Clothed in the Mysteries of Christ
MASS Gaudeamus omnes
LESSON Proverbs 8:22-24, 32-35.
GOSPEL St Luke 1: 26-38
LAST GOSPEL St Matthew 22:1-14
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The Collect of today’s feast gives us the key to the Rosary. We ask Almighty God that, meditating upon its mysteries, we may “imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise”. The Rosary is meant to clothe the soul in Christ.
That image matters because the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost is commemorated beneath this feast. Its Epistle tells us to “put on the new man”, and its Gospel gives us the king who finds one guest at his son’s wedding without a wedding garment. He has accepted the invitation and entered the hall, yet something essential is missing.
St Augustine identifies that garment with charity; St Thomas calls charity the form of the virtues. We may possess the beads, know the prayers, defend the Faith and attend Mass, yet still shelter resentment, impurity or pride. The mysteries have to become visible in the life.
That begins with today’s Gospel, the Annunciation. The Angel greets Our Lady: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She hears the word of God and answers: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.” Mary receives Christ before she presents Him to the world. That is the pattern of Christian life: we receive Christ, and His life must begin to appear in ours.
The Annunciation asks whether we accept God’s will when it is not our plan. Gethsemane asks what obedience is worth when it hurts. Calvary asks whether there is someone we still refuse to forgive. The Resurrection asks whether we live as people who believe death is not the final word.
The Aves give the prayer its rhythm; the mysteries give it its substance. Over years those scenes become part of the soul. When suffering comes, Gethsemane is familiar; when death comes near, the Resurrection is no longer merely a doctrine remembered from a book.
This feast, however, was born not only from contemplation but from crisis. In 1571 St Pius V faced the advance of the Ottoman Empire, an explicitly Islamic power which had already taken Constantinople, much of the ancient Christian East and large territories in Europe. Cyprus had been invaded; Nicosia had fallen; Famagusta endured a terrible siege. Pius feared the further advance of Ottoman Islam into Christian Europe.
He united rival Catholic powers in the Holy League. On 7 October 1571, the first Sunday of October, their fleet under Don John of Austria met the Ottomans at Lepanto. The Ottoman fleet suffered devastating losses, thousands of Christian galley-slaves were liberated, and its reputation for naval invincibility was broken. Cyprus was not recovered, but the maritime advance had been checked.
While the fleet fought, Catholics prayed the Rosary. Pius V did not tell the sailors that prayer made defence unnecessary, nor the faithful that because men were fighting prayer had become compromised. Human responsibility and dependence upon Providence belonged together.
That makes Pope Leo’s language this year particularly striking. On Palm Sunday he invoked Isaiah’s warning that God does not listen to prayers offered by those whose hands are “full of blood”. In Magnifica Humanitas he described the theory of “just war” as outdated while preserving a strict right of self-defence; and last Sunday he asked the Church to pray the Rosary throughout October that wars may cease and peace be established. The older Catholic doctrine of just war was meant to restrain force by subjecting it to moral judgement. If innocent life may still be defended, the question remains when such defence is just and proportionate. Lepanto reminds us that the Church did not historically equate armed defence with aggression, while no Christian cause licenses hatred or cruelty.
Our circumstances are not those of 1571. There is no Ottoman fleet sailing towards Italy, and ordinary Muslims living in Europe are not enemy soldiers. Yet Islam is a confident presence in European societies, while Islamist ideology, jihadist violence, failures of integration and disputes over religious liberty are real. Catholics should neither exaggerate these matters nor ignore them.
There are voices abroad today ready to recover the language of the Crusades and the cry Deus vult — “God wills it” — as though Europe’s answer must be some new crusade to eject the perceived infidel. But before those words are directed outside us, Christians should remember what they demand from us. Deus vult begins with God. His will must govern our worship, homes, marriages and ambitions. It is emptied of Christian meaning if we proclaim what God supposedly wills for others while refusing to surrender ourselves to Him.
Compare the average Muslim’s commitment to his faith to the contemporary European Christian. Before donning the crusader cross of the Templar, we must first put on the wedding garment of our baptism into Christ. The white garment comes before the martial emblem. The Christian is first marked by regeneration, grace and charity before he can speak credibly of defending Christendom. A man may wear a cross upon his breast and yet remain spiritually naked before the King. Today’s Gospel asks not what symbol we display outwardly, but whether we have truly “put on Christ”.
Last Sunday Our Lord gave us the Summary of the Law: love God with the whole heart, soul and mind, and love our neighbour as ourselves. The order matters because love of neighbour flows from love of God. If I love my neighbour as myself, I must desire for him the greatest good I desire for myself. That is not merely safety, prosperity or peaceful coexistence. It is salvation.
True charity cannot look upon the Muslim neighbour simply as a demographic problem, still less as an enemy to be hated. If Christ is truly God and eternal life is found in Him, then I must desire that my Muslim neighbour should know Him, love Him and attain Heaven. Anything less is not the fullness of Christian charity.
Yet we cannot credibly summon others to conversion while refusing conversion ourselves. Europe does not principally need men dressing themselves in crusader symbols while remaining strangers to the Catholic Faith. It needs baptism taken seriously, confession recovered, marriages made Christian, children catechised, Sundays sanctified, and Christ acknowledged not as a cultural emblem but as Lord.
Islam did not empty our churches, make Catholics abandon confession, or make us embarrassed by our own religion. Much of that we have done to ourselves. A civilisation which discards its own faith cannot be surprised when a more confident creed occupies the space it has vacated.
If Europe returned genuinely to its Catholic roots, families could be strengthened, children formed within a moral order, public life reminded that law answers to truths higher than the State, and destructive ideologies resisted by a civilisation which knew what it believed. Those of other faiths would encounter Christianity not as an exhausted memory but as a living faith. Our conversion does not save our neighbour — Christ alone saves — but it can make us credible instruments through whom he encounters Christ.
That is the real force of Deus vult for us. Before it is a cry against an external enemy, it is surrender to the will of God. Before we ask how Europe can be recovered, we must ask whether Christ has recovered us. Before we speak of defending civilisation, there must be a crusade against the unbelief, compromise and sin within our own hearts.
And here the wedding garment returns. The man who nurses hatred after leaving Mass lacks something essential. The man who prays the Sorrowful Mysteries while making peace with habitual impurity has not allowed those mysteries to judge him. Parents who lament the disappearance of Christian Europe while their children never see them kneel at home are asking civilisation to preserve what they themselves are failing to transmit.
This is why the family Rosary matters. It says that this house has a King. It teaches children that illness is prayed about, the dead remembered, sin forgiven, and Our Lady actually invoked. Children will fidget and adults will be tired. Pray it anyway.
Then there are the words we repeat fifty times: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” We ask Our Lady to help us in the life we actually have, and to remain with us when we stand before the King whose invitation we accepted. Then the question of the wedding garment will no longer be a parable.
So pray the Rosary this October for peace, for Europe, for Christians who have abandoned the Faith, and for those who do not yet know Christ. Pray for Muslims living among us, not merely that we may coexist peacefully, but that they may receive the grace to know and love Our Lord Jesus Christ. And do not pray as though the conversion required were always somebody else’s.
The Rosary gives us the mysteries of Christ; the Sunday asks whether we have put them on. May Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary obtain for us the grace to be clothed in Christ, so that when the King comes among His guests He may find in us the wedding garment of charity: a charity which first surrenders itself to God, and therefore desires for our neighbour the same eternal salvation we ask Him to grant to ourselves.
Deus vult: God wills it. May His will begin in us.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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