Motherhood is a trust that can never be broken!
The ancient culture of the Aztecs sacrificed adults to their gods for war, and sacrificed children to their gods for rain. That was part of life for the Aztecs until the Spaniards came in the 16th century and wanted their gold. And the missionaries followed, and they wanted their souls. By then, the Aztecs had witnessed bloodletting by their own leaders and bloodletting by their conquerors, so they were not about to become Christians. Then something happened.
In 1531 the Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, a 57-year-old Aztec Indian, and left her image on his tilma (long apron). This image was not made by human hands and its creation remains a mystery nearly 500 years later. She told him who she is:
Read these words slowly and take them into your mind and start to understand more fully what our Blessed Virgin Mother is saying to us.
“Know, know for sure my dearest and youngest son, that I am truly the ever perfect Holy Virgin Mary, who has the honor to be the Mother of the one true God for whom we all live, the Creator of people, the Lord of all around us and of what is close to us, the Lord of Heaven, the Lord of Earth….I will exalt Him upon making Him manifest, I will give Him to all people in all my personal love,…do not fear…Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your mother? Are you not in my shadow and under my protection?”
In these few words we understand that Mary is not only the Mother of God but that she is also the spiritual mother of Juan Diego, as well as all of us. Furthermore, her image communicates to the world that she is with child, God made flesh. As was worn typically by pregnant Indian women in the time of Juan Diego, it is the dark ribbon tied high above her waist that reveals her state of being with child. After this event, within ten years, nine million people of the Americas came to believe in the Christian God and were baptized into the Catholic faith. What all the missionaries from Spain could not do was accomplished by one man and the image on his tilma. Why was Mary’s apparition so successful?
What the Holy Virgin Mary communicated to Juan Diego was not only most meaningful to him, but was also meaningful to millions of people who came to believe that Mary carried God within her womb. The realization of Mary being a mother, the mother of God and also the spiritual mother of Juan Diego is central to the very fabric of the story he told. Yes, the ancient Aztec nation understood what all humans understood at that time: a mother is a nurturing person who has a God given faithful and steadfast love for the child in her womb, and she can be trusted with this life regardless of what other horrors are taking place. Motherhood is the trusted cornerstone of human life on this earth. The Aztecs trusted Mary’s word because she spoke to them as a mother:
“…do not fear…Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your mother? Are you not in my shadow and under my protection?”
Today, in half a human lifetime, the whole upper hemisphere of our planet has lost the concept of motherhood, that loving relationship, that trust of mother with child. How did this happen? The slippery slope began around 1930 when artificial birth control started to gain acceptance in our society. The invention of the birth control pill occurred in the sixties and was followed by the sexual revolution during the same decade. By 1973 the ground-work had been laid, and a small group of men in the United States Supreme Court pronounced abortions as legal for the entire country. Medical schools changed or completely ceased their graduates’ declaration of the Hippocratic Oath (written around 370 B.C.) which included the words: “I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Laws have power in the human mind, and the law of man, not the law of God began to take hold. The small fire grew into a large fire by the wind of propaganda through the use of media. And so the wind spread the fire of the rule of law, human law that has created the holocaust of the unborn that is now taking place over the entire Northern hemisphere. What would the loving Creator of our world, the Creator of human life think if (and it is close to happening) the entire Southern hemisphere also legalizes abortion?
Pro-choice propaganda has essentially changed our culture and has affected all human beings who live under the law and the culture of death to the unborn. Pro-choice is evil at work. And what is evil? Evil is the absence of truth, and its power comes from the desensitizing effect of propaganda and of laws. As a result, we are losing what the whole world understood as the trust of motherhood. Why? Many mothers and fathers now consider themselves pro-choice. That terminology is meant to sound harmless, but it is the lie that covers up the agony of an unborn child’s sense of imminent destruction as seen by real-time ultrasound: sudden increase of heart rate, severe agitation of body movements, and the facial expression of a child screaming in pain. That is evil at its best. In the Aztec Nation where the horror of sacrificing children was practiced, its people still clung to the basic understanding of motherhood as the trusted cornerstone of human life. In our Nation, in our time, the poison of compromising truth has deluded our people into believing that a mother’s right to choose is higher than a child’s right to live.
Remember, adoration is for God alone. Mary is not adored as some have mistakenly claimed: she is venerated. Veneration is honoring another. It is found in God’s commandments: Honor your father and your mother. Mary deserves profound honor as God’s mother and our spiritual mother: “Here is your mother.” (John 19:27) God humbled Himself and became flesh through her motherhood so that we may be born of the Spirit and have life in His kingdom. The first part of the Hail Mary Prayer is a repetition of the words found in the Gospel of Luke. The last line asks Mary to pray for us at the hour of our death, something that we would ask our closest friend to do.
Never forget that it is through the Holy Virgin Mary that we are reminded that motherhood is a trust that should never be broken. For the rest of his life, until his death at age 74, Juan Diego persistently witnessed to the fidelity and love that the Holy Virgin Mary has for us and for the Son of her womb. Juan Diego speaks to the young and to the old of our generation, and today we must have the courage that he had to witness to the truth: Pro-choice is murder, and the abortion law has created a holocaust across the world. We must maintain a vision of hope and bravely speak for life knowing that Mary is with us:
“…do not fear…Are you not in my shadow and under my protection?”
Gilbert R. Lavoie, M.D. Please pass this message on.