It’s a Feria, 4th Class, with the color of Green. In this episode: today in Church History: “Three Popes and a Church Divided – 1414”, the meditation: “The Glorious Return of Jesus”, today’s news from the Church: ““The Virgin Mary versus the Spirit of Assisi” – Letter from the Superior General to friends and benefactors No. 95”, a preview of the Sermon: “Holiness Is for Everyone”, and today’s thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
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Every morning, the Church borrows the words of a man who once couldn’t speak. Every day, Catholics repeat the greeting of his wife.
Today is a feria on the traditional calendar, but the Roman Martyrology remembers Saints Zachary and Elizabeth, the parents of Saint John the Baptist. And this couple has left quite a mark on our prayer lives.
There’s a detail about Zachary’s Temple service that’s easy to miss. Offering incense was an extraordinary privilege. The Jewish Mishnah describes the lottery as open to priests who had never performed that service before. For Zachary, this was a moment a priest might await his whole life.
And he wasn’t the high priest entering the Holy of Holies. He was an ordinary priest serving at the incense altar in the Holy Place, outside the inner sanctuary. Beyond him, the people prayed while the incense rose.
That makes Gabriel’s appearance especially striking. God met Zachary in the middle of the worship entrusted to him.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, belonged to the priestly family of Aaron herself. Luke introduces both spouses as righteous before God, before telling us they were childless. Their sorrow wasn’t evidence that God had rejected them. They were already pleasing to Him during those long, unanswered years.
Their memory has become part of the landscape around Ein Karem, near Jerusalem. Pilgrims visit churches commemorating John’s birth and Our Lady’s visit to Elizabeth. At the Visitation shrine, another tradition remembers Elizabeth fleeing with her little son from Herod’s soldiers. An ancient apocryphal account describes a mountain opening to shelter them. That episode isn’t in Scripture, but a stone preserved at the shrine keeps the tradition visible.
Their most familiar memorial, though, requires no pilgrimage.
Elizabeth’s greeting to Our Lady gave us the words about Mary being blessed among women and the fruit of her womb being blessed. We repeat them in the Hail Mary, often without picturing the elderly woman who first spoke them, filled with the Holy Ghost.
Zachary’s canticle, the Benedictus, became the Church’s daily morning prayer at Lauds. Its promise of light for those sitting in darkness fits the rising sun beautifully.
One spouse welcomes the Mother of God. The other announces the approaching dawn of salvation. Across the centuries, this husband and wife still teach the Church how to pray.
Saints Zachary and Elizabeth, faithful spouses whose words still shape the prayer of the Church, pray for us.
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