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Transcript

9/8/26 Virgin Mary, Superstar · Omnia Christus

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SPEAKER_00: One of the few things which many Christians know for sure about
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SPEAKER_00: the Catholic Church is that we worship Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: Of course, right?
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SPEAKER_00: That's why we are clearly not the correct Church.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, hopefully all of us know that that is not true.
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SPEAKER_00: And today on this day when we commemorate The birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
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SPEAKER_00: I thought it was good to reflect a little bit on how not true that is.
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SPEAKER_00: Why would they say that?
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SPEAKER_00: Why would Catholics say that we worship Mary?
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SPEAKER_00: Well, why would Protestants say that?
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SPEAKER_00: Basically because it's very easy to say something fake about someone to other people
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SPEAKER_00: who don't know very much about them.
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SPEAKER_00: Just like in the early Christian church, the Eucharist was sort of a secret.
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SPEAKER_00: Nobody got to come into the Eucharist who wasn't initiated.
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SPEAKER_00: And so in the pagan world, they would say all sorts of things about Christians.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, those Christians, you know what they're doing?
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SPEAKER_00: They're doing these secret evil things, you know, in there.
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SPEAKER_00: They're doing all these, you know, dark rites because they didn't know.
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SPEAKER_00: And because they didn't know, it was easy to think false things.
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SPEAKER_00: And if you go into a Catholic church and you don't know,
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SPEAKER_00: What you see there,
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SPEAKER_00: then it's easy to imagine things that are not true,
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SPEAKER_00: but no Catholics or Christians ever worshiped the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: Some poorly catechized people,
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SPEAKER_00: perhaps mixed Catholicism with certain forms of paganism or made native religion.
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SPEAKER_00: And may have confused the Blessed Virgin Mary with one of their gods or goddesses,
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SPEAKER_00: but no Catholics or Christians ever made that mistake.
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SPEAKER_00: And yet that is the thing which Protestants seem to know above all else about Catholics.
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SPEAKER_00: In fact,
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SPEAKER_00: they claim to be Bible Christians,
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SPEAKER_00: but we are the real Bible Christians in this sense,
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SPEAKER_00: because the Gospel,
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SPEAKER_00: in the Gospel of Luke, Mary says, all generations will call me blessed.
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SPEAKER_00: So we're just doing what the Bible says.
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SPEAKER_00: We're calling Mary blessed.
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SPEAKER_00: That's what we're doing because that's what the Bible tells us to do
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SPEAKER_00: because we're faithful to the Bible.
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SPEAKER_00: So far from being superstitious non-Bible Christians,
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SPEAKER_00: we are more Bible Christians than anyone by venerating Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, we don't worship Mary, but we do venerate Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: We do have this deep, Connection to Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: Why do we have that?
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SPEAKER_00: What is that?
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SPEAKER_00: Why would we do that?
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SPEAKER_00: Why would we put pictures of Mary in our church?
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SPEAKER_00: Like you can see all around here with all these other pictures of the saints.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, why would a child put pictures of their favorite sports stars or rock stars
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SPEAKER_00: or whoever on their bedroom walls?
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SPEAKER_00: Because we have a natural tendency to put images around us of those who we admire,
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SPEAKER_00: of those who we want to emulate,
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SPEAKER_00: those who we want to follow, those who we want to be like.
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SPEAKER_00: That's why we put up all these pictures of these saints of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
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SPEAKER_00: not because we think they're idols, not because we have them here to worship them.
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SPEAKER_00: But because these are people who we admire.
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SPEAKER_00: These are people who we want to be like.
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SPEAKER_00: These are people who we want to imitate in our lives.
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SPEAKER_00: And of course, as we know in the Catholic faith, it goes even beyond that.
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SPEAKER_00: Because from the very beginning,
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SPEAKER_00: the church has known that those who die in Christ are not removed from us.
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SPEAKER_00: Just like Christ was taken up into heaven and the disciples went away rejoicing.
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SPEAKER_00: So when Mary's taken up into heaven,
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SPEAKER_00: We all in the disciples go away rejoicing because we know that there is a new
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SPEAKER_00: and deeper connection.
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SPEAKER_00: The disciples only went away rejoicing when Christ was taken up because they knew
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SPEAKER_00: that Christ was with them in a new and deeper and more profound way.
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SPEAKER_00: It's the same with all the saints and especially with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: She is with us in a new and more profound way because she's with God and
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SPEAKER_00: because we're all connected.
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SPEAKER_00: This is where the church is known from its earliest years.
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SPEAKER_00: So not only do we have Mary as someone who we venerate,
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SPEAKER_00: someone who we want to be like,
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SPEAKER_00: we also have Mary as someone who we can connect with,
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SPEAKER_00: someone who can help us on the journey.
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SPEAKER_00: What does Mary do?
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SPEAKER_00: What is the help that she offers us?
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SPEAKER_00: Fundamentally, She offers us the school of the Holy Spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: Mary is someone who invited the Holy Spirit so deeply into her life
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SPEAKER_00: that she gave birth to God himself.
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SPEAKER_00: Maximilian Kolbe says that in almost in a certain sense,
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SPEAKER_00: Mary is like an incarnation of the Holy Spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: If you want to see what the Holy Spirit looks like,
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SPEAKER_00: if you want to see his face, You look at the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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SPEAKER_00: So when you get to know the Blessed Virgin Mary,
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SPEAKER_00: you will learn who the Holy Spirit is, what he looks like.
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SPEAKER_00: And by getting to know her, you will get to know how you can follow the Holy Spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: Mary's last recorded words in the Gospels are those words that she speaks at
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SPEAKER_00: the wedding of Cana where she says, do whatever he tells you.
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SPEAKER_00: Do whatever he tells you.
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SPEAKER_00: I think there's a real secret in that.
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SPEAKER_00: That is the summation of Mary's understanding of her relationship with the Holy Spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: She does whatever the Holy Spirit asks her to do.
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SPEAKER_00: And the reason why she doesn't speak anymore,
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SPEAKER_00: at least not in a recorded sense in the Gospels, is because she's doing it.
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SPEAKER_00: She is doing whatever the Holy Spirit tells her.
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SPEAKER_00: She is there at the foot of the cross.
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SPEAKER_00: She is there at Pentecost.
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SPEAKER_00: She is wherever the Holy Spirit wants her to be.
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SPEAKER_00: And as we get to know Mary,
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SPEAKER_00: as we learn from her,
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SPEAKER_00: as we learn who she is,
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SPEAKER_00: as we listen to her voice in our hearts,
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SPEAKER_00: as we study under her in the school of the Holy Spirit,
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SPEAKER_00: we get to know who the Holy Spirit is.
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SPEAKER_00: We begin to recognize his voice in our lives.
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SPEAKER_00: And we can begin to do what she says, which is to do whatever he tells us to do.
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SPEAKER_00: That is what He
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SPEAKER_00: guides us into holiness.
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SPEAKER_00: He guides us into relationship with God.
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SPEAKER_00: He guides us into everything that we're supposed to be.
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SPEAKER_00: And the only way that we can follow that guidance is by listening to his voice.
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SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is speaking in every moment of our lives.
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SPEAKER_00: Mary, from her earliest years,
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SPEAKER_00: learned how to listen to that voice, how to hear it, how to do whatever he told her.
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SPEAKER_00: If we're quiet and we listen,
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SPEAKER_00: throughout our day,
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SPEAKER_00: the Holy Spirit is going to be inspiring us to do different things, small things.
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SPEAKER_00: Maybe you should do this.
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SPEAKER_00: Maybe you shouldn't do that.
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SPEAKER_00: And so often we want to just forget about that.
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SPEAKER_00: We're like, no, no, no, I want to do what I want to do.
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SPEAKER_00: That's not the way Mary lived her life.
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SPEAKER_00: She lived her life listening to that still small voice, doing whatever it told her.
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SPEAKER_00: And it guided her into this amazing relationship with God.
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SPEAKER_00: Today on her feast day, let us ask her to teach us.
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SPEAKER_00: Let us enroll in her school.
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SPEAKER_00: Let us be with her.
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SPEAKER_00: She wants to be our mother.
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SPEAKER_00: She wants to be our model.
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SPEAKER_00: And she wants to guide us to find what she found,
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SPEAKER_00: this relationship with God that transformed her whole existence.
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SPEAKER_00: And it was as simple as doing Whatever the Holy Spirit told her to do.
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SPEAKER_00: It's hard to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit,
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SPEAKER_00: above all because we fill our lives with noise, we fill our lives with distraction.
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SPEAKER_00: But if we do that,
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SPEAKER_00: if we start to clear that out,
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SPEAKER_00: if we start to make space,
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SPEAKER_00: if we spend time with Mary,
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SPEAKER_00: if we spend time listening to her voice,
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SPEAKER_00: asking her to be present,
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SPEAKER_00: she will teach us to recognize the voice of the Spirit and she will give us
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SPEAKER_00: the grace, the strength, To do whatever he tells us.