Reflection for the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord

"Mary is truly humble and doesn’t want to show off. She acknowledges being little before God and is happy to be so. At the same time, she is aware that the realization of God’s plan depends on her answer, and that therefore she is called to adhere to it with her whole self. In this circumstance, Mary appears with an attitude that corresponds perfectly to that of the Son of God when He comes into the world: He wants to become the Servant of the Lord, to put himself at the service of humanity to fulfill the Father’s plan.  Mary says: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord”; and, entering the world, the Son of God says: “Lo, I have come to do thy will” (Hebrews 10:7, 9). Mary’s attitude fully reflects this statement of the Son of God, who becomes also Son of Mary. Thus Our Lady reveals herself a perfect collaborator of God’s plan, and she reveals herself also a disciple of her Son, and in the Magnificat she is able to proclaim that God has “exalted those of low degree” (Luke 1:52), because with her humble and generous response she obtained a lofty joy and also a lofty glory."

--Pope Francis, Angelus Address, December 24, 2017

Reflection for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

"In Mary of Nazareth, we recognize our own history: the history of the Church, immersed in the common lot of humanity. By taking flesh in her, the God of life — the God of freedom — has conquered death. Yes, today we contemplate how God overcomes death — yet never without us. His is the Kingdom, but ours is the “yes” to his love that can change everything. On the Cross, Jesus freely uttered that “yes” which would strip death of its power — the death that still spreads wherever our hands crucify and our hearts remain imprisoned by fear and mistrust. On the Cross, trust prevailed; so did love, which sees what is yet to come; and forgiveness triumphed. Mary was there, united with her Son. In our day, we are like Mary whenever we do not flee, whenever we make Jesus’ “yes” our own. That “yes” still lives and resists death in the martyrs of our time, in witnesses of faith and justice, of gentleness and peace."

--Pope Leo XIV, Homily, August 15, 2025

Reflection for Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God

"In Christ, God has truly come into the world, he has entered into our history, he has set his dwelling among us, thus fulfilling the deepest desire of human beings that the world may truly become a home worthy of humanity. On the other hand, when God is put aside, the world becomes an inhospitable place for man, and frustrates creation’s true vocation to be a space for the covenant, for the 'Yes' to the love between God and humanity who responds to him. Mary did so as the first fruit of believers with her unreserved 'Yes' to the Lord....

"Dear brothers and sisters, today we praise the Most Holy Virgin for her faith, and with Saint Elizabeth we too say, 'Blessed is she who believed' (Luke 1:45). As Saint Augustine said, Mary conceived Christ by faith in her heart before she conceived him physically in her womb; Mary believed and what she believed was came to be in her (cf. Sermon 215, 4: PL 38, 1074). Let us ask the Lord to strengthen our faith, to make it active and fruitful in love. Let us implore him that, like her, we may welcome the word of God into our hearts, and carry it out with docility and constancy."

--Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, March 27, 2012

Quote of the Day

"The Word of God who unites us is Christ the Lord, the desired of the nations. It is He who rises from the East as the rising sun, He whom America met and embraced five hundred years ago, thanks to the maternal tenderness of Mary who deigned to manifest herself to Juan Diego with the Indian features of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Touched to the heart by the divine mercy revealed in these features, from that moment on, America marches forward in the hope of the God who comes in Christ, in the midst of the hopes and challenges of the present time."

--Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Homily, December 10, 2012

Quote of the Day

"Mary is so interwoven in the great mystery of the Church that she and the Church are inseparable, just as she and Christ are inseparable. Mary mirrors the Church, anticipates the Church in her person, and in all the turbulence that affects the suffering, struggling Church she always remains the Star of salvation."

--Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, December 8, 2005

Quote of the Day

"As sailors are guided by star to the port, so are Christians guided to Heaven by Mary."

--Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Quote of the Day

"As Christ, the new Adam, must be called a King not merely because He is Son of God, but also because He is our Redeemer, so, analogously, the Most Blessed Virgin is queen not only because she is Mother of God, but also because, as the new Eve, she was associated with the new Adam....For from her union with Christ she attains a radiant eminence transcending that of any other creature; from her union with Christ she receives the royal right to dispose of the treasures of the Divine Redeemer's Kingdom; from her union with Christ finally is derived the inexhaustible efficacy of her maternal intercession before the Son and His Father."

--Venerable Pope Pius XII, Ad Caeli Reginam, #38--39

Quote of the Day

"Today the Church honors Our Lady of the Rosary, a liturgical Memorial that gives me the opportunity to reassert the importance of the prayer of the Rosary, so dear also to my venerable Predecessors. I commend it to you, dear young people, so that it may help you to do God's will and find in the Immaculate Heart of Mary a safe shelter. May it enable you, dear sick people, to experience the comfort of our Heavenly Mother, so that she may sustain you in moments of trial. May the recitation of this prayer be for you, dear newlyweds a daily custom in your family which, thanks to Mary's intercession will thus grow in unity and fidelity to the Gospel."

--Benedict XVI, General Audience, October 7, 2009

Quote of the Day

"Just like Mary, the Woman, so too the beloved disciple is both a historical figure and a type for discipleship as it will always exist and must always exist. It is to the disciple, a true disciple in loving communion with the Lord, that the Woman is entrusted: Mary--the Church.

"These words spoken by Jesus as he hung upon the Cross continue to be fulfilled in many concrete ways. They are constantly repeated to both mother and disciple, and each person is called to relive them in his own life, as the Lord has allotted. Again and again the disciple is asked to take Mary as an individual and as the Church into his own home and, thus, to carry out Jesus' final instruction."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 222

Reflection for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God

 

"To begin the year by recalling God’s goodness in the maternal face of Mary, in the maternal face of the Church, in the faces of our own mothers, protects us from the corrosive disease of being 'spiritual orphans'. It is the sense of being orphaned that the soul experiences when it feels motherless and lacking the tenderness of God, when the sense of belonging to a family, a people, a land, to our God, grows dim. This sense of being orphaned lodges in a narcissistic heart capable of looking only to itself and its own interests. It grows when what we forget that life is a gift we have received – and owe to others – a gift we are called to share in this common home."

--Pope Francis, Homily, January 1, 2017

Reflection for the Feast of the Visitation

"In fact, to proclaim means to exalt a reality for its greatness, for its beauty … Mary exalts the greatness of the Lord, praises Him, saying that He is really great. In life, it is important to look for big things, otherwise you get lost, behind so many little things. Mary shows us that if we want our life to be happy, God must be placed first, because He alone is great. How many times, instead, we live pursuing things of little importance: prejudices, rancor, rivalry, envy, illusions, superfluous material goods … How much pettiness in life! We know this is the case. Maria today invites us to look up to the “great things” that the Lord has done in her. In us too, in each of us, the Lord does many great things. We must recognize and rejoice, proclaiming God, for these great things."

--Pope Francis, Angelus Address, August 15, 2019

Reflection for the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

"In the lovely painting venerated in this basilica [Leon, Mexico], the Blessed Virgin holds her Son in one hand with immense tenderness while extending her other hand to succour sinners. This is how the Church in every age sees Mary. We praise her for giving us the Redeemer and we put our trust in her as the Mother whom her divine Son bequeathed to us from the Cross. For this reason, we invoke her frequently as 'our hope' because she has shown us Jesus and passed down to us the great things which God constantly does for humanity. She does so simply, as a mother teaches her children at home."

--Benedict XVI, Homily, March 25, 2012

A Buried Treasure: The "Ave Maria" of Bruno Vlahek

by Justin Soutar

Back in 2013, I was visiting the popular British sheet music website Score Exchange (where I happen to sell some of my own music), searching for a good piano arrangement of the familiar and timeless Schubert Ave Maria. As I combed through the search results, I stumbled upon a completely different, and much more recently written, Ave Maria for soprano solo, SATB choir and piano that I had never seen or heard before. Using the site's Scorch playback feature to listen to the score on my computer (a mechanical device that gives a rough idea of how it should really sound), I found the unfamiliar music so hauntingly beautiful, richly complex and deeply moving that it became permanently engraved within my consciousness, impossible to forget. In fact, the emotional impact of this contemporary classical work dated 2005 was on par with the well-known classic Ave Maria compositions of Schubert, Bach/Gounod and Mozart. The site's description revealed that this piece was actually the composer's own piano reduction and SATB arrangement of his original version of the Ave Maria published in 2003, which was written for soprano, SAA chorus and orchestra.

The writer of this particular Ave Maria, a certain Bruno Vlahek, was also unfamiliar to me. Checking out his biography on Score Exchange, I learned that he is a remarkably gifted, world-renowned, award-winning Croatian composer and virtuoso pianist my own age, which meant--incredibly--that he had turned out both versions of this Ave Maria in his late teens. Since the piano/choral score was offered free of charge on the website at that time, I printed out a copy for myself, and during my leisure time on Sunday afternoons, I would occasionally amuse myself by attempting to play some of the piano part, which was quite complex and difficult with its simultaneous natural and syncopated rhythms and a half-dozen triplets thrown into a steady drumbeat of sixteenth and thirty-second notes. I longed to master the entire piece, but given my work schedule and commitments at the time, this was a pipe dream.

Then in late 2016, the good Lord gave me my dream job as a full-time music director at Saint Patrick Catholic Church in Lexington, Virginia. Realizing that 2017 would be the one hundredth anniversary of Our Lady's apparitions at Fatima, I decided that we should do something special musically to mark this important centennial, and I felt that the glorious but obscure Vlahek Ave Maria would be perfect for the occasion--something definitely off the beaten path that was beautiful and memorable. Here was a chance to publicly honor the Blessed Virgin Mary while sharing with the congregation a magnificent piece of music they had never heard before and would probably never hear otherwise. When I shared an excellent YouTube video performance of this score with the pastor, Father Joe, his reaction was the same as mine had been a few years earlier: "It's different, but I like it." He gave it his blessing right away.

So early in 2017, I rose to meet the formidable double challenge of mastering the piano part and teaching our little sixteen-member volunteer choir and soloist to sing the beloved Latin prayer to new melodies and unfamiliar rhythms. Initially the choristers were somewhat cool toward the piece and intimidated by the difficulty of the material, but after two months of patient rehearsal beginning in May, their attitude had changed from trepidation to enthusiasm; they had discovered that this challenging new Ave Maria was actually fun to sing! After three more months of prayer and diligent practice, as well as valuable advice and assistance from one choir member who is a band director, we were ready to present this stunning hymn to the Blessed Mother just in time for the conclusion of the Fatima centennial.

We finally presented the Ave Maria by Bruno Vlahek on October 29, 2017, during the 10:30 AM Sunday Mass with approximately 180 parishioners and visitors in attendance, my band director friend conducting the choir, and my small digital audio recorder going. While not perfect in every detail, our rendition was well received, eliciting spontaneous applause. As far I know, this was the first time it had ever been publicly performed in the United States. Father Joe responded with an immediate public request for an encore presentation on December 8, 2017, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Somehow, with our conductor and one other choir member absent, we managed to execute it nearly perfectly at the 5:30 PM Mass that Friday evening. (Regrettably, I failed to snag an audio recording of this spectacular achievement.) Our third presentation, which fell somewhere in quality between the first and second attempts, took place during the 5:30 PM Mass on August 14, 2019, the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I'm deeply grateful to the Lord and to his holy Mother for granting and obtaining for me and our little choir the talents and graces necessary to learn and share with our parishioners and visitors this awesome but largely buried contemporary Marian hymn masterpiece. It is no small accomplishment to have such a challenging world-class piano and choral work firmly in our liturgical music repertoire. I'm eagerly looking forward to performing it again as soon and as often as we have the opportunity to do so. My sincere hope is that our past and future efforts to share the Vlahek Ave Maria with others will contribute to making this jewel of twenty-first century Catholic classical music more widely performed, known and appreciated, so that it may eventually earn the honored and secure place it certainly deserves in both the Church and the world’s great musical treasuries.

Copyright © 2020 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

Reflection for Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

"Mary, because she believed, loved; she is the handmaid of the Lord and the servant of her brothers. Celebrating the memory of Mary is to celebrate that we, like her, are invited to go out and meet others with the same gaze, with the same mercy within, with their same gestures. To contemplate her is to feel the strong invitation to imitate her faith. Her presence leads us to reconciliation, giving us the strength to create bonds in our blessed Latin American land, saying “yes” to life and “no” to all kinds of indifference, exclusion, or the rejection of peoples and persons. Let us not be afraid to go out and look upon others with the same gaze. A gaze that makes us brothers. We do so because, like Juan Diego, we know that here is our mother, we know that we are under her shadow and her protection, which is the source of our joy, and that we are in the cross of her arms."

--Pope Francis, Homily, December 12, 2016

Quote of the Day

Coronation of the Virgin, Diego Velasquez

"From above, from where Christ reigns, the Mother of the Church accompanies the journey of God's people, supporting even the most tiring steps, comforting those who are undergoing trials and keeping open the horizon of hope."

--Pope Francis, General Audience, August 20, 2014

Reflection on the Feast of the Visitation

"God visits us in the womb of a woman, mobilizing the womb of another woman with a song of blessing and praise, with a song of joy. The Gospel scene bears all the dynamism of the visit of God: when God comes to meet us He moves us inwardly, He sets in motion what we are until all our life is transformed into praise and blessing. When God visits us, He leaves us restless, with the healthy restlessness of those who feel they have been invited to proclaim what He lives, and is in the midst of His people. This is what we see in Mary, the first disciple and missionary, the new Ark of the Covenant who, far from remaining in the reserved space of our temples, goes out to visit and accompany with her presence the gestation of John...

"With Elizabeth, today too we wish to anoint her and greet her by saying 'Blessed is she who has believed', and continue to believe in 'a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord'. Mary is thus the icon of the disciple, of the believing and prayerful woman who knows how to accompany and encourage our faith and our hope in the distinct stages we must go through. In Mary we find the faithful reflection not of a poetically sweetened faith, but of a strong faith, especially at a time when the sweet enchantments of things are broken and there are contradictions in conflict everywhere.

"And we will certainly have to learn from that strong and helpful faith that characterised and characterises our Mother; to learn from this faith that knows how to get inside history so as to be salt and light in our lives and in our society.

"The society we are building for our children is increasingly marked by the signs of division and fragmentation, leaving many people out of play, especially those who find it difficult to obtain the minimum necessary to lead a dignified life. A society that likes to vaunt its scientific and technological advances, but that has become blind and insensitive to the thousands of faces that are there along the way, excluded by the blind pride of the few. A society that ends up establishing a culture of disillusionment, disenchantment and frustration in many of our brothers, and even anguish in many others due as they experience the difficulties they need to face so as not to lose their way...

"Faced with all these situations, we must say with Elizabeth, 'Blessed is she who has believed', and to learn from this strong and helpful faith that characterized and characterizes our Mother."

--Pope Francis, Homily, Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, December 12, 2016

Reflection for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God

 "To begin the year by recalling God’s goodness in the maternal face of Mary, in the maternal face of the Church, in the faces of our own mothers, protects us from the corrosive disease of being “spiritual orphans”. It is the sense of being orphaned that the soul experiences when it feels motherless and lacking the tenderness of God, when the sense of belonging to a family, a people, a land, to our God, grows dim. This sense of being orphaned lodges in a narcissistic heart capable of looking only to itself and its own interests. It grows when what we forget that life is a gift we have received – and owe to others – a gift we are called to share in this common home....

"Celebrating the feast of the Holy Mother of God makes us smile once more as we realize that we are a people, that we belong, that only within a community, within a family, can we as persons find the “climate”, the “warmth” that enables us to grow in humanity, and not merely as objects meant to “consume and be consumed”. To celebrate the feast of the Holy Mother of God reminds us that we are not interchangeable items of merchandise or information processors. We are children, we are family, we are God’s People."

--Pope Francis, Homily, January 1, 2017

Reflection for the Immaculate Conception

 

"The attitude of Mary of Nazareth shows us that being comes before doing, and we must leave it to God to truly become as He wants us to be. It is He who does so many marvels in us. Mary is receptive, but not passive. Just as, at a physical level, She receives the power of the Holy Spirit but then gives flesh and blood to the Son of God that is forming in Her, She also receives the grace and corresponds to it with faith, on a spiritual level. For this reason, St. Augustine says that the Virgin 'conceived first in the heart before the womb' (Discorsi, 215,4). Faith was conceived first, then the Lord!

"This mystery of the acceptance of grace, who in Mary by a unique privilege, was without the obstacle of sin, is a chance for everyone. St. Paul, in fact, opens his Letter to the Ephesians with these words of praise: 'Blessed be God, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the Heavens in Christ' (1:3). As Mary was greeted by St. Elizabeth as 'blessed among women' (Luke 1:42), so have we always been "blessed", that is loved, and therefore 'chosen first from the creation of the world to be holy and immaculate' (Eph. 1:4).

"Mary was preserved, while we were saved thanks to Baptism and the faith. All however, be it Her and us, through Jesus Christ, 'for the praise of the glory of his grace' (v.6), that grace from which the Immaculate was filled in its fullness."

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"Mary is the Queen of heaven and earth and our Queen because she is the Mother of our Lord and because she cooperated in Christ's redemptive work of salvation. Since she was uniquely associated with Christ's suffering on the Cross, she was uniquely associated with His triumph and royal reign in the kingdom. Assumed into heaven, Mary entered the royal court of heaven and sits at the right hand of her Son, Christ the King. As our Queen, Mary directs us, protects us and intercedes for us."

--Edward Sri, Queen Mother: A Biblical Theology of Mary's Queenship (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2005)

On the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

"Tota pulchra es, Maria! 'You are all beautiful, O Mary!' And there is in you no stain of original sin. Nor, by the special assistance and grace of God, did you ever commit the least actual sin...

"'Thou shalt not suffer thy holy one to see corruption' (Acts 13:35), says the Bible regarding our Lord Jesus Christ. These beautiful words also express God's will regarding His holy Mother...

"Ave Maria! Hail Mary! Mother of God, Virgin Most Powerful, Queen assumed into Heaven, Gate of Heaven, Ora pro nobis!"

--Fr. Albert J. Hebert, S.J., Raised from the Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 1986), pp. 23, 24, 27-28