Looking toward the feast of Our Lady of Palestine, Patroness of the Order

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The feast of Our Lady of Palestine falls in the month of the Rosary (October 25), the prayer that reconnects us to God and repeatedly invites us to raise our gaze upward to meet Mary's gaze toward our humanity. She continues to care for the Church of which she was Mother and became the first elected member; in fact, from the height of the Cross Jesus handed her over to John, who brought her into the nascent Church, which became her new family forever.

Her presence soothed the souls of the Disciples and Women shaken by the events and troubled by the mystery of the death and Resurrection of the Lord; She, expert in grace and faith, took in hand these new children, recovered them to full trust in God, prepared them for the consecration of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer became the spiritual exercise of the apostolic community.

At the center of the Church's two-thousand-year experience is Mary the Pilgrim, wandering among the men and women of every age, begging for their love of Christ; 'Lady Pilgrim', simple and tall in her dignity as "Mother and Daughter of her Son" (Dante); without hardly speaking, she whispers to those who ask her: I come from Nazareth!

Mary began her uninterrupted pilgrimage from Palestine. This accompaniment of humanity appears to us to be marked by countless encounters of which we have traces in the many Marian shrines.

The Rosary is the prayer of our condition of begging, of our continuous murmuring, rather monotonous, with which we ask Mary to pray for us sinners.

Lowering her gaze to our human occupations, to the wars that bloody the earth, to the countless violence and hatreds, to the indifference and the many poverties, Mary brings the consolation of divine mercy: Father, she will ask as Jesus did on the cross, forgive them!

We ask that every Knight and every Lady of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, in this Marian month that ends for us with the feast of Our Lady of Palestine, recite the Holy Rosary, taking special care that She opens processes of peace and reconciliation in the Land of Jesus, in the troubled world and in the families divided and tried by the present and universal pandemic.

 

Fernando Cardinal Filoni

 

 

(October 2021)