Mother of Perpetual Help Feast Day a personal note

Today’s Feast – Mother of Perpetual Help

 

One of the first pieces of furniture I organised to purchase for our new church at Glenmore Park, dedicated to Padre Pio, was a shrine dedicated to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Now I know some who bother to read this far are just about to switch off, thinking “Oh that’s just another one of his religious mumbo jumbo so I will give it a miss”. But stay reading, who knows you might just learn something that might change your life. It is for you educated ignoramuses that I write the following blog.

One of the remnants from my childhood version of religion is an attachment to religious ‘things’ like statues and holy pictures. Not the silly looking plastic painted statues you would remember from church piety stores, but the realistic kind that you swear moved when you turned your head. I remember many times when I have been praying in a church late at night and I feel a ‘presence’ nearby and turn expecting to see a person only to see a statue which was previously just outside my peripheral vision. I swear it moved!

So I started talking to statues and befriending them. I was not going crazy because of the loneliness of celibacy, I was talking to the saint whose image was represented, not the plaster or wood carving.

Anyway, my favourite image or icon which has a long tradition is the representation of our Mother of Perpetual Help which has a great story behind it. It was painted centuries ago and represents in iconography the child Jesus asleep in His mother’s arms. He has a dream in which two angels come to Him and show Him the instruments of His death as well as some other symbols of what happened to Him during His crucifixion. One angel is holding a hammer, nails and Greek cross and the other holds the spear with the sponge soaked in vinegar as well as the one that pierced His side after His death.

When He saw these Jesus jumped in His mother’s arm and kicked off His sandal but holds on tightly to His mother. There are lots of explanations of this representation but what I was told is that when you have problems in your life, you should hold on tight to your heavenly Mother’s hand.

I was very eager to get one for our church as well as a shrine with candles you can light in front of it. We actually used ours as a fundraiser to buy a bus for the parish (one of the first things the new parish priest who took over after me wanted to do was use that money for something else as well as get rid of the Shrine because he never really fully embraced Catholicism when he ‘converted’ to become a priest, but some good people on the Pastoral Council opposed him).

Bernadette Boulos actually bought and paid for the shrine in the Philippines and we reimbursed her later on (but she probably doesn’t want me to tell you this but she personally donated $38,000 to the Padre Pio Church building appeal and she is not even a parishioner!) The people who ended up paying for the shrine were the Rod and Deborah Mitchell family together with the Perry Family. I can’t remember how much it cost but it was close to $6,000 if I recall correctly.

So why the devotion?

It was a pious practice promoted by the Redemptorist priests. I learnt about it when I visited the enormous church  in Baclaran (near Manila, Philippines) and was blown away by the sight of ten thousand worshippers all praying at one of the 11 services they hold there every Wednesday.
Well as I used to tell the devotees who attended our church on a Wednesday night at 7pm for the Novena Mass, if Mary was not interceding for people and their prayers were not getting answered do you think people would still keep coming in big numbers week after week?

And if I didn’t get the answer to all my prayers, do you think I would have persevered with offering the long Novena Mass every Wednesday evening in every parish for close to twenty years when I didn’t have to?

Let me explain some of the miracles I witnessed.

Countless barren couples came to me lamenting the fact that they have not got children. I promised that if they attended the Novena as a couple for nine Wednesdays in a row, they would get their baby. Not one couple has been disappointed. I got the privilege of baptising most of those children and some of them bear the name Kevin in gratitude for my convincing them to pray to Jesus’ Mother for their ‘miracle child’.

I attribute my own as yet unborn daughter’s conception to the prayers I offered for the gift of a child after trying many, many times to have a baby with Josefina.

People who had been unemployed for an extended period of time, miraculously got a job by the end of the nine weeks.

People whose marriages looked irredeemable were reunited after one of the couple attended the Novena for nine weeks in a row and prayed the prayers.

But by far the best miracle for anyone is finding their life partner. Previously lonely people unable to find a person to love have also cried on my shoulder about their failures in love. I suggest the Novena all the time. It worked for me!

When I had decided to leave ministry because of, you guessed it, finding that the priesthood was full of frauds, I prayed for God to show me who I could spend my life with. Little did I know that on another continent a young girl was praying the exact same prayer and asking our Mother of Perpetual Help to guide her. I wasn’t looking for a wife the night I went to that karaoke bar.  I just went to sing and have a few drinks with some good friends from the parish. But our paths were destined to cross and as they say in the classics, the rest is history. I now have the most beautiful person in the world as my wife. Thank you Jesus and Mary!  

People looking for a life partner have always received a spouse after praying the Novena faithfully.  

Is it superstition? No, it couldn’t be. If it were, there are a whole lot of coincidences going on with this ‘superstitious’ practice. I don’t have an explanation but this particular devotion is one of the reasons, despite my bad experience with the Catholic Church and its imposters for leaders, I could not change my religion. No other religion offers so many crutches to assist people with weak faith. I could write a thousand more paragraphs about that but I will save it for another blog.

I just couldn’t miss the feast of our Mother of Perpetual Help without lauding one more time, the Mother of Jesus who has always been helping me and loving me like her own Son. And this devotion has helped me at times when my trust in humanity waned. I have met so many wonderful people through this devotion that we prayed together.

It is pure miracle given by God in reward for people who persevered in prayer and proved their commitment to the reason for their prayers.

I attended the feast of Mother of Perpetual Help Mass today in the company of many true believers. No one was there on a whim or a hope or even to be seen. They were there because they are grateful they have been granted a miracle that they desperately needed. Their faith, hope and love was fulfilled and God gave them their wish to show that He does listen to His mother, at whose behest He performed His first and most unnecessary and reluctant of miracles.

When Mary said at the wedding feast in Cana, Galilee “Son, they have no wine?”

He replied, “Woman, what’s that got to do with you or me?” And you know the rest of the story, Mary tells the waiters “Do whatever He tells you” and Jesus told them to fill six stone water jugs with water and He turned it into wine!

So, Mary says the same to you now, “Do whatever He tells you!” and if you do, He will perform miracles for you too!

I am proof of that.

Happy Fiesta!