A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Glory to your lord. And remember, this is the reading that's selected for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Now this is Saint Matthew. Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about when his mother, Mary, was engaged to Joseph.
But before they had come to live together, she was found with child through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, an upright man and unwilling to expose Mary to the law, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when suddenly the angel of the lord appeared to him in a dream and said to him, Joseph, son of David, have no fear about taking Mary as your wife. It is by the holy spirit that Mary has conceived this child. She will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.
Now all of this happened to fulfill what the lord had said through his prophet. The virgin shall be with child and give birth to a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, a name which means god is with us. And this is the gospel, the good news of the Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. It has been my good fortune to have visited Guadalupe on two occasions, and that was before the new shrine was completed.
And while I had been to Lourdes several years ago and spent a week there, nevertheless, in a in a way, I was much more impressed by what I saw at Guadalupe. For one thing, there was much more confusion. It wasn't too early in the morning, it was about 10:00 when I got there, and the air was filled with the smell of charcoal burning, of food cooking. Because many of the pilgrims had come and spent the night and had brought their little ways of making fire with charcoal and had just finished preparing their repast, their first meal of the day, which we call breakfast. Now what struck me besides the confusion there was something else, and that is this, that in front of the church, this was the old church, and you know it was in such a state of decay, it was sinking that, it was declared unsafe, and that's why they built the new one.
Now, stretching out from the front cortical of this church, a long distance straight through the town is one straight street. And even now from the cortical of the church to the entrance to this big open space in front of the church is still a long distance. And people, young and old, were creeping along that long distance on their knees, Many of them in such bad shape that they had to have two children to hold them up. And yet they were creeping along on that hard uneven stones of that great open space and then going into the church and then creeping up that immensely long aisle of the church still on their knees to the altar, to the main altar. It's true that over the main altar, there is now the great cope the or the cape, which played an important part in the apparition of our blessed lady in the sixteenth century.
Now I was very much struck by this. Well, everybody is. You get the scene, the smells, the the emotion, of it all is it gets through to everybody, and, the reactions of everybody are very different. So I happened to meet one of the priests there, and I got talking with him. And, I asked him, were all of these people who were doing who were creeping on their knees coming into the church because they were the most spectacular.
Remember, this was relatively early in the morning. Whether they were there to ask well, with petitions, were they asking for something? Were they there to beg our blessed lady to do them a favor or to get a favor done for them? Or what was it all about? Because so many of them didn't seem to be people who might be asking a favor.
And this priest told me, I merely recount what he said. I'm reporting only. He said that most of them are not here to ask for anything. They are here to fulfill a pledge. And that pledge was made with a petition that if the favor they ask of our blessed lady of Guadalupe, if that was given to them, then they would make this pilgrimage.
Now it's very difficult for us to understand what that little word make a pilgrimage or phrase make a pilgrimage means. It meant in many instances that these people walked. Now they're there by the thousands, and this was an ordinary weekday. This was not a special pilgrimage or something. It means struggling.
It mean and many of them are not young. Many of them are young. There are very young children and the very old. In all stages of dilapidation and in all stages of bright and cheerful youth. They're all there.
And the priest said that most of them there are fulfilling a promise, a pledge that they made that if their prayer for a favor was answered, they would make this pilgrimage. As I have I wanna repeat, to make that pilgrimage for most of them was a most serious project. It meant giving up days of work, sacrificing pay, living under very difficult conditions. Most a lot of them had slept right out there that that night. They carried their own blankets.
You don't see anything like this at Lourdes. So that was the point he made, that most of these people coming to Our Lady Of Guadalupe were there to say thanks. Thanks. Now it's often said that gratitude is the queen of virtues, but that it is a seldom practice. I think most people who have any experience of life will agree, will agree.
Gratitude may be the queen of virtues, but it certainly isn't the most popular, and it is not the most visible. It's absolutely startling, absolutely startling, the way human beings forget to say thank you. I had an incident of it yesterday, not about myself at all, where a where the son of a lady with considerable difficulty gathered together this is a few years ago, number of years ago gathered together a lot of toys and took them to an orphanage and deposited them at the orphanage with the proper authorities. She never received one tiny little word of even acknowledgment, not even acknowledgment, much less thank you. This is not an uncommon experience.
In the life of our blessed Lord, how many times did people return to give him thanks? Of the 10 lepers he cured, one returned. Ten percent! And in experience of many of us, that's a very good percentage. I have mentioned this on other occasions, but this gentleman told me himself that he had put I don't he told me the number of young men that he had put through college completely paid all their bills.
And he said, to this day, I have not received as much as a postal card from any one of them. From any one of them. Not even a postal card. You'll say, oh, that couldn't happen. It does happen.
Gratitude is not the most manifest virtue being practiced today. And so it was absolutely startling to me that when this priest who was attached to the, to the basilica, he knew he he was in a position to know what he was talking about. When he said that most of those pilgrims are there to return thanks, that was startling. That was absolutely astonishing. That, in my estimation, is a miracle.
A miracle. And so, today, incidentally, I this is one apparition of our blessed lady that I have gone into with considerable effort, and it certainly presents an airtight case for authenticity, believe me. But that's something else. The point is that today Our Lady of Guadalupe stands out on the southern and northern hemispheres of the New World, as we call it, as something unique, as something very special, as something that received special and extraordinary attention when our holy father came last this February past February on his visit to Mexico. Where did he go first?
To Our Lady Of Guadalupe, where he addressed the great crowds there. That was an extremely intelligent move. And even before he left Rome, John Paul said, I am going to Mexico. This was one of the first things he said, to pay my devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. And all the rest of it he mentioned after that.
He too was a pilgrim to Our Lady Of Guadalupe. And so today now, as we commemorate this feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, let us think of the thousands and millions of people who today you are united around this shrine, in fact, or in in thinking about it, in memorializing it, and join ourselves to them with gratitude, thanking our blessed lady for what she was. Because if you notice this read, it points to her as the mother of Jesus Christ, the son of god, and that is her glory. We don't go to Mary as just an ordinary human being who had an extraordinary experience of motherhood. We go to her because her motherhood was the mothering of the son of god, Jesus Christ, our lord and savior.
In the name of the father, of the son, and of the spirit. Amen.