Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day! to each Mom as YOU are reading this message. Happy Mother's Day! too, to your Mom and to mine, whether she is here in this vale of tears or is now in eternal life.

And Happy Mother's Day! to You, O Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, Mother of Our Savior, Mother of the Church, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope...our Mother.

Mi madrecita is in eternity, and you never met a more loving, more selfless, more holy, more good, more Catholic Mom, who prayed through life's sorrows and who could always find her way back to laughter. Thank you for being a wonderful Mother, Mama! Please look down on your son from Heaven above and help me get to Heaven, too.

May you and I, dear reader, meditate deeply on the love and beauty and glory of motherhood, and may that make us each into better pro-lifers who will more lovingly reach out to the moms around us who are bearing babies in crisis pregnancies. Amen.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

"If I were hanged on the highest hill, I know whose love would follow me still, Mother o' mine, Mother o' mine!" -- Kipling

By the way, the famous Italian painting above, "The Madonna of the Streets," was really called "La Madonnina" ("The Little Madonna") by its painter, Roberto Ferruzzi (1854-1934), who painted it in 1897, using an 11-year-old girl and her baby brother as the subjects.