- Feb 5, 2002
- 167,455
- 56,741
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
The National Eucharist Pilgrimage’s ‘Marian Route’ highlights how the Church in the Midwest has had an overflow impact that belies the region’s lowly status.
Midwesterners are used to being overlooked. After all, this is the part of the U.S. known as “flyover country” by coastal denizens. Even the region’s most prominent metropolis, Chicago, is known as “The Second City,” a nickname that originated as a put-down, made by a visiting journalist from the nation’s “first city,” New York.
To put it in familial terms, the Midwest is the nation’s disregarded middle child, less elite than the elder East, not as cool as the younger West, and far more unassuming than the charming (though sometimes-rebellious) South.
But Catholics know that being overlooked in the eyes of the mighty often coincides with finding favor with God, who chooses “the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something” (1 Corinthians 1:27). This divine tendency is epitomized in the pinnacle of his creation: Mary, the virgin who became the Mother of God, the lowly handmaiden from a provincial backwater who is now rightfully hailed as the Queen of the Universe.
And it has also played out in the Midwest — making it fitting that the only National Eucharistic Pilgrimage route to originate in and pass solely through the region is named for the Blessed Mother.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
Midwesterners are used to being overlooked. After all, this is the part of the U.S. known as “flyover country” by coastal denizens. Even the region’s most prominent metropolis, Chicago, is known as “The Second City,” a nickname that originated as a put-down, made by a visiting journalist from the nation’s “first city,” New York.
To put it in familial terms, the Midwest is the nation’s disregarded middle child, less elite than the elder East, not as cool as the younger West, and far more unassuming than the charming (though sometimes-rebellious) South.
But Catholics know that being overlooked in the eyes of the mighty often coincides with finding favor with God, who chooses “the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something” (1 Corinthians 1:27). This divine tendency is epitomized in the pinnacle of his creation: Mary, the virgin who became the Mother of God, the lowly handmaiden from a provincial backwater who is now rightfully hailed as the Queen of the Universe.
And it has also played out in the Midwest — making it fitting that the only National Eucharistic Pilgrimage route to originate in and pass solely through the region is named for the Blessed Mother.
Continued below.
Midwest Catholicism Is Humble, Yet Powerful — Just Like Mary
The National Eucharist Pilgrimage’s ‘Marian Route’ highlights how the Church in the Midwest has had an overflow impact that belies the region’s lowly status.
