Journey with Mary
A Sunday Letter, Issue Two
Week of 11 May 2026, Seventh Sunday of Easter
Dear friends,
It has been a week of waiting. On Thursday the Lord ascended. For the next nine days, the Church stands with the apostles and with Mary in the Upper Room, in the first novena, the original waiting. Saturdays have always belonged to her, and this week, on the day reserved for her, we began something new on the site, a quiet thread called Mother’s Words to Us. Each Saturday from now on, we will sit with one of her sentences, spoken at some small place in the world and often forgotten by everyone but the village that received it.
From the Early Church this week
Tuesday, Voices from the Early Church: Polycarp on Eighty-Six Years of Faithfulness
An old bishop of Smyrna, on the day of his martyrdom in the year 155, was told he could save his life by cursing Christ. He answered, “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How can I now blaspheme my King who saved me?” Eighty-six years of unbroken faithfulness, which began when he was a boy listening to the apostle John.
Friday, Sayings of the Desert: Macarius on the Silence That Is Prayer
From the deserts of fourth-century Egypt, Abba Macarius the Great left us very few words. The ones that survive are like stones smoothed by wind. One reads: “If you are blamed and remain silent, you have prayed.” A whole spirituality of unspoken faithfulness in a single sentence.
A new Saturday: Mother’s Words to Us
From this weekend on, Saturday on the site is reserved for her voice. Each week, one of Mary’s own sentences, spoken somewhere small in history and largely forgotten everywhere else. We sit with the words for the day.
We have begun with Pontmain, a village in western France where, on a winter evening in 1871, two brothers stepped outside their father’s barn and saw a lady in a dark blue robe scattered with gold stars, standing in the sky above a neighbour’s house. More children came and saw her. The village prayed the rosary in the snow. While they prayed, words appeared letter by letter in a banner of gold beneath her feet. The children read them aloud as they came.
But pray, my children. God will hear you in a little while. My Son allows Himself to be moved.
Our Lady of Pontmain, 17 January 1871
A Marian shrine this week, Our Lady of Fátima
On Wednesday, 13 May, the Church marked the anniversary of the first apparition at Fátima. The year was 1917. The world was in the middle of the Great War, the worst slaughter the human race had yet known. Portugal had been declared a republic seven years before, anti-clerical and proud of it. The villages of the Serra de Aire, in the country’s poor centre, kept the faith without much help from the state.
On that Sunday afternoon, three children (Lúcia dos Santos, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged eight and seven) were taking their family sheep to graze in a hollow called the Cova da Iria. There was a flash of light. They thought it was lightning. Then, in a small holm oak tree, they saw a Lady, more brilliant than the sun. She asked them to come back on the thirteenth of every month for six months, and to pray the rosary every day for peace.
They came back. So did others, growing in number each time. By 13 October, tens of thousands had gathered, including journalists and the openly anti-Catholic. The estimates of that day’s crowd range from 30,000 to 100,000. They watched the sun spin, pulse, change colour, and seem to fall toward the earth before returning to its place. The wet ground and the clothes of those drenched by the morning’s rain became, in an instant, dry. It is one of the most publicly witnessed miracles in modern history.
What she asked for has not changed. The rosary, every day. Prayer for peace. Prayer for the conversion of sinners. The five First Saturdays of reparation, which she added in a later vision to Lúcia in 1925.
In 1981, on the very anniversary of her first appearance, Pope Saint John Paul II was shot in St Peter’s Square. He survived. The bullet, he later said, had been guided by “a motherly hand,” and he placed it the following year in the crown of the statue at Fátima, where it remains today.
More than a century on, around six million pilgrims a year now come to the Cova da Iria. On every 13 May and 13 October the hill fills with several hundred thousand. They kneel on the stones. They pray what she asked them to pray. The thing she came to say has not ended.
“Our Lady of Fátima, pray for us.”
Also this week
Our Lady of the Forsaken, Valencia. Last Sunday the city of Valencia kept its high Marian feast for Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, Our Lady of the Forsaken, and the celebrations have run all through the week. She has been the patroness of the city, and of the poor, the sick, the dying without family, and the prisoners no one comes to claim, since 1409, when a small group of laymen took up the care of those nobody else would touch and asked her to be their Mother. She has been answering to that name ever since. If you walk into her basilica today, the first thing you notice is that her statue tilts very slightly forward. As if she is listening. As if she is leaning toward whoever comes to her next.
“Mother of the abandoned, pray for us.”
Notre-Dame du Port, Clermont-Ferrand. On Friday, in the volcanic heart of the Auvergne, central France kept the feast of Notre-Dame du Port, Our Lady of the Port, a Black Virgin shrine traced back to the sixth century. The present statue, carved from walnut in 1734, is small (about a foot tall) and is kept in the crypt of a Romanesque basilica that has listened to pilgrims for nearly 1500 years, including those on the long road to Santiago de Compostela. In the Middle Ages it was one of the five most celebrated Marian shrines in France, on par with Chartres. It is largely forgotten now outside the region. She is not.
“Our Lady of the Port, pray for us.”
From Rome
Two notes from the Holy Father this week:
- At Wednesday’s General Audience, held on the feast of Our Lady of Fátima, Pope Leo XIV offered a catechesis on Mary as “the perfect model of what the Church is called to be,” a creature of the Word of the Lord and mother of the children of God.
- Pope Leo also established a new Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, drawing together four Vatican dicasteries and three pontifical academies to discern the Church’s response to AI in human life, work, and warfare. It is the first standing inter-dicasterial body of his pontificate.
This Sunday at Mass
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
We are inside the Pentecost Novena, the nine days between the Ascension this past Thursday and Pentecost next Sunday. Mary stands with the apostles in the Upper Room, waiting for the Spirit. The Gospel today takes us back to the night of the Last Supper, where Jesus prayed for us before he died. He held all of us in mind, by name, and asked his Father for us.
Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
John 17:24 (ESV-CE)
He prayed for us, by name, the night before his death. We are still inside that prayer.
For the little ones
A few new things in our Kids’ Corner this week:
- New comic: Saint Simon Stock, the boy who lived in a tree. The English Carmelite to whom Mary gave the Brown Scapular at Aylesford in Kent in 1251. Have a look.
- Two new colouring categories: Life of Jesus, with 18 detailed scenes from his life and ministry, and Jesus for little ones, with 10 cartoon pages for the very young. Open the colouring hub.
- Catholic printables: 20 new pages added to the Catholic section, the seven sacraments, Adoration, and Marian scenes. Print and play.
Until next Sunday, walking with you,
Ivana
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