NOVENA PRAYER

Mary, Our Mother, by accepting the invitation to bear God’s Son to the world, you brought forth new life for all of us. Your faithful acceptance of God’s word is our model and inspiration as we strive to make room in our hearts for your Son and bear him to others. Help us to follow him more closely, even to the foot of the cross, as you did.



During this month dedicated to you, we ask in a special way for you to care for each of our own mothers: (state your personal intention).

Notre Dame, our Mother, we pray today, with great gratitude for our mothers: for our grandmothers, for our mothers, for those religious women, mentors, rectors, who have cared for us with your tender love. Bless our mothers on earth with abundant life and those mothers who have departed this life with the eternal joys of life in heaven.

We pray, as in all things, through the name of your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
TODAY’S SAINT

On our final day of the novena for Mother’s Day, we offer for our mothers in dedication to Mary, Our Mother.

Through Mary’s motherhood, we are reborn in faith through Jesus. Catholics honor Mary as a human who was glorified through her willingness to trust God. Mary’s sorrows and joys, her hopes for her child and spouse, and her quiet endurance ring true to the experience of families today. She is easy to identify with, and through her faithfulness, God changed the world. We call her “Our Lady” and “mother” because she is our mother in faith and our model of holiness.
Mary is a model for mothers not simply because she bore Christ in her womb or because she physically mothered him. Rather, as Christ proclaims in the Gospels, Mary’s motherhood is a model for us and for all mothers on a much deeper level.

Mary is the most excellent model for us of how we can use our human creativity to glorify God. Elizabeth proclaims blessed is the fruit of thy womb! because the fruit of Mary’s womb, Jesus, will vanquish death. To give birth to Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, is the greatest possible fruit of human creativity.

As we go about our own creative actions—writing or studying in school, earning a living for our families, cooking, baking, creating art, or, the most miraculous of creativity—bearing children, other immortal souls, and rearing them into saints—Mary serves as a model for how we can fully cooperate with God’s creativity. We, like Mary, are made in the image and likeness of God the Creator. It is our joyful duty to offer our work to God, so that the whole world may radiate God’s glory.

Mary is most notably depicted on Notre Dame’s campus in the Golden Dome of the Main Building, of course. The women of nearby St. Mary’s College procured the statue after the Great Fire of 1879 and it is modeled after one that was erected in Rome by the pope. It stands 19 feet high and weighs 4,000 pounds.

Mary’s statue is clothed in gold and stands on a crescent moon, images that come from the Book of Revelation. That Scripture describes a vision of Mary as “a woman in the sky, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet.”

When we say prayers to Mary, we direct our prayer to God, the source of all things, through Mary. We ask for Mary’s intercession with these prayers—we ask her to carry our requests or offerings of thanksgiving to God—and we are confident that Mary will do so in her care for us as our mother in faith.

We come to her today, confident that she will intercede for us and our mothers to her son, through her tender care.

Mary our Mother, pray for us and for all mothers!

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