Thursday next week will mark the one-year anniversary of the tragedy at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in our neighborhood. That morning at 8:15 am OLP will be offering Called to Hope: A Mass for Healing, Peace, and Service. This also just so happens to fall on the Memorial of Saint Monica.
Most of what we know of this North African saint is through the writings of her son, St Augustine. Saint Augustine describes St Monica as a woman of prayer and action. He credits her intercession and her example of faith for his conversion from a life of debauchery, and later of heresy. When St Augustine was ill and on the brink of death, St Monica traveled more than 1000 miles to come to his side. He recovered and traveled to study in Milan. Monica followed him there to live near him and to serve the poor there. He tells us of her abundant hospitality and generosity to those in need throughout her whole life.
Reflecting on Saint Monica and Annunciation, I realized that one of the things that sticks out in my mind from that day and the months following are women, mostly mothers, who, like her, were people of prayer and action. The image of the mother running barefoot through the street to reach her child on August 27 is burned into my memory. I remember it was a mother of one of our students at OLP who invited me to come pray the Rosary at Annunciation every night for the intention of the survivors. I remember running into another mom from OLP who was organizing the hundreds of flowers that people brought and giving food and water to those gathered. Later, two other women, also mothers, invited me to an event that they worked on for the “Catholic call to end gun violence.”
There were certainly men who prayed and served during this time too; many nights Archbishop Hebda prayed the rosary with us in front of the church in those days, for example, and I do not mean to ignore these contributions. But to me, there was something so beautiful about the women that I knew showing up in so many varied ways. Saint John Paul II, writing about the “feminine genius,” tells us that women play an essential role in the transformation of society, and that their natural receptivity allows them to be “prophetic witnesses” for receiving and sharing the love of Christ. You can see this in the reflections of St Teresa of Avila when she writes, “Christ has no body but yours: no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.”
As we continue to grieve and heal this atrocity in our own community, may we all, man and woman, look to the example of St. Monica and other holy women and men who teach us how to “pray with our feet.”
Elizabeth Pike
Director of Music & Liturgy
