Saint of the Week
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Feast Day – May 31
Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
This feast commemorates the three-month visit of Mary with her elderly cousin Elizabeth during Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus and Elizabeth’s with John the Baptist. The story appears in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. It recounts Elizabeth’s Spirit-filled greeting, acknowledging Mary as “the mother of my Lord,” and Mary’s beautiful response, the Magnificat, which begins, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” Introduced by the Franciscans in 1263, the feast became universal in the 16th century.
“Let us imagine the Virgin’s state of mind after the Annunciation, when the Angel left her. Mary found herself with a great mystery enclosed within her womb; she knew something extraordinarily unique had happened. . . But everything around her remained as before and the village of Nazareth was completely unaware of what had happened to her. Before worrying about herself, Mary instead thought about elderly Elizabeth, who she knew was well on in her pregnancy and, moved by the mystery of love that she had just welcomed within herself, she set out ‘in haste’ to go to offer Elizabeth her help. This is the simple and sublime greatness of Mary!”
—Pope Benedict XVI, May 31, 2008
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