our lady's victory

Pope Francis' prayer for peace

Our Lady Undoer of Knots, Casa Juan Diego, Houston, Texas

A woman must receive instruction silently and under complete control.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet.

(Timothy 2:11-12)

The world is at its most beautiful right before the sun comes up. I thought of that when we walked outside to the church across the street into the blue of the morning’s peace.

This morning, we prayed the office of readings in the church across the street.

I took the first reading, randomly. It was the second chapter of Timothy. And I read some of the author of the letter to Timothy’s sumptuary laws, regarding women’s dress, and some of his household (or ecclesial codes) regarding the relationship between men and women.

Spoiler alert: they read as though they were written in the first century AD.

If you think they have aged well depends on your perspective. I read the letter aloud, including the line traditionally invoked to prohibit women from preaching: “She must be quiet.”

Those words, in my voice, echoed through the empty church.

Isn’t truth a funny thing?

What does it mean—to contradict in the very event of your own reading—the surface meaning of the words you speak? To read something aloud that tells you to be quiet is a strange twist of history.

But that’s what it means to be alive—for our faith, our church to be a living idea, as John Henry Newman would say, for the original idea to keep growing and changing for history to take us somewhere new.

This feast, of all feast days, is perhaps a flagship day for Newman’s idea that truth is an organic reality: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often,” Neman writes in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

What better feast than this feast, which has become more perfect by changing names? Our pastor pointed out that Our Lady of the Rosary is a refurbished title for this feast, that originated in 1571 as Our Lady of Victory, celebrating a European victory in a sea battle with Ottoman Empire ships off the coast of Italy. The name was changed very quickly, by Pope Gregory XIII, in 1573.

But the concept of Our Lady of Victories had legs—for better or for worse—and in 1620, after defeating his fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, the Protestant Hugenots, King Louis XIII declared he would create a shrine to Our Lady of Victories, which he did, nine years later.

John Henry Newman himself came to the Shrine of Our Lady of Victories in Paris to pray in thanksgiving for his conversion.

When I think of Our Lady of Victory, I think of the church on Barclay Street in the Financial District, at which I used to go to daily Mass when I commuted on the C train from Harlem to Brooklyn every day. What Our Lady of Victory was, to me, a small stop on a pilgrimage. And I think celebrating Our Lady of the Rosary is, in some ways, less of an invitation to mystery than the original title, as besmirched by war, nationalism and division as it may seem to be.

What is she victorious over, this lady of victory? Probably not the people or groups or persons or nations or ideas we want her to be, perhaps even not what we pray for her aid in defeating.

Our pastor said that there are no more powerful prayers than those your enemies pray for you. And I wonder at that. To pray for an enemy, as an enemy, seems to be a contradiction in terms: it is to pray for an end to the enmity between you. In our prayer, we pray for God to have victory over ourselves, over our sorry little prayers and selfish little will.

What does it mean to pray for an enemy—to contradict, in the very event of your own praying—the meaning of enmity?

That seems to me like God’s sort of victory, the sort of movement of God we call grace.

And Mary is the one we hail for being full of it.

O Queen of the Holy Rosary, untie the knots of selfishness and disperse the dark clouds of evil. Fill us with your tenderness, uplift us with your caring hand, and grant us your maternal caress, which makes us hope in the advent of a new humanity where “… the wilderness becomes a garden land and the garden land seems as common as forest. Then judgment will dwell in the wilderness and justice abide in the garden land. The work of justice will be peace…” (Isaiah 32:15-17).

Pope Francis - Prayer Today for Peace