Following the Mass proper to this Marian invocation, we also ask the Lord today to grant us, through the intercession of Our Lady of the Pillar, to remain firm in faith and generous in love.
We beseech her to be firm in the faith, the greatest treasure we have received. Know how to guard it in ourselves and in those whom God has placed in our care from everything that could harm it: inappropriate reading, television programs that little by little undermine the Christian sense of life, shows that disdain a Christian...; guard it without yielding to what the Church has faithfully transmitted to us, maintaining with fortitude that good doctrine in an environment that for the sake of tolerance is sometimes intolerant of those firm principles on which we cannot yield, because they are the foundations on which our whole life rests. St. Peter exhorted the early Christians to stand firm in the faith in a pagan environment, similar to the one we sometimes find ourselves in. To give in on matters of faith or morals, in order not to have a bad time, to smooth out the edges, out of pure conformism and cowardice, would cause certain harm to those people who, perhaps a little later, will see the light in our behavior coherent with the faith of Jesus Christ.
In an environment in which perhaps weakness and weakness abound, this firmness must be accompanied by generosity in love: knowing how to understand each other with everyone, even with those who do not understand us or do not want to understand us, or who have social and political ideas different or opposed to ours, with people of high culture or with those who can barely read..., always maintaining a friendly attitude compatible with firmness when necessary, which is born of a heart that deals with God daily in the intimacy of prayer.
If the first evangelization, in Spain and everywhere else, was carried out under the protection of Our Lady, this new evangelization of the nations that are founded from their origin on Christian principles will also be carried out under her protection and help, as the pillar that guided and sustained the Chosen People day and night in the desert. She leads us to Jesus, who is our Promised Land; "this is what she is constantly doing, as is reflected in the gesture of so many images of the Virgin..... She, with her Son in her arms, as here in the Pillar, shows him to us unceasingly as the Way, the Truth and the Life". "That is why God wants us to come to the Pillar, wrote St. Josemaría Escrivá as he finished recounting some small events of his love for our Lady in this Marian shrine: so that, feeling comforted by the understanding, affection and power of our Mother, our faith will increase, our hope will be assured, our concern to serve all souls with love will be more lively. And may we be able, with joy and new strength, to give ourselves to the service of others, to sanctify our work and our life: in a word, to make divine all the ways of the earth."
Hablar con Dios