It’s good for all of us to have a second mother. We love our first mothers, hopefully, for bringing us to term and giving us the gift of life. In a nation where that is not always the choice – that ever dangerous word – we thank our dear mothers for choosing life. The bond created through a mother and child, though, is a unique one that lasts a lifetime, we pray. Our second Mother is who we celebrate today. And she’s the same second Mother for each of us. That makes all of us family. Her holiness is unmatched, even beyond our birth mothers. In my lowly estimation, her loveliness is second to none. I’ve had the good habit for years now calling her the most beautiful woman who ever lived. And her beauty has nothing to with a Miss America or Miss Universe pageant. Rather, her beauty is realized in the absolute perfection of her womanhood. She is the number one woman who matches to perfection the term that St. John Paul II coined, “The Feminine Genius.” And that phrase has little to do with having Einstein intelligence. It speaks to the perfection of the female gender as created by God through the inside of Adam. Mary, our second Mother for eternity, is second to none when leading our good souls to the many victories of her Son. Many of the popular Saints in the Church do the same; the list is thankfully long. They lead us to Christ, where we belong, through their inspired prayers and our imitating their imitation of the Lord. Simplicity, prayer, mercy, good works, humility … all these virtues they perfected in a lifetime. Some of those lifetimes were very short. But our second Mother, the holy Mother of God, the holy Mother of Jesus, she remains our best source for reaching our goal of being one with her Son after we call it a day in this quick life. As Luke writes in the Gospel, Mary, our second Mother, kept all that was said about her Son, reflecting on them in her heart. All the newspaper articles, all the journals, all the photos of Jesus playing soccer, scoring the winning goal to win another championship for Nazareth, these were all gathered into the scrapbook of her heart, where a mother does her best work. She left all the newspaper articles, the journals, the sources, and whatever else to a few writers who compiled the scrapbook known as the New Testament that speaks to the important parts of her Son’s life, leaving out much we don’t know about him. Our second Mother knows everything about her Son’s human life, beyond the Gospels and Letters. She could have told the writers like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul certain things about her Son that no one else knew. But if she did, this world would not contain the number of books. This is how well our second Mother knows us too. For which we are blessed. We all can use a second Mother. We have one in Blessed Mary, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. The Mother of God, whose depth of love and knowledge of her Son Jesus is shared with us. May the Holy Mother of God continue to lead us to her Son in this New Year and beyond.