“The Virgin Mary, humble servant of the Lord, was open to His every word and call. She was embraced by Francis with indescribable love and declared the protectress and advocate of his family. The Secular Franciscans should express their ardent love for her by imitating her complete self-giving and by praying earnestly and confidently.”
— Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order, Article 9
Article 9 of the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order calls us to look to the Blessed Virgin Mary, recognizing her as the model of perfect openness to God’s word and call. St. Francis embraced her with an “indescribable love” and made her the protectress of his family. The Rule instructs us to express our own ardent love for her not merely through words, but by the active imitation of her “complete self-giving.”
Mary’s fiat—her complete self-giving—takes on flesh in the daily reality of our specific, lived vocations. In the everyday commitments of secular life, work, and community, the imitation of Mary’s self-giving is found in the constant, quiet yielding to love, patience, and the needs of others. The General Constitutions of the OFS (Article 16) remind us that Mary is the supreme “model of listening to the Word and of faithfulness to vocation.” Faithfulness over a lifetime requires her kind of deep, abiding listening amidst the noise and demands of the world.
The Franciscan Intellectual Tradition has always placed Mary at the center of the Incarnation. Blessed John Duns Scotus championed her Immaculate Conception, seeing her not as an afterthought of redemption, but as God’s masterpiece of grace, perfectly preserved to be the dwelling place of the Word. St. Bonaventure similarly emphasized that Mary conceived the Word in her heart through faith before she conceived Him in her womb. This underscores our own daily calling: before we can act as effective Secular Franciscans in the world, we must, like Mary, cultivate an interior stillness that allows Christ to be conceived in our own hearts.
This living tradition of the Order has long been recognized by the Church as a powerful leaven for the laity. Pope Leo XIII, a great champion of the Third Order, wrote in his encyclical Auspicato Concessum (1882) that if the institutes of St. Francis were revived, “every Christian virtue would easily flourish.” He saw the secular Franciscan vocation—and by extension, the deeply Marian and Christocentric virtues it upholds—as the antidote to the spiritual and social ills of the modern era.
Today, this profound connection continues to be echoed by the Magisterium, including our current Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV. In his apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, he reminds us of our urgent obligation to the poor and marginalized—a call that aligns seamlessly with the Secular Franciscan commitment to justice and solidarity. Building upon the legacy of Pope Francis, who beautifully called Mary the “Mother of Evangelization” in Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Leo XIV challenges us to be a missionary Church with open arms. Just as Mary brought the warmth of a home to the cold stable in Bethlehem, Secular Franciscans are called to bring the warmth of the Gospel to a fractured modern world.
To imitate Mary’s self-giving, as Article 9 asks, is to embrace the daily, hidden acts of service that mirror her own life in Nazareth. It means praying the Rosary not just as a devotion, but as a confident tether to her maternal protection. Ultimately, it is a lifelong commitment to saying “yes” to God—whether in the quiet moments of prayer, in the bustling center of daily life, or in extending Christ’s peace to those most in need.
Peace and Every Good
Mike
References
Fiałkowski, M. (2022). Formation of lay Catholics: Franciscan inspirations. Religions, 13(8), 686. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13080686
