Journey with Mary
A Sunday Letter, Issue Three
Week of 18 May 2026, Pentecost Sunday
Dear friends,
The novena is over. For nine days the Church has waited with Mary in the Upper Room, and today the Spirit comes. The waiting has its answer, and the answer is fire. Those nine days, between the Ascension and Pentecost, were the first novena the Church ever prayed. Every novena since, the rosary novenas, the novenas to the saints, the small nine-day prayers your grandmother taught you, is a return to that upper room, to that waiting beside Mary for the Spirit to come.
And by a quiet kindness of the calendar, today is also her own feast, Mary, Help of Christians. The Mother who waited with the apostles in the Upper Room is the same Mother to whom the Church has turned in every age of trouble. She is with us today, as she was that morning, when the Spirit came.
Today, the Church’s birthday
Pentecost is not only the coming of the Spirit. It is the day the Church is born into the world.
For fifty days the apostles had been the witnesses of something too large for them. They had seen the Lord risen and they had seen Him return to the Father. They knew. But they were still hidden, still afraid, still in the upper room with the door shut and Mary among them.
Then the wind comes. Then the fire. And the door opens, not from the outside, but from within. They walk out into a crowded Jerusalem and begin to speak, and every person hears them in his own language. Peter, who only weeks earlier had denied the Lord three times in fear, stands and preaches the first homily of the Christian era. Three thousand are baptised before the day is out.
That is the Church’s first morning. Today is the anniversary. Two thousand years later, every parish in the world keeps the same feast, and every one of us is a child of that crowd in the street.
From the Early Church this week
On Tuesday, our Voices from the Early Church sat with Saint Justin Martyr, the philosopher and second-century convert whose long letter to the Roman emperor describes the Sunday liturgy in such recognisable detail that any Catholic who walked into his community in 155 AD would have known exactly what was happening. The Mass has not changed.
On Friday, our Sayings of the Desert turned for the first time to a Desert Mother: Amma Syncletica of Alexandria, who left wealth and city to live in a small tomb with her blind sister, and who taught the women who came to her that the fire of prayer does not light easily, that the smoke comes first, and that the smoke is part of the fire.
Mother’s Words to Us, Lourdes
Yesterday morning the second entry in our Saturday series, Mother’s Words to Us, went live. We sat with Lourdes, with the eighteen visits to a poor shepherd girl in a damp grotto in the Pyrenees in 1858, and with the strange Occitan sentence that Bernadette carried home from the sixteenth visit and could not pronounce.
Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou. I am the Immaculate Conception. Mary did not say I am the woman to whom this happened. She said I am that mystery. Her whole being is grace.
A Marian shrine this week, Mary, Help of Christians, Turin
Today is her feast. The title Mary, Help of Christians is ancient. Saint John Chrysostom used it as far back as the fourth century in a sermon for the people of Antioch. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux carried it forward in the twelfth, in his great Marian homilies. It is one of the oldest names of Mary the Mother of mercy who runs to the help of God’s people when they are in trouble.
The title entered the universal calendar by a much later road. In 1571, in the waters off Lepanto, a vastly outnumbered Christian fleet won a decisive battle against the Ottoman navy on the morning of 7 October, while in Rome the confraternities of the Rosary walked the streets in procession. Pope Saint Pius V, who had ordered that procession, attributed the victory to Mary and established the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on that day. From that hour the title Help of Christians spread quietly through Italy and beyond.
It became a universal feast under Pope Pius VII. In 1809 Napoleon’s soldiers entered the papal apartments and arrested the Pope. For nearly five years he was held under guard, first at Savona and then in France, while the French emperor tried to bend the Church to his will. The Pope did not bend. He prayed. The Church across Europe prayed with him. On 24 May 1814, after Napoleon’s first fall, Pius VII was released and returned to Rome. He never forgot the date. The following year he gave 24 May to her, under the title she had so plainly answered to, Maria Auxilium Christianorum, Mary, Help of Christians.
Half a century later, in Turin, a young priest named John Bosco had a dream. He was nine years old, a poor farm boy, and in the dream he saw himself among rough children who would not listen to him, and a Lady came to him and said, not with blows but with gentleness will you win these children for me. That dream guided the rest of his life.
As a young priest he gathered the abandoned boys of Turin, taught them to read, taught them a trade, taught them to pray. He had no money and no land. He had an old shed and the city’s contempt and a steady conviction that the Lady of his dream was building the work, not he. By 1862 the boys numbered in the hundreds. He told them they would build a basilica together, in her honour, under the title Help of Christians. They had nothing. They built it anyway. It was consecrated in 1868. It still stands in the Valdocco district of Turin, and over the high altar her image looks down on the children who come to her, crowned, with her Son on her arm, holding out her open hand.
Don Bosco wrote: She has done everything. Without her we are nothing. Near the end of his life he had a second great dream, the Dream of the Two Columns, in which the Church, a great ship in a storm, was anchored between two pillars rising from the sea, one bearing the Eucharist and the other bearing the image of Mary, Help of Christians. As long as the ship was tied to those two pillars, no storm could sink it. He told that dream to his sons and they have not forgotten.
The Salesian family Don Bosco founded, who today care for poor and abandoned children in nearly every country in the world, was placed entirely under her care. So was the whole of Australia, by its bishops, in 1844, who chose her as the country’s patroness. She has been answering ever since.
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us.
Also this week
Saint Rita of Cascia. Friday was the feast of Saint Rita, the Augustinian nun of fifteenth-century Italy who is the patron of impossible causes. Married young to a violent man, the mother of two sons who died young, she finally entered the convent at Cascia she had longed for since childhood, and lived the last forty years of her life in prayer and in the care of the sick. Near the end of her life a wound from a thorn of Christ’s crown appeared on her forehead and remained. For our little ones we added a short comic of her life and a colouring page.
From Rome
It has been a full week at the Vatican. On Wednesday the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, received Catholicos Aram I of the Armenian Apostolic Church for his first official visit, and welcomed him publicly at the General Audience the following day, a small, patient sign of the long friendship between East and West. At the Audience, the Holy Father reflected on the Second Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, and on how every Eucharist is, in his own words, “a true epiphany of the Church in prayer.”
Yesterday the Pope travelled to Acerra, in the so-called Terra dei Fuochi near Naples, the region long scarred by illegal waste burning. He told the mayors and residents gathered that the common good must come before “the business interests of a few,” and asked them to “take responsibility and serve life.” The visit fell on the eve of the Laudato Si’ anniversary, and read as a quiet continuation of that letter’s long care for creation and for the poor who suffer most when the earth is treated badly.
And tomorrow, Monday, the Holy Father releases his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. He will speak in person at the presentation in the Synod Hall, a gentle break with custom that suggests how seriously he takes the question. Friday’s address to an international conference on AI gave a foretaste of his thinking: the Church, he said, must help people rediscover “the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God,” because the challenge before us is “not technological but anthropological.” The encyclical, as it happens, is the very letter introduced to children in this week’s issue of Little Light.
This Sunday at Mass
Pentecost Sunday. The readings are among the most loved in the Church’s year.
- First reading: Acts 2:1-11. The rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the apostles speaking in every language under heaven.
- Psalm 104. Send forth your Spirit, Lord, and renew the face of the earth.
- Second reading: 1 Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13. One Spirit, many gifts; one body, many members.
- Sequence: Veni, Sancte Spiritus. Come, Holy Spirit. One of the most beautiful prayers the Church has ever written.
- Gospel: John 20:19-23. The Risen Lord breathes on the apostles. Receive the Holy Spirit.
For the little ones
A big day for Kids’ Corner. Issue 1 of Little Light, our new weekly Catholic magazine for children, launched yesterday. The first issue is dedicated to Mary, Help of Christians, with Pentecost, Saint Philip Neri, the Pope’s first letter, a Bible story, God’s Creation, a colouring page, a word search, and a craft for making your own little lantern.
Also fresh this week, our Pentecost crossword, all thirty-eight Catholic words on the Holy Spirit, the Gifts, and the Fruits, ready to print.
A blessed Pentecost to you and your family.
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us.
Leave a Reply