“Carried away in glory on the day of her Assumption with her body, Mary reminds us of the importance that the Church gives to the carnal”

A priest in the Yvelines, Father Pierre Amar is an editor on padreblog.fr. He recently published Out of order (Artège, 2019).

Christmas in the middle of summer. This is how many French people consider the holiday of August 15, a happy family break filled, we must wish everyone a warm reunion. Once again, after All Saints’ Day, Christmas and Ascension Day, Catholics are very happy to offer this beautiful gift to the whole of the national community: a non-working religious holiday, a singular indication of our Christian roots. As at Christmas, we can also bet that the churches and shrines will be a little more frequented than usual by a less accustomed public, eager to entrust to Mary the joys and sorrows of the past year but also the many uncertainties of the months to come. come.

Because summer 2020 cannot be like all the others. After this special year, what will fall be like? We would like to be able to forget everything for a moment but, even in the heart of August, the summer recklessness is abruptly dismissed as soon as you have to unsheathe your mask to enter a store or a museum, or even – now – stroll through some. streets. The mask invites us to a certain gravity and reminds us of our common destiny. That of being vulnerable, interdependent people, embarked on a very curious journey of which a stage is inevitable and known to all: death.

The spiritual is the big missing from this curious period that we are going through.

Faced with this reality, the vast conspiracy against any form of spirituality once denounced by the writer Georges Bernanos is in full swing. Because the spiritual is the big absentee of this curious period that we are all going through and which has only one refrain: “Take care of yourself!”. As if we had waited for Covid-19 to realize that life is good and that it is a gift. It was time!

Yet that will not be enough to raise one’s head. And to all those who would like to free themselves from generalized pessimism, here is a good old remedy, this type of remedy that we look at while thinking of our grandmothers and say to ourselves that it could work well: that of looking up to Heaven, to look up to Mary, protector of France since a wish from King Louis XIII. So that it protects us from Covid-19 but also from the ambient disaster, discouragement and resignation.

You laugh? However, without ignoring medical science, entire generations have used this medicine before us and with success: talk about it to the Marseillais who have always trusted “the good Mother”, to the Lyonnais who faithfully celebrate Notre-Dame de Fourvière or to the inhabitants of Valenciennes who have never forgotten the Saint Cordon! We should talk about many other places, such as Lourdes or Rocamadour, without forgetting Corsica, but it is then an encyclopedia that we should write …

Didn’t the fire at Notre-Dame last year show us how closely the soul of France was linked to Mary?

Looking at Marie: this is the message conveyed by two very recent initiatives. The first is that of the “M de Marie”, an atypical pilgrimage and very followed all this summer by two carriages carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary. One left from Lourdes and the other from La Salette in Isère, crisscrossing France and drawing a vast M on the hexagon, joining the towns where the mother of Jesus appeared. Didn’t the fire at Notre-Dame last year show us how closely the soul of France was linked to Mary? Carried away in glory on the day of her Assumption with her body (this is precisely the event celebrated on August 15), she reminds us of the importance that the Church gives to the carnal.

“My body is mine” we hear here and there. It’s a mistake: my body is me. One day, he will join that of Mary with God.

“My body is mine” we hear here and there. It’s a mistake: my body is me. It is with him that I love, that I give, that I share, that I also suffer. One day, he will join that of Mary with God.

But what our grandmothers also say is that this humble woman from Israel who has become the patron saint of France has always known distress and hardship. Since a certain Good Friday, when she experienced the worst suffering ever – that of losing her child – she has been in solidarity with all those who cry, all those who suffer, all those who toil.

Like a mother, she turns to her children to strengthen and console them. They still have to confide in her by opening their hearts and dropping the masks! Because in Marseille, Lyon or Valenciennes, it remains essential to live in the traditions of the interior, not to forget that they were animated by faith and that if they are no longer, they risk becoming empty shells. .

August 15 resounds like a call: is there not in the heart of man a thirst for “something else”?

The other initiative comes from the bishops of France. In a common message, they invite all Catholics to pray this August 15 through the intercession of Mary, “For a fair discernment of biomedical techniques offered to human ingenuity”. Because if we do not take care of each other, starting with the most fragile, we will not be able to heal this world. In this sense, the adoption, a few weeks ago, of the new bioethics bill marks a very serious anthropological setback. Embryonic sorting, eugenics, chimera, enlargement of the IMG up to nine months for “psychosocial distress”, etc .: ethical transgressions are legion. Following Mother Teresa who had said the same words when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the bishops of France denounces “A terrible tragedy”.

The current crisis gives us a lot to think about what to be and what to do. August 15 resounds like a call: is there not in the heart of man a thirst for “something else”? During the lockdown, many of us realized that life couldn’t be all about eating and sleeping, shopping and a little sport. Let us not exclude the spiritual from our society: it possesses within it riches of resilience, hope and courage which our country will badly need. Finally, our grandmothers still have a lot to teach us!

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