Pope Francis dedicated the first Wednesday morning catechesis of 2015 to a teaching about the importance of mothers in both the family and the Christian community.“Every human being owes his or her life to a mother, and almost always owes much of his or her subsequent existence, human and spiritual formation, to her,” the Pope said.
“However, although the mother is highly exalted from a symbolic point of view, she is listened to and helped very little in daily life, and her central role in society is not given much consideration. On the contrary, often the willingness of mothers to sacrifice themselves for their children is exploited in order to save on social expenditure.”
Even in the Christian community, the mother is not always given due consideration, Francis said. “Yet at the center of the life of the Church there is the Mother of Jesus. … It is necessary to better understand their daily struggle to be efficient at work and attentive and affectionate at home; we must better understand what they aspire to in order to express the best and most authentic results of their emancipation”.
Mothers are “the strongest antidote to individualism. … They are those who most hate war, which kills their children. They bear witness to the beauty of life. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero said that mothers live a 'maternal martyrdom'. In his homily at the funeral of a priest killed by death squads, he said, echoing Vatican Council II, 'We must all be willing to die for our faith, even if the Lord does not grant us this honor... Giving life does not only mean being killed; giving life, having the spirit of martyrdom, is giving in duty, in silence, in prayer, in the honest fulfillment of one's duty; in that silence of everyday life, giving life a little at a time. Yes, as it is given by a mother, who without fear, with the simplicity of maternal martyrdom, conceives a child in her womb, gives him life, nurses him, nurtures him and cares for him with affection. It is giving life. It is martyrdom'. Yes, being a mother does not mean merely bringing a child into the world, but it is also a choice of life, the decision to give life.”
Any society without mothers would be an inhuman society, the pope, because mothers always know how to show tenderness, devotion and moral strength, even in moments of great difficulty.
“Mothers often also transmit the deepest sense of religious practice. … It is a message that mothers who believe know how to transmit without much explanation; this arrives later, but the seed of faith is planted in those first precious moments. Without mothers … faith would lose a good part of its simple, profound warmth.”
He went on to explain that the Church is also a mother which means none of us is an orphan. “ . . . We have a mother – the Virgin, the mother Church and our mother. We are not orphans, we are children of the Church, we are the children of Mary and of our mother.”
He concluded his teaching with gratitude toward all mothers. “Thank you, dear mothers, for what you are in the family and for what you give to the Church and to the world. And to you, our beloved Church, thank you for being a mother. And to you, Mary, mother of God, thank you for presenting us to Jesus”.
Following the catechesis, the Holy Father greeted, among others, a delegation of French imams engaged in dialogue between Islam and Christianity, and a group of Polish survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp, freed seventy years ago.
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