On 13 May 2026, the anniversary of Mary’s first apparition at Fatima, Pope Leo XIV spoke of everyone’s need to turn to Mary:
“In the Mother of the Lord, the Church contemplates her own Mystery, not only because she finds in Her the model of virginal faith, maternal charity and the spousal covenant to which she is called, but also and above all because in Her [the Church] recognizes her own archetype, the ideal figure of what she is called to be.”
Indeed, when we turn to Mary and remember her, then she, the Causa Nostrae Laetitiae, shines brilliantly in Church, in homelife, in friendships and fair love. The great Catholic poet, Dante Aligheri, pointed to the identity of Holy Mother Church and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Seeking the grace through Mary to look directly into the transforming light of the Blessed Trinity, Dante imagines St Bernard of Clairvaux contemplating the mystery of Mary in these words: “You were the Mother of Him who made you, and you remain a virgin forever.”
Monsignor Romano Guardini wrote often in his many books on the importance of Mary in evolving human life and in the unfolding life of the Church. In his book, The Human Experience, he writes of the chaste longing for Mary’s presence, as once for the longing of a natural mother’s comforting embrace. Especially in those dark moments of loss, crisis, anxiety, or of any anguish of soul, a mother’s comforting embrace in the night has no consolation greater than turning to Mary. This is not infantile, Monsignor Guardini insisted; it is an essential part of our nature, our human experience. In turning to Mary, we are striving towards God, striving towards wholeness.
An elderly English gentleman once told me about his grandmother, who was a nurse for the British soldiers during World War I. He said that the dying soldiers very often called his grandmother, “Mum” or “Mother.” She never corrected the dying man in his last painful moments. His grandmother, a field hospital nurse, would be there with them, holding their hand, comforting them; in the delirious moments before they passed to heaven, this was the dying man’s own “Mum.”
There are many accounts given through the ages of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to dying Catholic men as their own mother; some recognized her through the final rosary petition: “…Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” One of these apparitions appeared during the Napoleonic Wars near Leipzig. In 1813, a gravely wounded Polish soldier, Tomasz Klossowski, lay among the dead on the battlefield. Tomasz cried out to Mary to save him. This is the account given later by Tomasz Klossowski:
“She was moving across the battlefield in a long [rose-colored] dress, floating above the ground and hugging a white eagle at her breast. Virgin Mary! She was slowly coming toward me. She stopped and leant over me and then I saw her face, most beautiful, but full of indescribable sorrow.”
She spoke to Tomasz; he would return to Poland where he was to search for an image that faithfully represented her so that “…[people] may pray to it and take graces from my hands in most difficult times.” Appearing three times again in 1850, she promised another visionary, a shepherd, that she would clasp the nation of Poland to her heart as she did with the white eagle. This apparition is known as Our Lady of Licheń, the Sorrowful Mother of Poland. Those who turn to Mary find that she has already turned to us, interceding from the very heart of God’s mercy.
Ruth D. Lasseter
SDC Associate
Indiana, USA
