The Holy Spirit, who with his power overshadowed the virginal body of Mary, bringing about in her the beginning of her divine Motherhood, at the same time made her heart perfectly obedient to that self-communication of God which surpassed every human idea and faculty. "Blessed is she who believed!"205: thus Mary is greeted by her cousin Elizabeth, herself "full of the Holy Spirit."206 In the words of greeting addressed to her “who believed” we seem to detect a distant (but in fact very close) contrast with all those about whom Christ will say that "they do not believe."207 Mary entered the history of the salvation of the world through the obedience of faith. And faith, in its deepest essence, is the openness of the human heart to the gift: to God’s self- communication in the Holy Spirit. St. Paul write: "The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."208 When the Triune God opens himself to man in the Holy Spirit, this opening of God reveals and also gives to the human creature the fullness of freedom. This fullness was manifested in a sublime way precisely through the faith of Mary, through the "obedience of faith"209: truly, “Blessed is she who believed!”
