You just heard one of the great passages in all literature, one of
the most challenging, difficult gospels. And I’m not going to talk
about it! And the reason I’m not going to talk about it is today is
the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, February 11th. On February 11th in
1958, I was standing in a kitchen cleaning a dish with a Brillo pad.
And there was a big legal problem facing my family, which I’ll spare
you. But I’m cleaning with the Brillo pad. I was 24 and, while
cleaning the dish, I said outloud on February 11th, 1958, “Mary of
Lourdes, if you work a miracle for us, if I get to be a priest, I’ll
always talk about you on February 11th, and I’ll never complain
again.” Well, she did. And there is a very fine legal mind still
living back in New York who says, “Yes. That was a miracle. What
happened in court that day was a miracle.” So, of course, I kept
complaining. But I will keep the first part, the promise. And it is
February 11th. So I don’t think Our Lord or the Liturgical Commission
will be mad at me if I want to talk about her, about Mary. And our
acronym is “M A M A.” Now, Our Lord says we can call the Father
“Abba,” which means Papa. So our acronym today, if you go along with
me, is about Mary, M A M A.

The first “M” is Maryolatry. Maryolatry, that’s bad! Maryolatry is
turning Our Lady into the fourth person of the Trinity, of making her
divine, of making her equal to God. I know you know that’s not so.
But people who denounce too much interest in Mary, and many still do,
and many outside the Roman Catholic Church do, with some good reason
in the past. We are not turning her into a goddess. She’s the mother
of Jesus. And we have statues of her. “You adore her. You....” “No,”
a Wall Street executive said to another Wall Street executive who
accused the first guy of adoring Mary because there was a little
statue of Mary on his desk on Wall Street. The guy who had the statue
said, “Look at your desk. You got your mother. You got your father.
You got your wife. You got your kids. You got your spaniel.... to
remind you that you love them and they love you. I got a little
statue of Mary cause I love her, the mother of Jesus. That’s all. It
reminds me. I don’t adore her.

My father was a convert and, like many converts, he went to an
extreme about Mary. I remember one day, I was a little kid and he
picked up the New York Times. Evidently, in the Amazon, some natives
who had been recently converted to Catholicism, were carrying a
statue of Mary and chanting on a kind of pilgrimage along the Amazon.
And a non-Catholic missionary was shocked and disgusted, and ran up
to the head guy carrying the statue of Mary and took the statue and
heaved it into the Amazon. My father said, “They should have thrown
the missionary into the Amazon. How dare he....” Well, that’s a
little bit of Maryolatry, a little bit of Maryolatry. But a love of
her and an affection for her is not bad. A refrain I would like to
use a couple of times is, when Bernadette, who saw this Mary, 1858,
the Blessed Mother appeared in a grotto in a small town in southern
France, called Lourdes. And she told Bernadette to ask the people to
come. It’s one of the rare things where the Church actually seems to
accept it as unqualifiedly authentic, not weeping virgins where it
turns out that the paint ran or atmospheric changes in the chapel
change and they saw Jesus floating. The appearance of Mary at Lourdes
in southern France seems to be authentic. And when Bernadette herself
was dying, the young lady who saw her, (She was a nun in her
thirties, painful death.) artists and sculptors from all over Europe
would come and say, “Did she look like this?.... Did she look like
this?” Very gifted artists. And Bernadette, who was a very honest,
down-to-earth peasant said, “No. No. No..... No. But she’s
beautiful. She’s beautiful but you do not have her smile.” She said
that over and over. She was dying when she saw all these great works
of art. “The Lady in Lourdes, you don’t have her smile,” when she
looked down at people and wanted people to come, her smile.

Ok. Next, M A M A is “A,” Aversion, aversion to Mary, a reluctance, a
distaste for her. It’s human for some people. Outside the school
where I worked (The school was called “Our Lady of Lourdes High
School” in Poughkeepsie.) the statue of Our Lady, enormous, in front
of the school and Our Lady looked like this, as if she were a
duchess who had discovered a caterpillar in her salad, and wanted to
summon the waiter and scold him. I mean I thought of all those kids,
adolescent young men and women, you know hectic with hormones and
homework and troubles with the parents..... WHO would go to that for
a prayer?! Bernadette kept saying, “Her smile.... Her smile....”
Other people say, “I don’t need Mary and I don’t need saints. I go
directly to God!” .... Which is admirable, and I don’t mean to mock
them. I just act all the time. I am hyperbolic by temperament. But “I
go directly to God!” All right, but we poor beleagured Roman
Catholics do have a gospel reference for prayer to her, namely at the
famous wedding. Remember? Young Jewish couple has a wedding. That was
a big deal!! It was something people waited for for a whole year.....
“We get wine, lots of food!” And Our Lady goes to Our Lord, in the
gospel, “They’ve run out of wine!” And Our Lord is rather chilly.
“What’s that to me?.... What’s that to me?” And then Our Lady, in
the gospels, goes to the waiters and says, “Whatever he tells you to
do, do it.” And you know the story, that Our Lord goes, finally, and
he turns the water into wine, just to save the young Jewish couple
from a social embarrassment. There’s precedent for asking Mary for
help. It’s right in the gospel. And I don’t ever want to forget, and
that’s why I keep repeating, that Bernadette, as she is dying, years
after seeing the beautiful young lady in the grotto, said, “Oh, I
wish you could capture her smile, when she looked at the people.”

OK! We are up to the second “M,” Miracles of Lourdes. There have been
miracles. I always wave props (holding up a book.) This is the
“Miracle of Lourdes” by Cranston, a Protestant lady who went to
southern France in our lifetime, to blow the lid off this farce. She
stayed there a long time and she researched. She has chapter after
chapter. It’s not a pious book. It’s a documentary historical study.
That whole chapter toward the end, on the Medical Bureau of Lourdes,
the International Commission, x-rays before, x-rays after, exhaustive
medical data. The Catholic Church only accepts sixty-two. The Church
is so cautious about looking silly. Only sixty-two are authentic
miracles. In the book, she recounts many atheist, agnostic
physicians, at the top of their profession saying, “If this isn’t a
miracle, what is?!” She wrote the book to expose Lourdes as a fraud.
She finished the book and became a Catholic. “The Miracle of
Lourdes,” it’s a powerful documentary study that God reaches out at
times through the intercession of this Lady to heal.

There is a guy who graduated from the high school, named Tom, and he
is blind, not just legally. He is really totally blind. Every year
that he can afford it, he goes back to Lourdes. And his sisters say,
“Why are you going back there?” He says, “I’ve got to go!” The
reason is (I get e-mails from him once a week.) that he has
memorized the steps that lead down to the little grottos, the little
waters of Lourdes, where they bring little kids. And he carries them
down. He is very safe. He knows the steps by heart. His family says,
“He’s an awful grouch, most of the year.” He comes back from Lourdes
and he’s on air. That’s the miracle of so many who go to Lourdes.

And finally, just one little quote that I love for personal reasons.
And it might chill some of you. I hope not. Bernadette was told
several things by Mary, that were personal to Bernadette. But when
she was dying in a convent in her thirties in France, she did say
that the Blessed Mother had said to Bernadette, aside from urging
Bernadette to tell people to come, and smiling, “I can not promise
you happiness in this world, Bernadette, only in the next..... I can
not promise you happiness in this world, Bernadette, only in the
next.....” Now Bernadette had wracking asthma all her life. She was
dead poor and she died of agonizing tuberculosis. So Mary did not
sell her a bill of goods. But the part that helps me and maybe some
of you is “....only in the next.” We’ve known some people whose
whole lives seem to have been founded on suffering and faith through
the suffering. The Resurrection readings earlier in this Mass were
“He’s going to raise us.” Only in the next... And Bernadette, to the
end, “Her smile, her smile. Why don’t you get her smile in the statue?”

Finally, Affection, Affection for Mary. This is the Rosary. (I always
bring props.) I once visited a student at Fordham, a former student
who was in college. And he was sitting at his desk, with this. Now, I
had long since given up the rosary. “I don’t have time to say the
rosary! I can’t concentrate on the rosary. I am out doing good.” It’s
funny how all the things came back, angels, mysticism, the rosary,
Mary..... came back from people who we thought we just kind of
dispensed with it. I said, “Eric, what are you doing?” It was just
as if I had caught him snorting cocaine or something.... “It’s the
rosary.” ....OH! I take my needs to the beads, man! Never forget it.
“I take my needs to the beads.” You only have to say one decade if
you can’t say more than one without your mind going into coma. But
one decade. I know many men and women going to work at their wheel of
the car. You can’t concentrate, even on ten Hail Mary’s. But take a
mystery. Well, let’s see the “Crowning with thorns....” And you’ve
got headaches, big headaches about money or family. And you just pass
the beads. A nerve specialist sent me an article back in New York,
“People in the Orient and Roman Catholics, for centuries, have known
that the simple act of passing beads through the fingers does wonders
for the nervous system, palpitations of the heart and a general level
of serenity. Hail Mary.... Don’t throw it out the way I did for
twenty years because I am too busy and I get too distracted.

There’s a statue to the left, of Mary, and she is a pretty young
lady. It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece. I am usually totally
self-absorbed when I walk down the aisle, totally self-absorbed, with
my buzzards flopping around. You know those invisible critters who
keep criticizing. But every so often, I spot her with her husband and
her child and I think of some female I want to pray for, in this
case, my niece. So I say, “Mary, Maureen.” No one gets mad. No one
shrieks, “Maryolatry!” It doesn’t cost anything and it ‘s a great
honorable Catholic tradition. “Mary...” and I say my niece’s name,
Maureen. Gets me out of my head for a minute.

Finally, I want to recommend (This really is “Finally!”) .... I want
to recommend a movie which you can rent on DVD or video. It’s called
“The Song of Bernadette.” In the forties, black and white, it won
Oscars. It’s not a pious movie. It’s a hard-headed Hollywood movie,
of the facts of Lourdes. Jennifer Jones who is still alive plays
Bernadette as she was, a stocky young peasant girl, fiercely devoted
to telling the truth. Jones won the Oscar, best actress of the year.
It’s got the most beautiful production and music. I showed it to
Princeton seniors, with great trepidation. I thought, “Oh, Princeton
seniors will come out sneering.” They didn’t. I heard one guy say to
another guy, “Who’d a think an old movie about religion would be so
good?” I don’t get any cut on this movie, but it’s a good one, “The
Song of Bernadette.” And in the movie scene where Mary appears....
It’s played by a beautiful young actress but they do capture what
Bernadette insisted, her smile. “Get her smile!” Amen.