More than half a century ago, for a few months in 1967, I occasionally attended Mass at Our Lady of the Snows Church in Glen Oaks, Queens. It would be yet another 20+ years before I would get to visit the original Our Lady of the Snows, the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the anniversary of whose dedication the Church celebrates today. Annually on this day, a shower of white rose petals drops from the ceiling of that Basilica to commemorate the legendary miraculous snowfall that appeared overnight on this date sometime in the mid-4th-century on Rome’s Esquiline Hill, at the height of the hot Roman summer, to signify where Our Lady wished the Basilica to be built. In the Middle Ages (prior to the Tridentine Reform), there was even a special collect for this feast, which referenced the snowfall in the heat of summer and petitioned for a corresponding cooling of desire.
Rome, Europe, and the United States are all a lot hotter now than they were then, thanks to the climate change so many of ur politicians still find it politically advantageous to deny. How much more does the world need an even bigger miracle of the snow today! How much more do we need to cool not only the external temperature of out world but our increasing consumerist desires which have fed it!
Whatever happened on that hot 4th-century August night in Rome, we have a fairly clear idea of what is happened now in and to our heating-up world – the more temperate, life-friendly world which we are rapidly destroying and the hotter, less life-friendly world we are in the process of replacing it with.
Photo: Painting by Masolino da Panicale (1383-1447) depicting the miraculous snowfall and Pope Liberius (352–366) tracing in the snow the ground plan for the future basilica, with Jesus and Mary in a circular halo supervising the event (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples).
