The
Participation of the Blessed Virgin and St. John at the Sacrifice of the Cross
1. Christ is the Head, the Church His Body. He does not evacuate
the Church; He pulls it along in HIs wake. What He does in a sovereign
manner as Head, she must do in dependence on Him, vivified by Him, carried by Him
as His Body.
a) The Blessed Virgin and St.
John prefigure the Church at the foot of the Cross. To His infinite theandric
offering Christ unites their created finite offering. He envelops, sustains and
raises up finite beings. “Christ being the Head of the Church, grace was given
to Him not only as an individual person, but also in view of overflowing onto
His members, such that the works of Christ have value for Him and for His
members, as the works of a man who possesses grace, have value for himself.”
Certainly, this does not mean that the offering of the Blessed
Virgin and St. John could add anything intensively to Christ’s offering; but it
could be expanded, deepened, vivified, sanctified by this contact. This offering,
united to a supplication of Jesus, represents the unspeakable distress of very
loving creatures, torn by the spectacle of evil which seems to drown the world.
It can, from then on, become a coredemptrix for the world—no doubt to various
degrees. For the Blessed Virgin, her offering is coredemptive of all that is
Christ’s the Redeemer; her intercession is universal. The offering of St. John
is more restricted.
b) At the same time that He
pulls them along in the offering of His ascending mediation, Christ pours out
on the Blessed Virgin and St. John—that is, on the heart of the Church of that
time—the treasures of a definitive and fully Christ-conforming grace. “The
human nature of Christ,” says St. Thomas, “is the instrument of the divinity;
consequently, all the actions and passions of Christ act instrumentally, under
the motion of the divinity, in order to procure men’s salvation. The Passion of
Christ is thus the efficient cause of our salvation.”
2. At the moment when the drama of the world’s redemption
is completed on the Cross, Christ desires that the Church, the Church of that
time, be engaged in it in the measure that she is capable. The participation in
the oblation of the Cross, which is at once liturgical, bloody, and loving,
happens then by immediate contact, that is, without recourse to sacramental
signs and an unbloody rite.
At the Last Supper and at the Mass it is, on the
contrary, under sacramental signs and an unbloody rite that the entrance
into the sacrificial drama is proposed, first to the Apostles, then to
Christians of future ages.
One must remember, therefore, two manners by which the Church
participates fully in the redemptive drama: one of them, passing, by immediate
contact with the bloody sacrifice—that of the Church at the very foot of the
Cross, that of the Blessed Virgin and of St. John; the other, permanent bringing
to us the bloody sacrifice in the envelopment of the unbloody sacrifice,
instituted at the Last Supper by the Savior in order to be reproduced by His
disciples—that of the Church is waiting for the return of Christ. (Charles
Cardinal Journet, The Mass: The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross [trans.
Victor Szczurek; South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008], 26-27)
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