On the afternoon of December 8—the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—Pope Benedict XVI made the traditional papal visit to Rome’s Piazza di Spagna to honor the Blessed Mother at the foot of the plaza’s Colonna dell’Immacolata. There, in the pope’s words, “Mary stands high, on guard over Rome.”
Benedict asked the crowd, “What does Mary tell the city?” He noted that her presence—not only in Rome, but also in the heart of all Christian cities—reminds us, with St. Paul, that “Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more.” According to Benedict, “the city needs Mary, whose presence speaks of God, reminds us of Grace’s victory over sin and makes us hope even in the most humanly difficult situations.” Each one of us, the pope said, “contributes with our lives to the moral climate, for better or worse.”
Benedict devoted much of his address to a critique of the influence of today’s mass media, where “evil is told to us, said again, amplified, so that we get used to the most horrible things, and become desensitized.” In a certain way, the pope said, this “poisons us, because the negative is never fully cleansed out of our system but accumulates day after day.” Amidst this “pollution of the spirit,” we risk becoming mere spectators who fail to look into the faces of those we encounter in the city: “People become bodies, and these bodies lose their soul, become faceless objects that can be exchanged and consumed.” But “Mary Immaculate helps us rediscover and defend what is inside people.” She “teaches us to open up to God’s action and to look at others as he does.” When we listen to Mary’s voice, “the city shall become more beautiful, more Christian and more humane.”
An English translation of the pope’s address can be found on the AsiaNews website ; the Italian text is on the Vatican website .
