Homily of Pope Leo XIV at the Mass for the Jubilee of Marian Spirituality

This Sunday, Pope Leo XIV celebrated the Jubilee of Marian Spirituality with more than 30,000 pilgrims, including rectors and sanctuary workers, as well as members of movements, brotherhoods and various Marian prayer groups. During the celebration in St. Peter’s Square, the original statue of the Holy Virgin, preserved in the Sanctuary of the Apparitions, was present. Read the Holy Father’s complete homily here.

Dear brothers and sisters:

The apostle Paul addresses each of us today, as he did to Timothy: “Remember Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead and is a descendant of David” (2 Tim 2:8). Marian spirituality, which nourishes our faith, has Jesus as its center. Like Sunday, which opens each new week on the horizon of his resurrection from the dead. “Remember Jesus Christ”: this is the only thing that counts, this is what makes the difference between human spiritualities and the way of God. “Chained like an evildoer” (v. 9), Paul recommends us not to lose the center, not to empty the name of Jesus from his history, from his cross. What we consider excessive and crucify, God resurrects because “he cannot deny himself” (v. 13). Jesus is the faithfulness of God, the faithfulness of God to himself. Therefore, it is necessary that Sunday makes us Christians, that is, that it fills our feelings and our thoughts with the incandescent memory of Jesus, modifying our coexistence, our way of inhabiting the earth.

All Christian spirituality develops from this fire and contributes to making it more alive. Reading the Second Book of Kings (5:14-17) has reminded us of the healing of Naaman, the Syrian. Jesus himself comments on this passage in the synagogue of Nazareth (cf. Luke 4:27), and the effect of his interpretation on the people of his town was disconcerting. To say that God had saved this foreigner sick with leprosy instead of those who were in Israel was to turn them against him: “When they heard these words, all those who were in the synagogue were enraged and rose up and pushed him out of the city, to a steep place on the hill on which the city was built, with the intention of throwing him off a cliff” (Luke 4:28-29). The evangelist does not mention the presence of Mary, who could have been there and experienced what the old Simeon had announced to her when he brought the child Jesus to the Temple: «This child will be the cause of fall and rise for many in Israel; It will be a sign of contradiction, and a sword will pierce your heart yourself. Thus the inner thoughts of many will be clearly manifested” (Luke 2:34-35).

Yes, dear brothers, “the Word of God is living and effective, and sharper than any double-edged sword: it penetrates to the root of the soul and the spirit, the joints and the marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). Thus, Pope Francis in turn saw, in the story of Naaman the Syrian, a penetrating and current word for the life of the Church.

Addressing the Roman Curia, he said: “this man was forced to live with a terrible drama: he was a leper. His armor, the same one that gave him prestige, actually covered a fragile, wounded, sick humanity. We often find this contradiction in our lives: sometimes the great gifts are the armor to cover great fragilities. (…) If Naaman had only continued accumulating medals to put on his armor, in the end he would have been devoured by leprosy; apparently alive, yes, but closed and isolated in his illness.” (1)

Jesus frees us from this danger, He who does not wear armor, but is born and dies naked; He who offers his gift without forcing the healed lepers to recognize it: only a Samaritan, in the Gospel, seems to realize that he has been saved (cf. Luke 17:11-19). Perhaps, the fewer titles one can hold, the clearer it is that love is free.

God is pure gift, only grace, but how many voices and convictions can separate us today from this naked and disruptive truth! Brothers and sisters, Marian spirituality is at the service of the Gospel: it reveals its simplicity.

Affection for Mary of Nazareth makes us, together with her, disciples of Jesus, it educates us to return to Him, to meditate and relate the events of life in which the Risen Lord continues to visit us and call us. Marian spirituality immerses us in the history upon which heaven opened, it helps us see the proud dispersed in the thoughts of their hearts, the powerful thrown down from their thrones, the rich dismissed empty-handed.

It commits us to filling the hungry with good things, to exalt the humble, to remember the mercy of God and to trust in the power of his arm (cf. Luke 1:51-54). His Kingdom, in fact, comes and involves us, in the same way that he asked Mary for “yes”, pronounced once, but renewed day after day.

The lepers who do not give thanks again in the Gospel remind us, in fact, that God’s grace can also reach us and find no response, it can heal us and continue without compromising us.

Let us be careful, then, of going up to the temple that does not lead us to follow Jesus. There are forms of worship that do not unite us with others and anesthetize our hearts. Then we do not experience true encounters with those that God puts in our path; We do not participate, as Mary did, in the change of the world and in the joy of the Magnificat.

Let us guard against any instrumentalization of faith, which runs the risk of transforming those who are different—often the poor—into enemies, into “lepers” who must be avoided and rejected.

Mary’s path follows that of Jesus, and Jesus’ path is towards every human being, especially towards the poor, the wounded, the sinners. Therefore, authentic Marian spirituality makes the tenderness of God, her motherhood, current in the Church.

«Because – as we read in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium – every time we look at Mary, we believe again in the revolutionary force of tenderness and affection. In it we see that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak, but of the strong, who do not need to mistreat others to feel important.

Looking at her, we discover that the one who praised God because he “brought down the powerful from their thrones” and “sent the rich away empty-handed” (Lk 1:52-53) is the same one that ensures domestic warmth for our search for justice” (n. 288).

Dear brothers, in this world that seeks justice and peace, let us keep alive Christian spirituality, the popular devotion for those events and places that, blessed by God, have forever changed the face of the earth.

Let us make it an engine of renewal and transformation, as the Jubilee calls for, a time of conversion and restitution, of rethinking and liberation. May the Most Holy Mary, our hope, intercede for us and always guide us towards Jesus, the crucified Lord. In him is salvation for all.