Cardinal Tobin: We are His Witnesses, Mary is our Model | February 7, 2025
Click a button to jump to the section:
Vol. 6. No.11
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
Last month, when I announced our new pastoral planning initiative, We Are His Witnesses, I described my vision for the Archdiocese of Newark in these words:
If you asked me today what my vision is for the Church in northern New Jersey, I would make my own the Holy Father’s words from Evangelii Gaudium:
I hope that all communities will devote the necessary effort to advancing along the path of a pastoral and missionary conversion which cannot leave things as they presently are (EG #25).
What is this “path” of pastoral conversion and missionary discipleship that we are called to follow as the People of God here in northern New Jersey? Jesus tells us that He Himself is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). He invites us to repent, to change the way we live, and to follow Him. What’s more, He invites us to be His witnesses and to share His love and His truth with everyone we encounter.
Pastoral conversion and missionary discipleship are not new concepts. They have been integral to our Church’s life and ministry since the earliest days of Christian history. As recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, many prominent figures, especially Saints Peter and Paul, have guided our Church’s efforts in synodal processes designed to adapt and change the Christian community’s approaches to proclaiming the Gospel to all nations and peoples.
In many ways, the Blessed Virgin Mary is the model for everything that the Church does as a community of believers following in the footsteps of our Redeemer and advancing along the paths of holiness and missionary zeal under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Mary was a true woman of Israel. She believed with all her heart and soul that God leads his people “in joy by the light of his glory, with mercy and justice for company” (Bar 5:9). Mary knew that the journey she was called to undertake would include much sorrow, but she also believed that God’s Providence would ultimately lead to everlasting joy. Mary’s confidence in the grace of God has served as an inspiration to her daughters and sons from the Church’s earliest days.
Mary was the first Christian, the first disciple of her son. Throughout her life, the Holy Spirit guided her, and after her Son’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, she was able to reach out to others—especially the weak and fearful disciples who struggled to follow their Lord in the face of grave obstacles. God’s grace allowed Mary to become what she has been throughout Christian history: a source of comfort, encouragement and strength for all who seek to follow Jesus, live holy and blameless lives, and proclaim His Gospel of Joy to the whole world.
Pope Francis has said that his favorite image of the Church is “mother.” This is “the face of the Church,” the pope says. It is an image he would like the Church to display more often.
The Church is a mother who teaches, guides and helps us to grow. She is an alma mater (a nourishing mother) as opposed to a cold and indifferent teacher who seeks to impose ideas on us.
A nourishing mother possesses infinite patience and mercy—no matter what mistakes her children make. Instead of giving up on her children, a mother has the patience to continue to accompany her children. Even when we make mistakes—sometimes serious ones—our loving mother stands with us. “She is animated by the strength of love,” the Holy Father says, “and she always finds a way of understanding us, to help us.”
The Church is a merciful mother. With Mary as her model, the Church “never closes the doors of her house” to those of us who have lost our way. “She does not judge,” the pope says, “but rather offers God’s forgiveness; she offers her love to invite her children to return to the right path even when they have fallen into the deepest abyss. The Church is not afraid to enter into the darkest night with them in order to give them hope.” As Mary witnesses to us, her children, mercy and hope are given to us always—even when we are surrounded by darkness!
Perhaps the most astonishing thing the Lord ever did was to become a man and be born of a woman. As an infant, he was totally dependent on his mother. As a man dying on the cross for our sake, he handed over his mother to us, and she then became the Mother of the Church.
Mary is the model of motherhood that the Church seeks to imitate. She is the perfect teacher, the Mother of Mercy, and the one who constantly intercedes for us to our Father in heaven. In Mary, we see fulfilled the promise of our redemption.
Mary was the first person to be redeemed by Christ. This singular act of mercy came before she accepted the vocation that God intended for her. Mary was a perfect steward of God’s gift of self. In her womb, the one who was destined to be our Redeemer was nurtured and formed by God’s grace.
Mary was granted this merciful redemption in advance and, therefore, was strengthened by God’s grace in the face of every challenging situation in her life. Mary is, therefore, the supreme example of pastoral conversion. She is what our Church is called to be: ready, willing, and able to follow Jesus by making whatever changes are necessary in our personal lives and in the structures we use to support our mission.
Mary’s life shows that she struggled mightily to accept situations she couldn’t possibly understand. She needed the help of God’s grace—as we all do—to handle life’s most challenging moments and to say “yes” to God’s will, even when it seems to promise only pain and sorrow.
In his encyclical Dilexit Nos (see selection below), Pope Francis writes that “[Mary] was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective.” This is the form of discernment that must guide our planning efforts. Let’s ask our Blessed Mother to accompany us, to guide us, and to become more like her as we trust in God’s Providence.
As our Archdiocese continues to discern God’s will for our future, let us look to Mary, Mother of the Church, as the model for our commitment to pastoral conversion and missionary discipleship. Through her intercession, may we grow in holiness and in love for God and one another.
As we anticipate and prepare to meet the needs of our people for many years to come, may our Local Church truly be a nurturing mother.
Sincerely yours in Christ the Redeemer,
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R.
Archbishop of Newark
In communion with the holy Mother of God
A selection from the Catechism of the Catholic Church
2674 Mary gave her consent in faith at the Annunciation and maintained it without hesitation at the foot of the Cross. Ever since, her motherhood has extended to the brothers and sisters of her Son “who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties.” Jesus, the only mediator, is the way of our prayer; Mary, his mother and ours, is wholly transparent to him: she “shows the way” (hodigitria), and is herself “the Sign” of the way, according to the traditional iconography of East and West.
2675 Beginning with Mary’s unique cooperation with the working of the Holy Spirit, the Churches developed their prayer to the holy Mother of God, centering it on the person of Christ manifested in his mysteries. In countless hymns and antiphons expressing this prayer, two movements usually alternate with one another: the first “magnifies” the Lord for the “great things” he did for his lowly servant and through her for all human beings the second entrusts the supplications and praises of the children of God to the Mother of Jesus, because she now knows the humanity which, in her, the Son of God espoused.
2676 This twofold movement of prayer to Mary has found a privileged expression in the Ave Maria:
Hail Mary [or Rejoice, Mary]: the greeting of the angel Gabriel opens this prayer. It is God himself who, through his angel as intermediary, greets Mary. Our prayer dares to take up this greeting to Mary with the regard God had for the lowliness of his humble servant and to exult in the joy he finds in her.
Full of grace, the Lord is with thee: These two phrases of the angel’s greeting shed light on one another. Mary is full of grace because the Lord is with her. The grace with which she is filled is the presence of him, who is the source of all grace. “Rejoice . . . O Daughter of Jerusalem . . . the Lord your God is in your midst.” Mary, in whom the Lord himself has just made his dwelling, is the daughter of Zion in person, the ark of the covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells. She is “the dwelling of God . . . with men.” Full of grace, Mary is wholly given over to him who has come to dwell in her and whom she is about to give to the world.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. After the angel’s greeting, we make Elizabeth’s greeting our own. “Filled with the Holy Spirit,” Elizabeth is the first in the long succession of generations who have called Mary “blessed.”
“Blessed is she who believed. . . . “Mary is “blessed among women” because she believed in the fulfillment of the Lord’s word. Abraham, because of his faith, became a blessing for all the nations of the earth. Mary, because of her faith, became the mother of believers, through whom all nations of the earth receive him who is God’s own blessing: Jesus, the “fruit of thy womb.”
2677 Holy Mary, Mother of God: With Elizabeth we marvel, “And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Because she gives us Jesus, her son, Mary is Mother of God and our mother; we can entrust all our cares and petitions to her: she prays for us as she prayed for herself: “Let it be to me according to your word. “By entrusting ourselves to her prayer, we abandon ourselves to the will of God together with her: “Thy will be done.”
Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death: By asking Mary to pray for us, we acknowledge ourselves to be poor sinners and we address ourselves to the “Mother of Mercy,” the All-Holy One. We give ourselves over to her now, in the Today of our lives. And our trust broadens further, already at the present moment, to surrender “the hour of our death” wholly to her care. May she be there as she was at her son’s death on the cross. May she welcome us as our mother at the hour of our passing to lead us to her son, Jesus, in paradise.
Source: Catechism of the Catholic Church
A Message from Pope Francis
(A selection from the Encyclical Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us) published October 24, 2024.)
18. We see, then, that in the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others. We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others.
19. The heart is also capable of unifying and harmonizing our personal history, which may seem hopelessly fragmented, yet is the place where everything can make sense. The Gospel tells us this in speaking of Our Lady, who saw things with the heart. She was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective. The best expression of how the heart thinks is found in the two passages in Saint Luke’s Gospel that speak to us of how Mary “treasured (synetérei) all these things and pondered (symbállousa) them in her heart” (cf. Lk 2:19 and 51). The Greek verb symbállein, “ponder”, evokes the image of putting two things together (“symbols”) in one’s mind and reflecting on them, in a dialogue with oneself. In Luke 2:51, the verb used is dietérei, which has the sense of “keep”. What Mary “kept” was not only her memory of what she had seen and heard, but also those aspects of it that she did not yet understand; these nonetheless remained present and alive in her memory, waiting to be “put together” in her heart.
20. In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.
21. This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fiber of our being, we were made to love and to be loved.
My Prayer for You
Immaculate Mary, pray for us sinners. Show us the way to your Son, Jesus. Help us to be faithful Pilgrims of Hope who are committed to pastoral conversion and missionary discipleship. Amen.