The Annunciation

We had a wonderful Mass this morning on the great feast of the Annunciation.   There were children from the secondary school present and for the first time in 50 years I heard a priest in my parish asking the children to speak to Mary.  It was yet another pointer to the great recovery the Church is making since the Spirit of Vatican II.    The blot was the mistranslation of the Gospel, brought in by the modernists who controlled the new reading for Mass and who seemed to have had an aversion for words like `soul` and `grace`.   So, we had "Hail, highly favoured...." instead of "Hail, full of Grace...... "  The understanding of Grace in the context does not lend the word in any way to be translated  as favoured.   I once had correspondence with a young Protestant girl on our Lady and she was adamant that we worshipped her.   Thank God her Protestant bible had not been tampered with and I was able to take her to Luke and the Annunciation and ask her why the Angel called her `full of Grace` when grace had been lost through Original Sin and Christ had not yet died and restored it to us.  Her reply "was in some ways astonishing.     "That was a wonderful mercy from God"  I replied that thi was indeed so and that is why we hold Mary in such esteem.   She is just one of us.    I never hear fro the girl again but God bless her wherever she is.    At Lourdes when Bernadette asked for her name the Lady came down from the rock to stand at the same level with the crowd and lifting her eyes and her arms towards heaven said "I am the Immaculate Conception"  One with us but with such a wonderful mercy.

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