In a few short months, we will be celebrating the Great Jubilee, the two-thousandth anniversary of Jesus' Incarnation. The Lord wants the year 2000 to be one of the greatest events of our lives, leading to everlasting happiness in heaven. In this year, 1999, the Church has told us to focus on God the Father. This is the last step before the Great Jubilee.

Are you ready to cross the threshold of the Third Millennium? Are you living in God the Father's love? (Jn 15:10) Are you ready to be persecuted and to usher in a new springtime for Christianity? Pope John Paul II has taught: "In this broad perspective of commitments, Mary Most Holy, the highly favored daughter of the Father, will appear before the eyes of believers as the perfect model of love towards both God and neighbor. As she herself says in the canticle of the Magnificat, great things were done for her by the Almighty...The Virgin Mary responded to God's call with complete openness: 'Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord' (Lk 1:38). Her motherhood, which began in Nazareth and was lived most intensely in Jerusalem at the foot of the Cross, will be felt during this year as a loving and urgent invitation addressed to all the children of God so that they will return to the house of the Father when they hear her maternal voice: 'Do whatever Christ tells you' (cf Jn 2:5)" (Towards the Third Millennium, 54).

Mary, who was taken up to heaven, will take us into the third millennium, when we too will hopefully be taken by the Lord into heaven. Mary, who prophesied that the mighty would be deposed from their thrones and the lowly raised to high places (Lk 1:52), will mother us into the freedom and victory of the Great Jubilee. "O Mary, assumed into heaven, pray for us who have recourse to you."

Nihil Obstat:  Reverend Robert L. Hagedorn, February 22, 1999

Imprimatur:  †Most Reverend Carl K. Moeddel, Vicar General and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, February 24, 1999