Father Coughlin:
Immaculate Mary
(October, 1930)
“OUR SOLITARY BOAST”
THE REALITY
IT APPEARS to be extremely old fashioned and unintellectual to make mention of such a thing as original sin. Nevertheless, it does not require a keen observer to discover the effects of some titanic catastrophe which has befallen the human race. In their happiest moments of idealism our poets can sing their songs of things as they should be. Our painters can cover their canvases with winsome madonnas, not as they really are, but as they could have been. A Thomas More may thrill us with his Utopia free from tears and misery and poverty. But our social workers in the slums or in the courts can take both poem and picture, dream and fancy and supplant them with the sordid prose of life's realities.
Now a thoughtful man will pause and ponder when he contrasts the story of things as they really are with the poem of his ideals as they should have been. He is anxious to discover a cause for this great betrayal of human nature; anxious to discover in the test tube of his judgment the nature of these germs of error, of moral ugliness -- the thousand germs which have produced the feverish existence in which we labor.
One thing is certain: If you search long enough you will find that the blood of every human being with whom you come in contact has been tinctured with a common poison -- a poison that is productive of error; a poison that blinds the spiritual eye, that withers the love of the heart. The blood of it flows in the veins of every human being. Everyone, say I? Yes, everyone, save a simple Galilean maiden.
MARY, CO-OPERATOR IN REDEMPTION
It is fitting that I speak to you this October evening of our tainted nature's solitary boast; fitting, during a month long since dedicated to her devotion. She is a person who was not only born free of this universal blight called original sin, but also was conceived without its least taint soiling her soul.
It is not to be wondered at that so many arrows have been pointed at the breast of those creatures who bear upon their bosoms the image of Jesus Christ. It is the expected thing. Christ was always persecuted. The legacy of pain, of sorrow, humiliation and heartaches has been bestowed by Him upon those who are closest to Him. Thus, it is that down the centuries there have reverberated the thunders of criticism bursting over the brow of His Immaculate Mother, and flashing its vivid lines of lightning at her purest breast.
Not that Mary would will it otherwise. It was she who nursed Christ at Bethlehem, she who became crimsoned with His blood at the foot of Calvary's cross. She glories as she shares His crown of thorns. For she likewise shares in His victory and His triumph.
THE PARAGON OF GOD'S CREATION
Upon the wings of fancy, come back with me to a day when this vast world of ours had not yet been fashioned. God was planning silver rivers and deep blue lakes; planning snow-peaked mountains and veins of gold which weave throughout the bosom of the earth. In His creative mind there was the picture of forests and dales, the song of thrush and lark, love of myriad angels who hovered about His throne.
And then did come the day of creation. The sky was mantled in a robe of peerless blue. The earth laughed in song and in gladness. The first gentle spring had come, heralded by the first melodious harmony of feathered songsters.
At length the progeny of man began to build their homes, but homes that knew tears and sorrow. Looking down the vista of time, the mind of God beheld one creature, the greatest of all His works of art, in whom the first ideal should not perish. From all eternity He had planned her. It was the mother of His only begotten Son! For her He robbed the skies of their blue; He stole from the birds their songs to fill her heart; He borrowed from the liquid gold its purest strands from which to spin her hair; and from the Seraphim and Cherubim He captured their love -- all for her, the paragon of His creation.
SIN'S VICTORY OVER NATURAL IDEALISM
It were blasphemy to arrogate to ourselves a quality which God did not possess. It were sacrilege to attribute to ourselves a power of love or affection which our Creator did not have in an infinitely superior manner and degree. If we have a spark of wisdom within our soul, His mind is flooded with its infinity. If our hearts have learned what a precious thing it is to love a mother, His Sacred Heart has had that love in a boundless degree. Neither limitation nor curtailment of any kind dare speak to the infinite heart of God-Made-Man and tell Him, “thus far may you love and no further. Thus, you may dream, but never hope to realize.”
But, my dear friends, for a moment may you and I who have climbed the rungs of the years upon the ladder of life look back in memory to the days of our girlhood and our boyhood. As we pin back the curtain of time there is the vision before you of your mother as she used to be. Golden hair, blue eyes, tender hand and queenly heart come leaping before your reminiscent mind. But it is only a memory which remains to mock you as you look from the topmost rung of your ladder of success. Silver hair and dimmed eyes, bent shoulders, yes, for many of you, a heart that is stilled in death was the last picture engraved upon your mind of this queen, your mother.
It would be irreverent for me or for anyone else to play upon the strings of the human heart, with the soft, sentimental music of words. But bear with me a moment, ladies and gentlemen. If it were in your power at this instant to lift away the clods of clay, and silence the cold winter's blasts which sing sad requiems over your mother's grave -- if it were within your power, you would bring her back again, breathe life into her still, numbed body, laughter unto her lips and fill the chalice of her poor, cold heart with the purest wine of joy, would you not?
That may be a fanciful thought. But it is one that is born with an honest idealism which exists in every boy's heart; in every girl's heart. If you were king, your mother would be queen.
Are you forgetful of the story of the Boy, Jesus Christ? That Boy had sentiments not only as pure as yours and mine regarding mothers' love -- His were divine. Unlike you and me, He was not forced to remain only an idealist. His wish was His command. You and I can conjure up the unseemly forms of hostile elements which in their combined effort have taken the mother from our arms and have made a mockery of her youth and smile and girlhood beauty. You and I can simply bow our heads before their inevitable victory. But that Boy when He grew to manhood calmed the angry seas; cleansed lepers and, at His word, brought back life to the cold corpse of the little daughter of Jairus. That Boy had command over every element of death and destruction because He is God as well as Man. Therefore, He Who is of infinite power need not remain a mere idealist when there was question of extending to His own mother whom He loved best and most, the gifts within His power!
THE NECESSITY OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
That is why He stole from the stars the silver of their voice. That is why He borrowed the beauty of the blue heavens to crystallize them in her eyes. That is why He saved her from the touch of that thing called original sin -- original sin that darkens the intellect and hides truthfulness. Original sin that, like cancer, eats away at the heart of us as it weakens our will. Original sin, that is the sworn foe of all true beauty.
From the battlements of heaven, long before He became man, Almighty God had witnessed the travesty which sin and Satan were making of His handiwork. Long before His infant lips uttered their
first cry amidst the poverty of Bethlehem, He had realized that if He were to be the David of the New Testament, born to slay the giant Goliath; the Moses of the new age come into the world of bondage to lead His fellowmen to the land of promise, He, too, must be raised and nourished by no daughter born in slavery, but by the princess herself. He could not afford to have Satan stand on the steeps of Calvary Hill and mock the blood that flowed from His thousand wounds as blood that had come from a mother's heart once under his bondage. Here was a necessity of fitness that no lien or mortgage be held upon those priceless, ruby drops of blood, by one from whom he was exacting the last farthing. Scripture cannot prove it to you conclusively. It is a thought which comes leaping down to us from the heart of reason, from the soul of every son and daughter.
If Christ could have done what you or I in our dream hours would like to do; and if it were most befitting that He should have done it, lest His Own flesh and blood would bear the insignia of Satan, unless within His Own veins there should run the bacteria of original sin as He suckled life itself from her chaste breast, it follows that Christ absolutely did perform the work which He could have done and which was befitting for Him to do.
This is not my argument. Rather is it one conceived by the eminent Duns Scotus who defended his Immaculate Mother at Oxford University centuries ago.
HUMANITY'S NEED OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
I have heard thoughtless people remark: “What need have we of an Immaculate Mother of Jesus Christ? We have Christ Himself to be our pattern, to be the mirror in which we may dress ourselves and after Whom we may fashion our virtues.” Thoughtless people talk like that. But I can imagine a sin-ravaged sinner as he stares from the gutter of his crime upon the cross of Christ -- I can imagine him as lifting up his hand and pointing to the crucifix, he says “It is very well for you, Christ, to preach purity to us. It is well for You to become the apostle of poverty and the exemplar of charity. But, Jesus Christ, do not forget, You are God as well as Man, and I am only a broken, battered piece of humanity. You are the Eagle Who can fly over the mountain tops of temptation with the wings of our divinity. But I am only the animal who slips and falls as he tries to scale the snow-capped peaks of purity.”
Perhaps, Jesus Christ thought of that centuries before He came down to become like unto us in all things save sin. Perhaps that, among other reasons, is why He chose the flesh and blood of His Own mother, pure human being that she was, to walk ahead of us and be the morning star to light a way across the desert life.
Thus, no sinner dare assail Christ and build up for himself an argument for his depravity.
MARY, EULOGIZED BY AN ANGEL
It was once an angel who became the eulogist of the mother of God. It was Gabriel himself, from highest heaven, who, neither wasting words nor sentiment, summarized the totality of her holiness, her sanctity, with one expression: “Hail, full of grace!” As if he had said to her, “Thou art all fair, my love, and in thee there is no stain.” Every best gift conceivable by God Himself shines forth like a gem of rarest beauty within thee.
And, my friends, why should I or you or any other mortal man attempt to eulogize the mother of God once Gabriel has spoken? Far less, why should one of us attempt to search for a frailty with the glow-worm lamp of reason, when her perfection stands so brilliantly illuminated before the mind of an archangel!
This is the doctrine which is expressed in the angel's words. It is the same doctrine which was always believed by everyone who was proud to call himself a Christian. Some one may suggest to me that this is not in harmony with Protestant belief. But I know that Protestants as well as Catholics join hands and hearts with us today in paying this mead of tribute to the Immaculate Mother of God.
I can almost smell the blasphemy which rises from the stench of Voltaire's sarcasm as he dips his dirty pen into the ink pot of hell and tries to scratch and besmirch the name of Mary with his burlesquerie. Voltaire mocked Christ and derided Him. Then he was logically forced to deny the Immaculate Conception.
But times have changed. Both Protestants and Catholics today who have a grain of faith would never hesitate to pay this reasonable, truthful homage to the mother of Jesus Christ, nor would hesitate to sing with our Protestant poet: “Thou art our tainted nature's solitary boast.” And thou art the ideal after which we would have patterned our mothers, our sisters and our daughters.
O Mother Mary! thou immaculate sweetheart of the Holy Ghost, whose virgin breast was the cradle and nest of the only begotten Son of God, we are not jealous of you. Readily do we understand why your name has been the inspiration to a Dante in poetry, to a Murillo and a Raphael in painting. Thou alone are perfect as far as human being can possibly aspire!
MARY, EMANCIPATOR OF WOMANHOOD
But, my friends, bear with me if I appear to be dabbling in superlatives while speaking of the superlative work fashioned by the hand of God. At least, we can be historians in calmness. May I recall
for you the plight of womanhood in the days of Augustus Caesar at Rome, or in the reign of the majestic Pericles at Athens? Woman was always a chattel, always a thing. Not only was she denied the rights of citizenship, but she was bought and traded as a man would purchase or sell a horse. Nevertheless, it was her hand which was supposed to rock the cradle of progress. It was her breast that was supposed to feed the citizen. Those were the times when men began to deify their lusts and their passions under the name of a Venus or an Aphrodite. Those were the days when the little lamp of civilization saw its sickly flame extinguished until the so-called erudite both at Rome and at Athens out-barbarized the Goth, the Vandal and the Tartar in his cruelty, in his immorality.
Not until Mary, the Immaculate Virgin Mother, came upon the horizon of history, did the noble soul of womankind begin to cast its warmth and benediction upon the works and destinies of human kind. Men may boast of their valor and courage. But the Christian woman may be praised for her love and her sacrifice. Men may be renowned for their intelligence and inventiveness, but women will always be known for their motherliness -- a word which compounds every beautiful quality which enters into the vocabulary of man.
MARY, COMFORTRESS AND MOTHER OF MANKIND
This evening, therefore, when we can cast a glance about us and envision the legions of shut-ins whose bodies are racked in pain, the myriads of impoverished who look for hope in vain; the great river of crime mingling its muddy water with the stream of virtue, we pause and take inventory of what nature is as we find it. But at the same time, as a miner in the depths of a hole which he has dug into the bosom of the earth can look aloft even in the broad daytime and see the stars scintillating in the heights of heaven, we, too, from the depths into which we have dug ourselves by sin, can envision the purest of creatures, can catch a glimpse of what we might have been had not sin come to scatter its error in the intellect, its weakness in the will, and its propensity to every evil known to physician and scientist and sociologist and the clergy. Alone she stands, our tainted nature's solitary boast, the one spotless creature, unblemished by sin! She is the ideal to which we aspire, the tender mother not only of Christ, but of everyone of Christ's brothers and sisters who are not forgetful either of Bethlehem's miracle or of Calvary's tragedy.
Thus, to thee we turn, our spotless Queen. By The Sweat Of Thy Brow, 1931, sermons, imp., nihil obstat.