Mary Is The Woman of Faith

By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

St. Augustine tells us that before the Blessed Virgin Mary conceived the Son of God by the power of the Holy Spirit in her womb, she first conceived Him in her heart by faith. As the year progresses, Mary demonstrates for us how the virtue of faith allows God to work in us and bears fruit most commonly in acts of charity. We celebrate this month the Feast of the Visitation in which this principle becomes so clear in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it; charity is ‘walking’ in the truth,” Pope Benedict said in his 2013 Lenten message, and “Faith is genuine only if crowned by charity.”

St. Luke provides the Gospel account of what Mary did just after the Angel Gabriel departed from her (Lk 1:39-56): “Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.” The Angel had not told Mary to go to Elizabeth, but only that “she who had been thought barren had conceived in her old age, because nothing is impossible for God.” Yet Mary went with haste on a difficult journey just after herself conceiving when most new mothers would naturally focus on their own maternal needs. “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, ‘Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.’” When we have faith, God is with us in a special way. Mary’s faith allowed God’s Only Begotten Son to be among us in a unique and real way through the Incarnation, and Elizabeth perceived this miraculously and blessed Mary with the words we repeat so often in the Hail Mary. Then Elizabeth, moved by the Holy Spirit, acknowledges the source of her joy and Mary’s at this most charitable act by the ‘Mother of her Lord:’ “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”