As the church moves through the weeks of the Advent Season, the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary comes into the foreground, first, in celebrating the feast of her Immaculate Conception on Dec. 8, nine months before her birthday in the liturgical calendar on Sept. 8 and, closely following, in the celebration of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12. On both feasts, the Gospel passage proclaimed at Mass is taken from the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. We hear the angel call Mary “full of grace.” Someone who is full of grace is empty of self. Mary is unique in having been preserved, through God’s grace, from any stain of the sin that makes us full of ourselves. What she gained in being emptied of self was the grace to be filled with the Holy Spirit and become the Mother of God. Two thousand years ago, she gave birth to Jesus, God’s only begotten Son and, at the time of the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ to a new world of 500 years ago, she gave birth to an entire people. The indigenous peoples of this content, the native pre-Americans, became her children. Something new was born.
Mary was here in what we now call America before the pilgrims from England showed up in 1620. We have forgotten that the first European here, Father Jacques Marquette, called the Mississippi the “River of the Immaculate Conception.” Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles recently reminded us all that, “we have lost the sense of America’s national story.” The part we remember about the settlement of New England and the other English colonies on the east coast, the story of great men like Washington, Jefferson and Madison and the founding documents of our present national union is true and often inspiring, but it’s only half the story. What has been lost is the memory of what started in the 1520s in Florida and in the 1540s in California. It’s less a story of settlement than of exploration and evangelization. It’s the same story that is ours in Illinois and the upper Midwest, a story of missionaries who did not come to gain the land but to introduce the natives to their Savior. Before there were houses in this land, there were altars. We have diminished America’s true identity. The people who lived here were called Christians before they were called Americans.
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