A fitting summary of what the Church teaches about the Blessed Virgin Mary may be found in the eighth chapter of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. It is recommended that one read this section of Lumen Gentium (nos. 52-67) in conjunction with this reflection.
To understand properly what Divine Revelation has taught us about who our Blessed Mother is, and what role she plays in our lives as followers of Christ, it is important to keep in the mind that the Church has always sought to teach about our Lady in relation to Christ. “In the Virgin Mary, everything is relative to Christ and dependent on him” (St. Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Marialis Cultus 25). As St. Pope John Paul II observed,
Only in the mystery of Christ is [the Blessed Virgin Mary’s] mystery fully made clear. Thus has the Church sought to interpret it from the very beginning: the mystery of the Incarnation has enabled her to penetrate and to make ever clearer the mystery of the Mother of the Incarnate Word. The Council of Ephesus (431) was of decisive importance in clarifying this, for during that Council, to the great joy of Christians, the truth of the divine motherhood of Mary was solemnly confirmed as a truth of the Church's faith. Mary is the Mother of God (= Theotókos), since by the power of the Holy Spirit she conceived in her virginal womb and brought into the world Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is of one being with the Father...In turn, the dogma of the divine motherhood of Mary was for the Council of Ephesus and is for the Church like a seal upon the dogma of the Incarnation, in which the Word truly assumes human nature into the unity of his person, without cancelling out that nature. (Encyclical Redemptoris Mater 4)
Our Blessed Mother’s motherhood in relation to Christ’s faithful likewise flows from her divine motherhood of the person of Jesus Christ. Reflecting on the intercession which our Blessed Mother exercised for the benefit of the married couple at the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee (see John 2:1-11), St. Pope John Paull II observed, “From the text of John it is evident that it is a mediation which is maternal. As the [Second Vatican] Council proclaims: Mary became ‘a mother to us in the order of grace’. This motherhood in the order of grace flows from her divine motherhood.” (Redemptoris Mater 22, citing Lumen Gentium 61).
Careful analysis of Sacred Scripture likewise confirms Mary’s motherhood “in the order of grace” as stemming from her motherhood of the Incarnate Word.
Prior to ascending into heaven, our Lord told his disciples “Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). Following our Lord’s ascension into heaven, the Evangelist Luke then relates in the Book of Acts, “they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet...All these in one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren” (Acts 1:12, 14).
The Evangelist Luke, who authored both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, uses identical language to describe the coming of the Holy Spirit upon our Blessed Mother at the Incarnation and upon the Church on Pentecost. In response to our Blessed Mother’s question as to the nature of her conception of Christ, the Angel Gabriel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). Immediately before ascending to heaven, our Lord told his disciples, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8).
Just as when St. Luke used language from the Second Book of Samuel which pertained to the Ark of the Covenant in order to describe Our Lady’s visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, thus depicting Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant (see 2 Samuel 6:2, 5, 9, 11; Luke 1:39, 43, 44, 56), so, too, does his use of the language describing the Holy Spirit’s coming upon Mary at the Incarnation (“power...Holy Spirit...come upon”) draw a parallel with the Holy Spirit’s coming upon the Church at Pentecost. By drawing a connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit at both the events of the Incarnation and Pentecost, this parallel helps to illustrate the intercessory role which our Blessed Mother played in the Upper Room at Pentecost. Just as God used her consent to His will for her to be the mother of Jesus as revealed to her at the Annunciation (see Luke 1:31, 38), in a like manner, her intercession among the members of the Church was key as they prayed in fulfillment of our Lord’s direction to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).
Since it has pleased God not to manifest solemnly the mystery of the salvation of the human race before He would pour forth the Spirit promised by Christ, we see the apostles before the day of Pentecost "persevering with one mind in prayer with the women and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and with His brethren", and Mary by her prayers imploring the gift of the Spirit, who had already overshadowed her in the Annunciation. (Lumen Gentium 59, citing Acts 1:14)
Our Lady continues to intercede for us in heaven to assist us on our way of salvation just as she did in the Upper Room. “Taken up to heaven she did not lay aside this salvific duty, but by her constant intercession continued to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation” (Lumen Gentium 62).
The Second Vatican Council further qualifies the Blessed Virgin Mary’s intercessory role as a participation in Christ’s own unique role as Mediator.
There is but one Mediator as we know from the words of the apostle, "for there is one God and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a redemption for all" (1 Timothy 2:5). The maternal duty of Mary toward men in no wise obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows His power. For all the salvific influence of the Blessed Virgin on men originates, not from some inner necessity, but from the divine pleasure. It flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on His mediation, depends entirely on it and draws all its power from it. In no way does it impede, but rather does it foster the immediate union of the faithful with Christ. (Lumen Gentium 60)
This intercessory role for the benefit of the Church further illustrates a fulfillment of her role as mother which our Lord had earlier decreed as he hung upon the cross. The Gospel of John recounts this instance:
Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdelene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then he said to his disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (19:25-27)
St. Pope John Paul II confirmed that the “beloved disciple” of this episode, St. John the Evangelist, stands in the place of all of Christ’s faithful:
The words uttered by Jesus from the Cross signify that the motherhood of her who bore Christ finds a "new" continuation in the Church and through the Church, symbolized and represented by John.
...
It can also be said that these same words [“Behold your son.”] show the reason for the Marian dimension of the life of Christ’s disciples. This is not only true of John, who at that hour stood at the food of the cross together with his Master’s Mother, but is also true of every disciple of Christ, of every Christian. The Redeemer entrusts his mother to his disciple, and at the same time gives her to him as his mother. Mary’s motherhood, which becomes man’s inheritance, is a gift: a gift which Christ himself makes personally to every individual. (Redemptoris Mater 24, 45)
Our Blessed Mother responds to our Lord’s command to behold us as her children by looking out for us just as she did for the married couple at the wedding feast at Cana, and by continually interceding for us as has been illustrated above. It also follows that our devotion to our Lady as Christ’s disciples follows from our own response to our Lord’s command to behold her as our Mother.
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary
In 2018, Pope Francis underscored the Blessed Virgin Mary’s motherhood of the members of the Church by approving the liturgical feast of Mary, Mother of the Church. In the decree establishing this feast, Cardinal Robert Sarah, then Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, indicated the regard that we as members of the Church are to have toward our Lady in response to her motherhood:
Indeed, the Mother standing beneath the cross (cf. Jn 19:25), accepted her Son’s testament of love and welcomed all people in the person of the beloved disciple as sons and daughters to be reborn unto life eternal. She thus became the tender Mother of the Church which Christ begot on the cross handing on the Spirit. Christ, in turn, in the beloved disciple, chose all disciples as ministers of his love towards his Mother, entrusting her to them so that they might welcome her with filial affection. (Decree on the the Celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of the Church in the General Roman Calendar)
In response to our Lord’s command to behold Mary as our Mother, our devotion to our Lady springs from this “welcoming” of her in her maternal role. As Cardinal Sarah notes, we welcome her with filial affection, of the affection of a child for its mother. Any devotional practice focused on our Lady, such as praying the rosary, should be accompanied by such affection. Our Lady no doubt delights in this affection as a mother would. This affection likewise helps us to keep in mind why it is that we regularly carry out such devotional practices: as an expression of love of children for their mother, and so avail ourselves of benefiting from her maternal role in helping us foster greater union with Christ.
This filial affection we have for Our Lady is not mere sentimentality, but the heart’s response to the mind’s assent to the truths of faith that the Blessed Virgin Mary is our Mother “in the order of grace”.
Let the faithful remember moreover that true devotion consists neither in sterile or transitory affection, nor in a certain vain credulity, but proceeds from true faith, by which we are led to know the excellence of the Mother of God, and we are moved to a filial love toward our mother and to the imitation of her virtues. (Lumen Gentium 67)
The regard we have for our Lady as our Mother should also entail veneration we have for her as she whom God chose to be Mother of the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (Revelation 19:16), in such a manner that we allow our regard for her to be influenced by that favor which the Most High God showed her in gracing her with so exalted a role.
The early writers of the Church called Mary "the Mother of the King" and "the Mother of the Lord," basing their stand on the words of St. Gabriel the archangel, who foretold that the Son of Mary would reign forever [see Luke 1:33] and on the words of Elizabeth who greeted her with reverence and called her "the Mother of my Lord." [Luke 1:43] Thereby they clearly signified that she derived a certain eminence and exalted station from the royal dignity of her Son. (Venerable Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam 9)
This “certain eminence and exalted station” with which God has blessed our Lady may also be glimpsed in the “great portent” of the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation of the “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1). One may legitimately interpret this Woman as representing the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This Woman represents Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer, but at the same time she also represents the whole Church, the People of God of all times, the Church which in all ages, with great suffering, brings forth Christ ever anew. (Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, 23 August 2006)
This passage from the Book of Revelation, while portraying the Woman as she who is “crowned with twelve stars” and gives birth to “a male child, who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron” (see also Psalm 2:9), likewise identifies her “offspring” as “those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (12:1, 17).
Identifying the Virgin Mary as both Mother and Queen, the Church prays in the Opening Prayer of the Mass for the feast of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary:
O God, who made the Mother of your Son
to be our Mother and our Queen, graciously grant that, sustained by her intercession,
we may attain in the heavenly Kingdom
the glory promised to your children.
As we maintain this reverential regard for our Lady as our Mother, as the Mother of the Lord, and as Queen, we do not hesitate to heed that maternal direction she gave to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Just as our Lord directed us to behold our Lady as our Mother, so we benefit from regarding her as such by heeding her direction in pointing us back to our Lord. By participating in this interplay, we move more deeply in that family relationship as children of God “in the order of grace” which surpasses biological bonds; as our Lord declared, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35). Our Lady herself exemplifies this obedience to God’s will, most especially in her consent to God’s will in response to the Angel’s message: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1: 38). In her consent to God’s will, so too does she model that trust we should have as the Lord’s disciples in following his will. As our Lady’s cousin, Elizabeth, proclaimed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Luke 1:45, cf. 1:41).
Devotional Practices to the Blessed Virgin Mary
As we “behold” our Lady as our Mother, we express our filial regard for her with internal and external practices. At times, the internal and external aspects of such practices coincide by design, as with the rosary, by which one outwardly prays vocally while simultaneously contemplating the “mysteries” of the rosary, or the events in the lives of Jesus and Mary on this the rosary’s meditations are based.
In addition to the rosary, the Church’s history has witnessed manifold expressions of devotion to our Lady in both the East and the West.
The Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary
As he considered how renewal of the faithful’s devotional practices to the Blessed Virgin Mary fell within the overall liturgical renewal following the Second Vatican Council, St. Pope Paul VI affirmed the following criterion:
It seems to us particularly in conformity with the spiritual orientation of our time, which is dominated and absorbed by the "question of Christ," that in the expressions of devotion to the Virgin the Christological aspect should have particular prominence...This will without doubt contribute to making piety towards the Mother of Jesus more solid, and to making it an effective instrument for attaining to full "knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Eph. 4:13). (Marialis Cultus 25)
In reaffirming the rosary’s value as maintaining this Chrisological character, St. Pope Paul VI deemed the rosary a “compendium of the entire Gospel” (Marialis Cultus 42, citing Venerable Pope Pius XII, Letter to the Archbishop of Manila "Philippinas Insulas"). Expounding on this point, he continued:
The Rosary draws from the Gospel the presentation of the mysteries and its main formulas. As it moves from the angel's joyful greeting and the Virgin's pious assent, the Rosary takes its inspiration from the Gospel to suggest the attitude with which the faithful should recite it. In the harmonious succession of Hail Mary's the Rosary puts before us once more a fundamental mystery of the Gospel - the Incarnation of the Word, contemplated at the decisive moment of the Annunciation to Mary. The Rosary is thus a Gospel prayer. (Marialis Cultus 44)
St. Pope John Paul II also reaffirmed this Christological character of the rosary when he stated simply that “to recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae 3, emphasis in the original).
Pope Leo XIII explained how this quality of the rosary to bring Christ and his gospel to light would have lent itself to St. Dominic’s combat against the Albigensian heresy:
St. Dominic, after journeying from Spain into France, was the invincible opponent of the Albigensian heresy which at that time was spreading like an evil pestilence through almost the whole of southern France to the foot of the Pyrenees. By his explaining and preaching on the wonderful and sacred mysteries of God’s gifts, the light of truth burned brightly in the very places that had been overshadowed by the darkness of error. For this is what each series of the rosary mysteries, which we so highly esteem, does for us. (Encyclical Parta Humano Generi ___)
Though the historicity of the traditions of Our Lady’s bestowal of the rosary to St. Dominic and of St. Dominic’s use of the actual rosary in his preaching against the Albigensians is debated, it is worth noting that these traditions have been attested to by several popes throughout history, including Popes Leo X, Pius V, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, Clement VIII, Alexander VII, Innocent XIII, Benedict XIII, Pius IX, and Leo XIII (see Augusta Theodosa Drane, The History of St. Dominic: Founder of the Friars Preachers, p. 136).
History nevertheless attests to a substantial relationship between the Dominican Order and the rosary’s place in the prayer life of the Church. After the rosary had developed over centuries, its popularity spread among the faithful as a result of the establishment of the Confraternity of the Rosary, an association of clergy and the faithful devoted to promotion of the rosary (see Donald Calloway, MIC, Champions of the Rosary: The History and Heroes of a Spiritual Weapon, pp. 67-71). In 1475, a Rosary Confraternity based in Cologne, Germany was the first to be officially recognized by a pope. Following this recognition, many more local confraternities were to be recognized as they were established under the direction of Dominican friars. The rosary flourished throughout the 16th century and in 1520, Pope Leo X traced the confraternity’s beginnings to St. Dominic himself (see Pastoris aeterni, as cited in ibid., p. 75). This attribution to St. Dominic was later repeated in 1897 by Pope Leo XIII (see Encyclical Augustissimae Virginis Mariae, 7).
Starting in 1571, the general chapters of the Dominican Order (meetings at which decisions are collectively made regarding the life and governance of the whole Order) “began to urge or require friars to preach about and promote the rosary” (Augustine Thompson, OP, Dominican Brothers: Conversi, Lay, and Cooperator Friars, p. 95). This Dominican connection to the rosary and the Rosary Confraternity was reinforced by the fact that prior to 1964, the blessing of rosaries was a “reserved blessing”, meaning that only priests of the Dominican Order could bless them (see Augustine Thompson, O.P., Dominican Blessing of the Holy Rosary, http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2008/10/dominican-blessing-of-holy-rosary.html#.XvDYBYjYqyI ).
One may list other examples from history illustrating the relationship of the Dominican Order to the rosary, including those lives of numerous Dominican Saints and Blesseds who while being devoted to the rosary proved outstanding models of holiness and conformity to God’s will for one’s state in life.
In addition to Rosary, a devotional practice which has stood the test of time throughout the Church's history is the Angelus. Of the Angelus, St. Pope Paul VI wrote:
Its simple structure, its biblical character, its historical origin which links it to the prayer for peace and safety, and its quasi-liturgical rhythm...sanctifies different moments during the day, and because it reminds us of the Paschal Mystery, in which recalling the Incarnation of the Son of God we pray that we may be led "through his passion and cross to the glory of his resurrection." (Marialis Cultus 41, citing the Angelus’ Closing Prayer)
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