Due to its interest for many faithful around the world, we transcribe in Spanish the sermon delivered by Cardinal Burke at the Solemn Pontifical Mass celebrated on Saturday, October 25, in St. Peter’s Basilica.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It is for me a cause of profound joy to offer the Pontifical Mass at the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter as the culmination of the Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage of 2025. On behalf of all those present, I express heartfelt thanks to those who have worked with such diligence and success to make the Pilgrimage possible. I offer the Holy Mass for the faithful of the Church throughout the world who strive to safeguard and promote the beauty of the Usus Antiquior of the Roman Rite. May the offering of today’s Pontifical Mass encourage and strengthen us all in love for our Eucharistic Lord, who, through the Apostolic Tradition and with an infallible and immeasurable love for us, sacramentally renews his Sacrifice of Calvary and nourishes us with the incomparable fruit of his Sacrifice: the Heavenly Food of his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.
Offering the Holy Mass of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary on a Saturday, we contemplate the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Our Lady, assumed in glory and ceaselessly beating with love for us, the children whom her Divine Son entrusted to her maternal care as he agonized on the Cross. When Our Lord pronounced the words: “Woman, behold your son… Behold your mother” to his Mother and to St. John the Apostle and Evangelist at the foot of the cross, he expressed an essential reality of the salvation he was obtaining for us: the full cooperation of his Mother, the Most Holy Virgin Mary, in his work of salvation.
God the Father, in his all-loving plan for our eternal salvation, granted that the Most Holy Virgin Mary, from the very instant of her conception, should participate in the grace of the salvation that her Divine Son would consummate on Calvary. By her Immaculate Conception, Mary was wholly Christ’s and, in Christ, wholly for us from the first moment of her being. The mediation of our salvation through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary is exemplified in the last words of the Virgin Mother of the Savior recorded in the Gospels. She said them to the servants of the wine at the wedding at Cana, who came to her distressed by the lack of sufficient wine for the guests of the newlyweds. She addressed their great distress by leading them to her Divine Son, also invited to the wedding, with the maternal instruction: “Do whatever he tells you.”
These simple words express the mystery of the Divine Maternity by which the Virgin Mary became the Mother of God, bringing into the world the incarnate Son of God for our salvation. By that same mystery, she remains the channel of all graces that, ceaselessly and immeasurably, flow from the pierced and glorious Heart of her Divine Son to the hearts of his brothers and sisters—adopted by Baptism—as they pilgrimage on earth toward their definitive dwelling with him in Heaven. We are sons and daughters of Mary in her Son, the incarnate Son of God. With maternal care, she draws our hearts to her glorious Immaculate Heart and leads them to him, to his Sacred Heart, and instructs us: “Do whatever he tells you.”
In the Most Holy Virgin Mary we see “the most perfect created manifestation” of the eternal Wisdom of God, the Son of God, the Word who acts from the beginning of creation and orders all things and, above all, the human heart according to the perfection of God, “both because she is the ‘handmaid’ particularly faithful to the Lord and because in her, as Mother of Christ, the divine plan has found its fulfillment.” She is, in the inspired words of Sirach, “the mother of lovely love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.” She fills us with hope that Our Lord, the incarnate divine Wisdom, listening to the prayers of the Mother of Divine Grace, who is always in his presence, will also have mercy on our generation, restoring the loving order written by God in creation, written by God above all in every human heart. Striving at every moment to rest our hearts in the pierced and glorious Heart of Jesus, we proclaim to the world the truth that salvation has come into the world. United in heart to the glorious Immaculate Heart of Mary, we draw others to Christ, the fullness of God’s mercy and love in our midst, in his holy Church.
This year we celebrate both the centenary of the apparition of the Child Jesus, together with Our Lady of Fatima, to the Venerable Servant of God Sister Lucia dos Santos, on December 10, 1925, and the centenary of the publication of the Encyclical Letter Quas Primas of Pope Pius XI, establishing the Feast of Christ the King of Heaven and Earth in the universal Church, on December 11, 1925. We thus bear witness to the truth that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the King of all hearts through the Mystery of the Cross, and that his Virgin Mother is the mediatrix through whom he leads our hearts to dwell ever more fully in his Most Sacred Heart.
In the apparition to the Venerable Servant of God Sister Lucia dos Santos, Our Lord showed us the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Our Lady, covered with many thorns by our indifference and ingratitude, and by our sins. In a particular way, Our Lady of Fatima desires to protect us from the evil of atheistic communism, which turns hearts away from the Heart of Jesus—the only source of salvation—and leads hearts to rebellion against God and against the order he has placed in his creation and written in the heart of every man. Through her apparitions and the message she entrusted to the holy little shepherds Francisco and Jacinta Marto and to the Venerable Lucia dos Santos—a message for the whole Church—Our Lady also addressed the influence of atheistic culture within the Church herself, leading many to apostasy, to the abandonment of the truths of the Catholic faith.
At the same time, Our Lady instructed us to make loving reparation for our offenses to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to her Immaculate Heart through the Devotion of the First Saturdays; that is, the First Saturday of each month: sacramentally confessing our sins, worthily receiving Holy Communion, praying five decades of the Holy Rosary, and accompanying Our Lady by meditating on the mysteries of the Holy Rosary. From the message of Our Lady it is clear that only Faith—which places man in a relationship of unity of heart with the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the mediation of her Immaculate Heart—can save man from the spiritual chastisements that rebellion against God necessarily brings upon its authors and upon all society and the Church. The Devotion of the First Saturdays is our response of obedience to our Mother in heaven, who will not fail to intercede for all the graces we so need, we and our world. The Devotion is not an isolated act, but expresses a way of life: the daily conversion of the heart to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, under the guidance and maternal care of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
When we reflect on the rebellion against the good order and peace with which God endows every human heart—rebellion that leads the world, and even the Church, to ever greater confusion and division, to the destruction of others and of oneself—we understand, as Pope Pius XI understood, the importance of our worship of Christ under the title of King of Heaven and Earth. Such worship is not an ideology. It is not the worship of an idea or an ideal. It is communion with Christ the King, especially through the Most Holy Eucharist, through which one understands, embraces, and lives one’s own royal mission in him. It is the reality in which we are called to live: the reality of obedience to the Law of God, written in our hearts and in the very nature of all things. It is the reality of our hearts, united to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, resting ever more fully in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The Pontifical Mass is offered today according to the most ancient Form of the Roman Rite, the Usus Antiquior. The Church celebrates the 18th anniversary of the promulgation of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, by which Pope Benedict XVI made possible the regular celebration of the Rite of the Mass according to this form, used since the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great. Privileged to participate today in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we cannot fail to think of the faithful who, through the Christian centuries, have encountered Our Lord and deepened their life in him through this venerable form of the Roman Rite. Many were inspired to practice heroic sanctity, even to martyrdom. Those of us who are old enough to have grown up worshiping God according to the Usus Antiquior cannot fail to consider how it inspired us to keep our gaze fixed on Jesus,[6] especially in responding to our vocation in life. Finally, we cannot fail to give thanks to God for the way in which this venerable form of the Roman Rite has led to faith and deepened the life of faith for so many who have discovered for the first time its incomparable beauty thanks to the discipline established in Summorum Pontificum. We give thanks to God because, through Summorum Pontificum, the whole Church advances toward a greater understanding and love of the great gift of the Sacred Liturgy as it has been handed down to us, in an unbroken line, by the Sacred Tradition, by the Apostles and their successors. Through the Sacred Liturgy—our worship of God “in spirit and truth”—Our Lord is with us in the most perfect way possible on this earth. It is the most excellent expression of our life in him. Contemplating now the great beauty of the Rite of the Mass, may we be inspired and strengthened to reflect that beauty in the goodness of our daily life under the maternal care of Our Lady.
Let us now lift up our hearts, united to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to the pierced and glorious Heart of Jesus, open to us in the Eucharistic Sacrifice through which he makes sacramentally present his Sacrifice of Calvary. Let us lift up our hearts, filled with so many joys and sorrows, to the infallible source of Divine Mercy and Love, trusting that in the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus we will be confirmed in peace and strengthened to carry the cross of our sufferings with the confidence of the Virgin Mary. Thus, under the constant and merciful maternal gaze of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, let us advance faithfully and wholeheartedly along the path of our earthly pilgrimage toward our definitive dwelling in Heaven.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.