Together, with Mary, on the Way
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My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, each year, one of the interesting tasks that befalls to the organising committee of the Marian Procession is to find an image of the Blessed Virgin. Look at the image that our talented Chancery Office team have created for today, its world-wide debut.
It is a gentle image of a mother and child. No words. Just a sublime, simple, stable and colourful, peace-filled image that draws you. A child wrapped in his mother’s arms, safe secure comforted.
As we gather together today we need that image and the reality it communicates vividly. Our world is troubled in many ways. People are looking everywhere for solutions and forgetting to look to God. One way to respond to that is to create places of oasis. Places to rest not simply from the weariness of the world, but a space of renewal and transformation.
As we gather together for the seventy-seventh annual Marian procession here in Adelaide this Autumnal afternoon, on the great feast of the Ascension of the Lord, we find such a s space. We walked together from Victoria Park, we have prayed together, we come before our Risen Eucharistic Lord. We come with our joys and hopes we are renewed in mind, body and spirit, For God is truly in our midst.
There is something quietly remarkable about the image with which Saint Matthew closes his Gospel, which we have just heard. Eleven disciples, not twelve, make their way to a mountain in Galilee, to a place Jesus himself had appointed. They arrive. They see him. They fall down in worship.
And yet, we are told, some hesitated. Some doubted. The Risen Lord does not wait for unanimous certainty before he speaks. He comes up to them. He meets them exactly where they are. And from that mountain, he sends them, sends us, not to stay, but to go.
“Together on the way”. That phrase, which gives our procession its theme this year, is not a slogan. It captures something essential about what the Church is and what she is called to become. We do not travel this road alone. We never have. From the very beginning, the way of discipleship has been a shared journey, a pilgrim people walking together toward the One who walks with us always, indeed to the very end of time.
And this afternoon, on this seventy-seventh occasion that the Archdiocese of Adelaide has gathered in a Marian Procession, we do not walk alone. We walk with her.
On the 13th May, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, Pope Leo XIV spoke to the universal Church in his Wednesday General Audience and turned our attention to the final chapter of Lumen Gentium, (Light to the Nations) the great Dogmatic Constitution of the Second Vatican Council on the Church. He spoke of the Virgin Mary as model, member, and mother of the ecclesial community. And his words carry particular weight for this afternoon.
The Holy Father reminded us that in the Mother of the Lord, the Church contemplates her own mystery, that in Mary we find not only a figure to admire, but a mirror in which to recognise what we ourselves are called to be. Mary is, in the Pope Saint Paul VI’s words, “the believer par excellence,” one who was unconditionally open to the divine mystery within the communion of God’s holy people. She is the perfect model of the Church: a creature wholly formed by the Word of the Lord, a mother who brings forth children in Christ, a servant who stays hidden while pointing always toward her Son.
This afternoon, dear sisters and brothers, Pope Leo’s questions are worth lingering with: Do I live my participation in the Church with humble and active faith? Do I feel that I am a living part of this community? Do I look to Mary as model, as outstanding member, as Mother of the Church?
Good questions for a day of Procession. Good questions for a people preparing for Synod. Good questions for a disciple of any age.
Why? Because that is the other dimension of our walking together this afternoon. As an Archdiocese, we are embarking on a Synodal journey, a process of discernment, of listening, of moving forward in the Spirit. The theme “Together on the Way” is not accidental. It is, in fact, the very grammar of Synodality: we go together, or we do not truly go at all.
And as we undertake that journey, we do well to place our Synod under Mary’s maternal care. She is not only the model of the individual disciple. She is the Mother of the whole Church. And what is a Synod, if not the Church seeking, together, to hear what the Spirit is saying?
Pope Leo, in his homily at Pompeii earlier this month, offered a striking reflection on the rosary, that great Marian prayer, which we have prayed together today. He referred to it as an act of love. “Is it not characteristic of love,” he asked, “to repeat, without tiring: ‘love you’”.”
And then, with the clarity and conviction that have marked his early pontificate, he spoke words that deserve to echo across every Marian gathering in the world: “No earthly power will save the world, but only the divine power of love that Jesus, the Lord, has revealed to us and given us.”
That is Mary of Nazareth’s message, distilled to its essence. She does not point to herself. She has never pointed to herself. From Cana, “do whatever he tells you.”, to Fatima, to this Marian Procession on a autumnal afternoon in Adelaide, she does the one thing a mother does best: she introduces her children to her Son.
The commission Jesus gives at the close of Matthew’s Gospel is breathtaking in its scope: “Go, make disciples of all nations. Baptise. Teach. And know that I am with you always.” It is a word addressed to a group of ordinary, doubting, kneeling people on a hillside. People like us. People who have known failure and fear and the gap between what we profess and how we live. Yet he sends them. He sends us.
Mary walked that road before us. She knows what it is to receive a word that upends everything. She knows what it is to carry Christ into the world. She knows what it is to stand at the foot of the Cross when the journey leads somewhere you did not choose. She is, as Pope Leo has reminded us, the woman who is the icon of the Mystery, the mystery of God’s plan of salvation, revealed fully in her Son.
As we are gather in prayer today, let us ask her, simply, as children to their mother, to help us be faithful disciples on the way. To help our Archdiocese walk the Synodal path with courage and humility. To help us, when we hesitate, when we doubt, to keep walking toward the One who is always, already, coming to meet us.Let us be comforted by the One who says to us today, “And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time”.
Together on the way. Together with her. Together in him, for God is Good, Good indeed.
The above words were taken from Archbishop O’Regan’s address at the Marian Procession on 17 May.
