Pope's Intentions
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For Evangelization: That Mary, Star of Evangelization, may guide the Church in proclaiming Christ to all nations.
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Feast
Commentary of the day
Saint John-Paul II, Pope from 1978 to 2005
Encyclical « Dives in Misericordia » §9 (trans. © copyright Libreria Editrice Vaticana)
"His mercy is from age to age"
“The favors of the Lord I will sing for ever” (Ps 88[89],2). These words of the Church at Easter re-echo in the fullness of their prophetic content the words that Mary uttered during her visit to Elizabeth, the wife of Zechariah: "His mercy is...from generation to generation." At the very moment of the Incarnation, these words open up a new perspective of salvation history. After the resurrection of Christ, this perspective is new on both the historical and the eschatological level. From that time onwards there is a succession of new generations of individuals in the immense human family, in ever-increasing dimensions; there is also a succession of new generations of the People of God, marked with the Sign of the Cross and of the resurrection... the absolute revelation of the mercy that Mary proclaimed on the threshold of her kinswoman's house...
Mother of the crucified One..., Mary, then, is the one who has the deepest knowledge of the mystery of God's mercy. She knows its price, she knows how great it is. In this sense, we call her the Mother of mercy... she was able to perceive, through the complex events, first of Israel, then of every individual and of the whole of humanity, that mercy of which "from generation to generation" people become sharers according to the eternal design of the most Holy Trinity...
Mother of the crucified and risen One; as the One who, having obtained mercy in an exceptional way, in an equally exceptional way "merits" that mercy throughout her earthly life and, particularly, at the foot of the cross of her Son; and finally as the one who, through her hidden and at the same time incomparable sharing in the messianic mission of her Son, was called in a special way to bring close to people that love which He had come to reveal: the love that finds its most concrete expression vis-a-vis the suffering, the poor, those deprived of their own freedom, the blind, the oppressed and sinners, just as Christ spoke of them (Lc 4,18; 7,22).