Concilium Allocutio - May 2013 by Fr. Bede McGregor

The Infinite Gift of the Holy Spirit

It is a lovely providence of God that our Concilium Meeting takes place this month on the feast of Pentecost. It invites us to reflect once more on the infinite Gift of the Holy Spirit given to each one of us personally and to the Legion as a whole. The mission of the Son is central to our Catholic faith. The Father so loved us that he gave us his Son as our brother, our redeemer, our friend, our Lord and God. Jesus is the visibility and total accessibility of God to each one of us. Our Lord tells us: ‘To have seen me is to see the Father and the Father and I are one.’ Every word, every deed, every detail in the life of God Incarnate is precious and grace filled for us, especially the death and resurrection of Jesus. Life would become intolerable without the friendship of Jesus.

But the mission of the Holy Spirit is also central to our Catholic Faith. The Father and the Son give us their love for each other and this love is infinite and personal: it is the gift of the Holy Spirit. One could say that the Father and the Son so loved us that they give us their own life and love, the Holy Spirit Himself. It is the Holy Spirit that leads us into the life of the Trinity. No one can say Abba Father or Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that makes the Church a sacrament of the life of the Trinity. It is the Holy Spirit that brings the Church into existence and sustains her in existence.

The words of St. Irenaeus put this truth very forcefully: ‘Where the Church is, there also is God’s Spirit; where God’s Spirit is, there is the Church and every grace; and the Spirit is truth; to distance oneself from the Church is to reject the Spirit and thus exclude oneself from life.’ This is the reason why the doctrine of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ is so indispensable to Legion spirituality. It is because it is in the Church that the Holy Spirit is most intimately to be found and without the Spirit the Legion would cease to be a vibrant part of the mystical Body of Christ.

On the feast of Pentecost we celebrate the birth of the Church through the power and love of the Holy Spirit. In a sense we could also say that on this great feast day we celebrate the birth of the Legion because the Holy Spirit is the primary source of everything that is authentically Catholic and the primary agent of all evangelisation. And the Legion is nothing but Catholic and nothing but totally committed to the task of evangelisation, these truths are expressed in many parts of the Handbook. For example: ‘It is significant that the corporate act of the Legion of Mary was to address itself to the Holy Spirit by his invocation and Prayer, then proceeding by the Rosary to Mary and her Son.’

We have been reflecting on the two inseparable missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this month of May, let us briefly refer to the part played by Mary in both these supremely important Missions because they reveal to us the utterly unique relationship of Mary to the Holy Spirit. First, the Mission of the Son in the Incarnation. It would be difficult to imagine a more intimate role in the Incarnation than the role of Mary as the Mother of God Incarnate. It is the Holy Spirit that enables her to become the Mother of Jesus. As the Angel Gabriel said to Mary: ‘the Holy Spirit will come upon you.’ Frank Duff, our Founder, spent many years thinking about the relationship between Mary and the Holy Spirit because he saw it as crucial to an understanding of the identity and mission of the Legion. I think it was his extraordinary devotion to Mary that led him to his extraordinary and profound devotion to the Holy Spirit.

At Pentecost we see the role of Mary in the Mission of the Holy Spirit in the birth of the Church. The apostles and other disciples both men and women are gathered together with Mary at the centre preparing for the descent of the Holy Spirit. Just as she is the Mother of Christ at the Incarnation so she is now the Mother of the Church at Pentecost and in both cases it is because of her sublime relationship to the Holy Spirit. St. Louis Marie de Montfort puts it very simply; ‘Where there is Mary, there is the Holy Spirit.’ We legionaries seek above all to have the spirit of Mary so on this feast of Pentecost and always let us ask Mary for some share in her openness to the Holy Spirit and the grace of a genuine devotion to Him.

Let us conclude with a quotation from a saintly Cistercian Abbot of the 12th Century who expresses so much better everything I have been trying to say in this Allocutio.

‘How ineffable is God, how unutterable his mercy. The esteem in which the divine love holds us is completely inexpressible. It was not enough for the Father to have given his Son to redeem a slave unless he were to give the Holy Spirit also, through whom he adopts the slave as his own. He gave his Son as the price of redemption; he gave his Spirit as the bill of adoption. O God you lavish yourself on man far beyond his dreams. … Just as he did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, so also he has not spared the Holy Spirit, but he has poured him out on all flesh with a liberality of a new and astonishing depth.’
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