Mother of Mercy
"For what did Jesus love on earth / One-half so tenderly as thee?"
The hymn chosen for today is one written by the great Catholic convert, Frederick William Faber, entitled “Mother of Mercy.” Fr. Faber was an Englishman who grew up in a Calvinist household but, while attending Oxford University, became influenced by the Oxford Movement, an attempt by High Church Anglicans to recover Catholic traditions lost in England during the Reformation. He especially befriended the movement’s leader, St. John Henry Newman, and through his influence, Fr. Faber eventually became Catholic and was ordained a priest. He soon became the first provost of the Brompton Oratory, following the recommendation of Newman and adhering to the same Oratorian spirituality of St. Philip Neri which Newman brought to England.
Fr. Faber was not only a profoundly holy man and a great priest but also a gifted writer, poet and hymnographer. His most famous hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers,” previously covered by Heavenly Chant, celebrates the Catholic martyrs who were brutally murdered under the reign of Henry VIII and the so-called “Good Queen Bess,” Elizabeth I. This song reminds us of the great and hard-won inheritance we have received as Catholics in the two millennia of persecution by the demonic forces of the world against God’s one true Church. In this light, Fr. Faber offered poignant advice for those who, like the Virgin Mary, live in an anti-Catholic world, where nevertheless there are many good things and good men on the wrong side:
We must remember that if all the manifestly good men were on one side and all the manifestly bad men on the other, there would be no danger of anyone, least of all the elect, being deceived by lying wonders. It is the good men, good once, we must hope good still, who are to do the work of Anti-Christ and so sadly to crucify the Lord afresh…. Bear in mind this feature of the last days, that this deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side.
Faber’s song “Mother of Mercy,” like many others he wrote, sought to correct the anti-Catholic prejudices of his fellow Englishmen, arguably none more pernicious than its denigration of the Mother of God into a mere incubator, an ordinary sinful woman and a minor character in the story of salvation history. Though Catholics today maintain strong Marian devotions, at least in some respects, this hymn echoes the twenty centuries of prayers, love and imitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary which has inspired Catholics to serve the poor, evangelize unbelievers, suffer ridicule, torture and death and to accept God’s will with the same humility and wisdom she showed in her great Fiat. This hymn especially recalls the words of St. Gregory Nazianzen: “If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, such a one is a stranger to the Godhead.”
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