to John:

I am struck by how St. John calls us, not only to think in terms of Jesus, but to see ourselves associated with Mary. And so he includes the incident at the foot of the cross, not to give us details about Palestinian domestic arrangements for widows, but to make us see ourselves as included in "Woman, behold your son" and "Behold your mother." I am also struck by how Revelation sees the Church as the "rest of her offspring". I become more and more impressed by the fact that the best saints have found their sanctity enhanced, not diminished, by reverence for Our Lady (just look at John Paul II and Mother Teresa). I have come to believe the Church's Marian theology is deeply and richly biblical. Indeed, I would argue that the reason the Church has been able to teach so brilliantly about the dignity of the human person both in Vatican II and in the writings of this Pope is that her Marian theology has prepared her like no other religious tradition to meet the onslaught of modernity and postmodernity against the dignity of the human person.

So what’s it all about, Charlie Brown? My guess is that Jesus’s mom can teach even Rick Warren about “the purpose-driven life.” Because she had one.