Excerpts from an address of Pope Paul VI at the
Basilica of the Annunciation
in Nazareth Jan 5, 1 964
At Nazareth our very first thoughts must be
turned toward Mary Most Holy, to offer her the tribute of our devotion and to
nourish that devotion with reflections that will make it genuine, profound and
unique, in conformity with the plan of God. It is Mary who is full of grace,
who is the Immaculate, the ever-virgin, the Mother of Christ and hence God’s
Mother and ours, she who was assumed into heaven, our most blessed Queen, the
model for the Church and our hope.
Before all else we offer our humble filial promise to venerate her with
that special devotion which recognizes the wonders God has accomplished in her;
with singular homage manifesting the most holy, pure affectionate, personal and
confident movements of Our Heart; with such devotion as causes her encouraging
example of human perfection to shine upon the world from on high.
Then we present to her our requests for what is closest to our heart,
because we wish to honor both her goodness and the power of her love and intercession. We pray that she may preserve in our hearts a
sincere devotion to her. We beg her to give us understanding, desire, and then
the peace of possessing purity of body and soul, purity in thought and word,
art and love; the purity that the world of today attempts to shock and violate;
the purity to which Christ has linked one of His promises, one of His
beatitudes, that of penetrating into the vision of God Himself.
We ask therefore the favor of joining Our Lady, mother of the home at
Nazareth, and her humble but courageous husband St. Joseph, in their intimacy
with Jesus Christ, her human and divine Son.
.... May Nazareth
teach us the meaning of family life, its harmony of love, its simplicity and
austere beauty, its sacred and inviolable character; may it teach us how sweet
and irreplaceable is its training, how fundamental and incomparable its role on
the social plane.
