Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes
Today, we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, who most famously said, in a local dialect, to little Bernadette, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” In this, Mary was confirming, to a simple peasant child, a dogma that the universal Church had declared just a few years before: that Mary was conceived Immaculately. But it took the Church many centuries to arrive at a place where it could confidently declare this doctrine, which simple Catholics had long before embraced, and which seems almost obvious to anyone who has been to Lourdes and has been touched by our Lady there, as Bernadette had been.
Much of the resistance to what the Holy Spirit wishes to help the God’s people understand in any age comes in the name of “tradition.” This was already the case in the time of Jesus, as we hear today in Mark 7:1-13. But what is the Church’s tradition, at its very core? Tradition (traditio) comes from the Latin verb trado/tradere which means “to hand over / to hand on.” And what is it that we hand on as Christians? What we most properly hand on, as Christians, is what has been handed over to us, Christ himself, who gives himself entirely to us, and goes to the very end on the cross. We receive the life of Christ in the very body of Christ given to us, and this is what we hand on. But because when we genuinely receive this traditio, we become incorporated into the Body that we receive, we cannot hand on the life of Christ that we receive without giving our own lives to the very people that we hand over the life of Christ to. Any “tradition” that gets in the way of us giving of ourselves to the poor as Christ gives himself over to us should be recognized for what it is: a human tradition that perhaps does not merit the name Christian.
Let us ask the grace to enter into the true Christian tradition: that receiving of Christ’s life and salvation that God offers us through the Church, and that sharing of Christ’s life with others that is only possible when we give ourselves, in Christ, for the world that he came to save.