We think of our Lady as sharing in the Pentecostal gift.  This was the first act of her ascended Son, this sending forth of the Holy Spirit whom He had promised.  It was the fulfilment of the prophecy:  “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”  I do not know of anything in the teaching of the Church to lead us to suppose that this gift was to the Apostles alone:  rather the thought of the Church is that to all Christians is there a gift of the Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is imparted to the Church as such, and within the organisation He functions through appropriate organs.  “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.”  Whatever the operations of God through the Body of Christ, the same divine energy is making them possible.  “All these worketh that one and selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.”

That the Holy Spirit should manifest Himself in her life was, of course, no new experience for S. Mary.  Her conscious vocation to be the Mother of God had begun when the Holy Ghost had come upon her, and she had conceived that “Holy Thing” which was called the Son of God.  And we cannot think that the Spirit Who is the Spirit of sanctity had ever been absent from her from the moment of her wonderful conception when by the creative act of the Spirit she was conceived without sin, that is, in union with God.  But as there are diversities of gifts, so the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost would have meant to her some new or increased gift of God.

For the Church as such this coming of the Spirit meant the entrance of the work of the Incarnation upon a new phase of its action.  We may, I suppose, think of the work of our Lord during the years of His Ministry as intensive.  It was the work of preparing the men to whom was to be committed the commission to preach the Kingdom of God.  They had been chosen to be with Him, and their training had been essentially an experience of Him, an experience which was to be the essence of their Gospel and which their mission was to interpret to the world.  “Who is this Jesus of Nazareth Whom ye preach?  What does He mean?” was to be the question that they would have to answer in the coming years; and they would have to answer it to all sorts of men; to Jews who would find this conception of a suffering and rejected Messiah “a stumbling-block”; to the Greeks who would find “Jesus and the resurrection” “foolishness”; to all races of men who would have to be persuaded to leave their ancestral religions and revolutionise their lives, and before they would do so would wish to know what was the true meaning of Christ in whose name their whole past was challenged.  As we watch the perplexity, the bewilderment, of these Apostles in the face of the collapse of all their hopes on the first Good Friday, as we see them struggling with the fact of the Resurrection, and attempting to adjust their lives to that; and then listen to their preaching and follow their action in the days succeeding Pentecost, we have brought home to us the nature of the action of the Holy Spirit when He came to them as the Spirit of Jesus to enable them to carry on the work that Jesus had committed to them.