A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Mary set out proceeding in haste into the hill country to a town of Judah where she entered Zachariah's house and greeted Elizabeth, her cousin. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby in her womb stirred. And the of course, that's she's pregnant with with John the baptizer. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried out in a loud voice, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
But who am I that the mother of my lord should come to me? The moment that your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby stirred in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who trusted that the lord's words to her would be fulfilled. And then Mary said, my being proclaims the greatness of the lord, and my spirit finds joy in god my savior. For he has looked upon his servant in her lowliness.
All ages to come shall call me blessed. God who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age on those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm. He has confused the proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised up the lowly to high places. The hungry he has given every good thing, while the rich he has sent away empty. Even as he promised our fathers, promised Abraham and his descendants forever. Mary remained with Elizabeth about three months, and then she returned home, that is back to the northern country. 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. The feast of the assumption of our blessed lady, defined as an article of faith in 1950 Papyrus the twelfth is of course the most recent feast that is formerly elevated with the infallible authority of our holy father back of it, in our devotion to our lady, devotion to Mary. And today we are celebrating this truth, which follows with the absolute logic and consistency from the whole idea of her immaculate conception. Because if death is a consequence of sin, and if Mary never had any sin, therefore there would be no death to Mary.
Basically, the the logic of it is beyond dispute. And so today, we are celebrating her feast of the assumption of Our Lady, body and soul, transformed of course, but joined in an inexpressible way to her own son, Jesus Christ. Now, the whole concept of our blessed mother has been under fire these days. We are told that it's immature, that it's infant infantile, that we don't need intermediaries between me and God except Jesus Christ. That this that Mary interferes with my devotion.
Well, Cardinal Newman, even before he became Well, I was going to say a Catholic, but before he he submitted to Rome, because that's what it amounted to. He pointed this out that wherever you have good authentic devotion to Mary, there you find devotion to her son. How could it be otherwise? How could it be otherwise? Even a poet like Wordsworth, that famous line, our man's solitary boast.
Our blessed mother, solitary. He's a little wrong because Jesus Christ was sinless. But leaving our lord out of it, here's words where he pays tribute to our our human nature's solitary boast. And how can you ever how can you ever take away from a son's glory or whatever by honoring his mother? It can't be done.
And where you have religion going from the the the dregs of sixteenth century Calvinism and trying to recover, you find a return to our blessed lady. Where her where the late every every every cathedral and many a country country church had a special chapel to Our Lady, and in the sixteenth century, they were demolished. And as the faith, the true, the total, the complete faith of Our Lord has has come back, so those chapels have been restored. Now I wanna tie in devotion to our blessed mother and this feast of the assumption with yesterday's feast. Now yesterday we celebrated the feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Kolbe, a Polish priest who was consigned a Franciscan monk, who was consigned to Auschwitz in 1941.
A prisoner escaped. You know this story, but I'll have to repeat it. A prisoner escaped and the commandant of the of the camps said, well, we we will take 10 men at random and we'll put them in a cell and let them starve to death. That was the punishment. They knew this would happen if anybody tried to escape.
So this man escapes, he couldn't be found. So they brought all the prisoners out, lined them all up, and at random the commandant went around selecting 10 men. And one of the men selected cried out, what's going to happen to my wife and children? And with that, a bedraggled, emaciated prisoner stepped out. Said, I am a Catholic priest, I will take his place.
So Maximilian Kolbe went down into that cell, starved to death for two weeks, and then was injected with some kind of a chemical to kill him. He was the last of the 10 to die. Now people remember this. This is what has been glamorized. He was canonized in 1982, only forty one years after his death.
And this fact that he gave his life for another prisoner, that of course has been glamorized. But what I want to bring out is that this man's life was heroic. And there are two factors, at least two, that strike me and what you see operating in his life even as a boy were these two things. Very bad health. He was too had consumption from his early years.
He fought it all during his life. He was a sick man all his life. And the second thing, his devotion to Mary. His devotion as he said to the immaculate. He had that as a kid, and when he went to the seminary he formed a little society.
When he got ordained from Rome, he enlarged that society. He founded cities called Maryville. He had a monastery which before night before the second world war had over 800 monks in it. They published a paper dedicated to Mary with a circulation of over 1,000,000 copies. This man had a fantastic devotion to our blessed mother.
Did that take away the slightest from his devotion to Jesus Christ? Did that take away in the slightest from his love of his fellow man? I found in my file the following prayer to well, it's a prayer that Saint Maximilian Colby was very fond of saying and publicizing. First, he said, and this was the keynote of his life. He was a he was a national well known man before Auschwitz.
He founded these Maryvilles in Japan, United States and other countries. I'm going to read two sentences from this heroic Remember, we honor him as a martyr. He says, let everyone strive not so much to change the atmosphere as to perfect himself. Let each of us come closer to the immaculate mother, and then we will come closer to each other. Let us not reverse that order.
In the name of the father, son, holy spirit. Amen.