At the Mass celebrating the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception at the Cathedral, December 8, Archbishop Edward Gilbert called the faithful once more to embrace the mission to which God had called them.

The Church must challenge “the attempt to take God off the table, the attempt to remove ethical obligations from living the Catholic Christian and the attempt to destroy Christmas and make it secular,” said the Archbishop.

“If God gave us a call he will give us the strength to complete it,” said the Archbishop. It is a theme that he holds dear. His personal motto is: “The Lord is my strength” (Isaiah 12: 2). Every person has been given a call, he stated, “to do something for the kingdom and to touch the lives of other people”.

To fulfill the demands of that call, the individual has to listen, to be open to the call, to trust in it and to believe that God will give the strength. Archbishop Gilbert said that if any of these responses fell apart, the process of mission would not work. It would mean “we have not accepted the mission that we have been given.”

It is Mary who presents to us the pattern that must be followed, a pattern made clear in the Gospel of the feast (Luke 1:26-38) that recounts the manner in which Mary responds to the news that she is to be mother of the “Son of the Most High.”

But His Grace cautioned, “Don’t dehumanise Mary. She wasn’t God. She trusted without understanding. But, she became the Mother of God.” Mary would have gone to the Temple, visited the sick, cooked for people. Nowhere does Scripture present her as extraordinarily different, he said.

From the beginning God had a plan for his people – an open invitation to share his life. But the mindset of Adam and Eve was that they should know as much as God knows; that they would be independent and decide what was right and wrong, “The effects of original sin,” said the Archbishop, created a disorder within ourselves, affected our relationship with each other, making us prone to selfishness, and “destroyed our relationship with creation itself.”

God intervened, however, and gave his people hope. It is possible to look evil in the eye and say, “No”. It was through Mary that the original plan of God was re-established. Said Archbishop Gilbert: “Mary gave Jesus the body he needed to die for us”.

“We are a chosen people, adopted by God,” he said, referring to the opening chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. “We must accept the responsibility for mission,” which involves encouraging God’s people and extending an invitation to them.

He encouraged the 15 priests seated in the sanctuary and the many religious in the congregation to extend the invitation to persons to become priests and religious.

But he also asked the married persons in the congregation: “Do you invite people to consider the married life, instead of the neo-pagan life? Do you walk with them?”