Marian Devotion

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Devotion to Our Lady is based in the sure knowledge that God alone is the One True God, the Infinite, the Almighty, Love itself and therefore the only One worthy of worship. Devotion to Our Lady is based in a conviction just as sure that salvation is through the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn. 14:7), God’s Word made flesh, Christ Jesus (Jn 1:14). Devotion to Our Lady is based in living in the Spirit of the One God, the Holy Spirit sent among us for our salvation. There can be no substitutes for God, no competitors, no rivals for our esteem, our affection, or our obedience.

Devotion, therefore, to Our Lady can only be an act, an expression, or a love aimed at that Trinity which deserves all of our labors, praise and affections. Devotion to Our Lady is to honor the varied ways in which God has made Himself known through her and how He sees fit to use her still.

To be a man truly worthy of any sort of respect is to be a man that knows how to truly give respect. We honor our elders, or rulers, our families. This sensitivity to respect seems written on our hearts. It comes from knowing there is, in justice, respect owed. It is a duty of ours that makes us better men when we recognize it. Behind the earthly respect, however, there exists a real respect for the awesome mightiness of God. In large doses it can look like fear and we rightly tremble before God’s power, His majesty, and His love which finds its most shocking form in forgiveness of the wretchedness of sin. It is this true awe for God alone that lends itself, in only a phantom sense, to the awe we feel when we respect other things and people within creation. The Creator’s merit of respect trickles down to the world He created and the men in His image and likeness.

Our Lady, then, is part of creation. The honor we owe her is not an honor without roots in the worship we owe God. The opposite is true, in fact. The worship we owe God demands that we honor the woman He has honored with His glory by including her in His plan of salvation in a singular way. Our Lady is unknown to us apart from her place in the salvation of mankind by God. What we know of her now, by way of Scripture and Tradition makes it clear that her “soul magnifies the Lord.” (Lk 1:46) We find our affections for her grow the way one might cling to a book, the cover and its pages, when one really loves the words the book offers.

Our Lady becomes the object of our devotions, more so than any other created thing in the universe, because she was (and is) such a special instrument in the hands of God. Her fiat, her “may it be done unto me according to Thy will” (Luke 1:38) was her consent to be what she alone is: the source of flesh for God made flesh, the only one to whom Jesus Christ could lovingly call “Mother.”

God favored Our Lady. He looked upon her, from above, as his special daughter and looked up to her from her arms as her Son, human and divine. God’s angels attest to this in scripture and in heaven above. It is nearly impossible to find a saint in the Church’s history that did not have a conspicuous devotion to her. What good being could manage to lack in love for Our Lady who is so beloved by God?

Mary, from the moment that she came into being in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne, was preserved from the stain of the sin brought on by our first ancestors. That stain that we all carry is a mark on us as children of God that need the salvation Christ offers. Yet Our Lady, created as the chosen Mother of Our Lord, was preserved from this stain, saved from it, by God the Son.

“Only a good tree bears good fruit.” (Matt. 7:17) Jesus, taking his flesh from His mother alone, could not be perfect if his Mother carried that stain of original sin, that corrupted nature that the rest of us suffer from. We call this grace-filled conception, this clean beginning of Mary’s existence by God’s compassion, the Immaculate Conception. It is a triumph of God over the power of sin and a recognition of His divine merciful plan set in motion.

Angels recognize this. When the Angel Gabriel appeared to the young Mary, he greeted her with the phrase “Hail, Mary, full of grace.” (Luke 1:28) In the original language of Luke’s Gospel, Greek, the word kecharitomene is used. It indicates that being filled with grace is a characteristic of the person of Mary. Being full of grace is not a temporary state for her that was just beginning with the angel’s visit. She received God’s grace as part of who and what she is even before the angel’s arrival.
Pope Pius IX, in 1854, solemnly proclaimed that the Immaculate Conception of Mary was to be believed by all the faithful. Yet, this had been the faith of the Church from ancient times.
Another special way God honored Mary was that He preserved her body from decay by taking her up (body and soul) into heaven at the end of her life, just as He did with Elijah and Enoch and even others. While Jesus alone ascended into heaven by His own power, others who have been called up to heaven bodily had to rely completely on God’s grace. We can only imagine the way those near Mary must have felt when they witnessed this, confirmed in their devotion to her. While the rest of us expect to be raised from the dead at the end of the world, our bodies reunited with our souls, Our Lady has already been given the reward of being body and soul in the presence of God.
Some may find it hard to believe in this miracle. Consider this: the first Christians enthusiastically advertised the possession of relics of saints. They boasted about being near the final resting place of all of the big figures in the Church’s first years. Christians in Rome, for example, bragged of having the bodies of Peter and Paul and prized the bodies of Christian martyrs. Yet there isn’t so much as a whisper in the ancient world about the deceased body of the Mother of Our Lord being still buried in the ground. At the same time, we have accounts of her Assumption from the early centuries of the Church’s existence that claim to have been passed on by eye witnesses of the event.
In the encyclical Munificentissimus Deus, Pius XII explained that “All these proofs and considerations of the holy Fathers and the theologians [for the Assumption] are based upon the Sacred Writings as their ultimate foundation.” Psalm 132 proclaims that the Lord and the “ark which Thou hast sanctified” will rise to its resting place in the New Covenant. Our Lady is understood, in the New Covenant, to be the new sanctified ark. If the old ark carried the old law and the bread from heaven, then Mary is the new ark which carried the Bread of Life inside her very womb, the law of love made flesh for our salvation. If Jesus finds his resting place, body and soul, in heaven, then it is safe to believe his Mother followed Him as the ancient belief puts forth. In fact, Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption are teachings of the Church proclaimed as things that must be believed by all Catholics.
Our Lady as the New Ark is not the only understanding we have like this. We also know her to be the New Eve in God’s plan of redemption. Mary’s life runs parallel in so many ways to Eve’s, as does Jesus’ life to Adam’s, with important differences, of course. The name “Adam” means “man” while “Eve” means, not “woman” but “mother,” although both Adam and Jesus refer to Eve and Mary as “woman” respectively. Adam can claim that Eve is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” (Genesis 2:23) because Eve comes from no other human parents. Mary can claim that Jesus is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh because Jesus has no other human parent. Eve is disobedient as she listens to the serpent, the fallen angel Lucifer (Gen. 3:4-6), while Mary is obedient as she hears the words of the angel Gabriel (Lk 1:38). The serpent in the Garden of Eden, and his “seed” is to be at odds with Eve “and her seed” while Adam is to crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). No doubt Mary was no less at odds with the devil and Jesus finally does crush the head of the serpent as he wins victory over death.
Saint Paul sees this connection as he writes “For since death came through a man (Adam), the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man (Jesus). For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” (1Cor. 15:21-22) And later, Saint Paul writes “So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam (Jesus), a life-giving spirit.” (1Cor. 15:45) If Eve has an essential role to play in the first sin, in the reason we need salvation, then Our Lady is honored with an essential role in the redemption offered by Christ.
Her role as intercessor is directly attested in Scripture. When Jesus and Mary attend a wedding, Jesus does not perform the miracle of turning water into wine until His mother pleads with Him. This miracle begins his life of ministry which ends with our salvation – and it began with Our Lady. (Jn. 2:2-11)
Her work is ongoing, too. Jesus knew that Adam called Eve, “the mother of all the living” and “woman” (Gen. 3:20). This explains why the following scene took place while Jesus was dying on the cross: “When Jesus saw His Mother, and the Disciple whom He loved (John) standing near, He said to His Mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then He said to the Disciple, ‘Behold, your Mother!’ And from that hour the Disciple took her to his own home.” (Jn. 19:26-27) If we are part of “the living” that need redemption, and part of the ones living at the foot of the suffering Christ in our own trials and sufferings, then Mary becomes Our Mother, Our Lady that stands beside us, the one we take into our own homes and our hearts. She honors us with her presence and we honor her with our devotion, a devotion that we share with Christ Himself.
Eve’s sin paved the way for us all to be stained by sin. Mary’s fiat paved the way for us all to be washed clean by the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14). When we keep this in mind, it becomes clear that true worship of God Our Savior cannot exclude true devotion to Mary, Our Mother. We respect our friends when we act chivalrous towards their mothers, sisters, and daughters. It is impossible to think we show respect to God, to honor God, without any special attention to His daughter, full of grace, His mother to whom He showed obedience as a child.
God chose to be known in the world through Mary, singled out from all other people, past, present and future. We cannot claim to really get to know Christ by some more direct means other than what God, Himself, chose as the means. Mary was God’s instrument. She should still be so today for each of us.
Devotion to Our Lady makes us better men. We learn respect for so much of what is good in womanhood as our devotion to Our Lady increases. As men, womanhood is outside of our own experience. This means we must take special care to come to understand what holy femininity looks like. We have to learn to depend on Mary, in all her sweetness, in all her motherliness, in all of her maternal concern for us as her children. She will teach us what we need to know.
Pope Benedict the XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, exhorts us to know Our Lady. Following are the last two paragraphs of the encyclical:

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“With a hymn composed in the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”: Ave maris stella. Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).

So we cry to her: Holy Mary, you belonged to the humble and great souls of Israel who, like Simeon, were “looking for the consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25) and hoping, like Anna, “for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:38). Your life was thoroughly imbued with the sacred scriptures of Israel which spoke of hope, of the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (cf. Lk 1:55). In this way we can appreciate the holy fear that overcame you when the angel of the Lord appeared to you and told you that you would give birth to the One who was the hope of Israel, the One awaited by the world. Through you, through your “yes”, the hope of the ages became reality, entering this world and its history. You bowed low before the greatness of this task and gave your consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). When you hastened with holy joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth, you became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of the world in her womb across the mountains of history. But alongside the joy which, with your Magnificat, you proclaimed in word and song for all the centuries to hear, you also knew the dark sayings of the prophets about the suffering of the servant of God in this world. Shining over his birth in the stable at Bethlehem, there were angels in splendour who brought the good news to the shepherds, but at the same time the lowliness of God in this world was all too palpable. The old man Simeon spoke to you of the sword which would pierce your soul (cf. Lk 2:35), of the sign of contradiction that your Son would be in this world. Then, when Jesus began his public ministry, you had to step aside, so that a new family could grow, the family which it was his mission to establish and which would be made up of those who heard his word and kept it (cf. Lk 11:27f). Notwithstanding the great joy that marked the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, in the synagogue of Nazareth you must already have experienced the truth of the saying about the “sign of contradiction” (cf. Lk 4:28ff). In this way you saw the growing power of hostility and rejection which built up around Jesus until the hour of the Cross, when you had to look upon the Saviour of the world, the heir of David, the Son of God dying like a failure, exposed to mockery, between criminals. Then you received the word of Jesus: “Woman, behold, your Son!” (Jn 19:26). From the Cross you received a new mission. From the Cross you became a mother in a new way: the mother of all those who believe in your Son Jesus and wish to follow him. The sword of sorrow pierced your heart. Did hope die? Did the world remain definitively without light, and life without purpose? At that moment, deep down, you probably listened again to the word spoken by the angel in answer to your fear at the time of the Annunciation: “Do not be afraid, Mary!” (Lk 1:30). How many times had the Lord, your Son, said the same thing to his disciples: do not be afraid! In your heart, you heard this word again during the night of Golgotha. Before the hour of his betrayal he had said to his disciples: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (Jn16:33). “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (Jn 14:27). “Do not be afraid, Mary!” In that hour at Nazareth the angel had also said to you: “Of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:33). Could it have ended before it began? No, at the foot of the Cross, on the strength of Jesus’s own word, you became the mother of believers. In this faith, which even in the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your way towards Easter morning. The joy of the Resurrection touched your heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become the family of Jesus through faith. In this way you were in the midst of the community of believers, who in the days following the Ascension prayed with one voice for the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14) and then received that gift on the day of Pentecost. The “Kingdom” of Jesus was not as might have been imagined. It began in that hour, and of this “Kingdom” there will be no end. Thus you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!” no. 49-50.

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