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26. All for God through Mary
THE
PEASANTS of that historic little parish at Pontmain, in their 1871
consecration to Mary, willed their merits to her that she might apply them
however she would. It was what St. Louis de Montfort recommends. It was
a shrewd decision. Our Lady of Hope did not fail them.
The intimacy she enjoys with the Holy Trinity
enables her to get the most out of the merits her children entrust to
their spiritual mother. If it is to their ultimate good to receive
material benefits she will obtain them, as her personal cures by the
thousands testify, and her traditional interventions into the affairs of
history also proclaim. On the other hand, should it be more to the
advantage of her clients not to receive physical aid they will not. She
will dispose them to a profound resignation instead, which has sustained
many a persecuted nation, and which the uncured patients at her shrines
have been commonly noticed to feel. In their dedication to Mary, which
presupposes a supreme dedication to God, her servants cannot lose.
The supercilious will say, have said, that in
the service of God who needs Mary? "You who raise the objection
especially need her" Pope Pius XII as much as said without actually saying
it at crowded St. Peter's on July 21, 1947. He was speaking at the
canonization of Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort and, after citing the
humble reliance of this servant of Mary upon her meditation, the Holy
Father urged his audience to study in the saint's writings his secret of
holiness. Be not self-reliant, is what his writings advise, lest pride
depreciate your merits. Rather entrust your spirituality to the safer
keeping of one who has a mother's influence over God and a mother's
concern for you. She can best present your merits to the Most High who
will find them the more precious coming from her.
Pope Pius drew a sharp contrast between the
"sad austerity" of Jansenism and the cheerful saint who fought it for the
"depressing pride" it was. Its defeat did not come easily. As Newman
said in a London lecture, "There was a time when all that was most gifted,
learned, and earnest in France seemed corrupted by the heresy."
Self-acclaimed models of piety, these severe foes of devotion to the
Mother of God showed a tendency to weaken in their faith, when they did
not lose it. The lecturing Cardinal laid the cause to "their deficiency
in the primary grace of the creature, humility."
In his Marian classic St. Louis Marie writes:
"Ah! how many of the cedars of Lebanon, how many of the stars of the
firmament, have we not seen miserably fall, and in the twinkling of an eye
lose all their height and all their brightness! Whence comes the sad and
curious change? It has not been for want of grace, which is wanting to no
man; but it has been want of humility. They thought themselves stronger
and more sufficient than they were. They thought themselves capable of
guarding their own merits. They trusted in themselves, relied upon
themselves. . . . Alas! If they had confided their treasure to the
Virgin ever reliable and powerful, who would have kept it for them as her
personal possession, how different it would have been!"
To be sure, any excess of devotion to
Mary which would equate her with Almighty God and treat her as the source
of grace when she is but its dispenser, must be abhorred. It would be
idolatry. It would offend her grievously. The sole purpose of dedication
to the Mother of Christ is to rely on her holy influence to obtain for the
dedicated a measure, the most abundant measure possible, of her own
perfect adoration of the Undivided Unity of the Three Divine Persons.
Understand her to be a creature who has derived her incomparable
prerogatives from God, see her as the venerated Queen of the angels, then
have no fear of overdoing the earthly veneration due her. Rather should
you fear underrating her great dignity. After all, to slight her dignity
would in effect betray a contempt for its Giver. God the Father of his
deliberate choosing overshadowed the Virgin of Nazareth, and his Son was
by their Spirit conceived in her, so that it is the Blessed Trinity we
honor in reverencing Mary.
A curious fact stands out in church history.
In age after age whenever a prerogative of Mary received the attention of
theology, its most ardent proponent invariably aroused in the more
timorous a qualm that he might be carrying a good thing too far. Yet time
just as invariably vindicated the continual succession of such
enthusiasts, one by one. Most of them have passed the test of
canonization, from Irenaeus in the second century to Louis Marie de
Montfort in the twentieth, and the uncanonized among them enjoy an equal
esteem for their holy initiative. No genuine Catholic now thinks that St.
Epiphanius or Dun Scotus in their respective eras went too far. What had
been feared in every instance to be an excess was found to be nothing more
than true doctrine, better understood. The enthusiasts with their
providential insights discovered the full implicit meaning already there.
They explained it for others to see as clearly.
Now Louis Marie de Montfort had the discernment
to see that, if Mary is our queen we owe it to her and since she is also
our mother and mediatrix we owe it to ourselves, to become her consecrated
servants. Slaves would be the precise translation of the word the
saint used. But with its harsh sound to the modern ear the word must not
be misunderstood. It means, in its frame of reference here, slaves who
enjoy the most genuine liberation on earth, the kind our Lord had in mind
when he said "the truth will make you free" (Jn. 8:32).
Ironically, the more blasphemous and loudest
objectors to the term are likely to be themselves slaves without perhaps
realizing they have fallen under the sway of the insidious devil. An
adult human being does not exist in a vacuum of utter independence from
outside influences. Human nature, when not submissive to the Holy Spirit,
has a propensity to evil; it cannot stay neutral; so that it can only
benefit by an allegiance to the mother who has from God the power and the
heart to do her devotees the most good, the guarantee in them an immunity
from the enslavement to Satan, the freedom to achieve their true destiny.
In brief, servitude to Mary simply means to learn of her how to love God
as she does: and it would be impossible to enjoy a higher fulfillment of
human nature than in loving God like that.
The doctrine, that Mary promotes in her
trusting clients a predominant love for God, did not of course originate
with St. Louis Marie. It came into being with the Church. Leaf through
the ancient missals, consult any thesaurus of traditional prayers, and it
will be seen that every direct appeal to Mary leads to an acknowledgment
of the Most High. The procedure never fails. "O mother of mercy," the
priest used to read and may still read from the old Roman Breviary before
putting on his altar vestments, "I am wretched and unworthy because of my
sins, and yet I hasten to you as my refuge with a heart full of love. You
stood close to your beloved Son as he was hanging upon the cross, and so I
beg of you in your kindness to be present to me, a miserable sinner, and
to all priests who are offering Mass today, either here or anywhere
throughout the Church. Thus with the aid of your grace, may we offer an
acceptable Sacrifice to the exalted and undivided Trinity."
To like effect, and of a candor too quotable
not to be quoted in full, follows another old prayer—for use after Holy
Communion. "O Mary, gracious mother and virgin, I have received your
beloved Son, whom you conceived in your sacred womb,, brought forth,
nourished and held in your sweet embrace. Behold him whose countenance
filled you with joy and all delight: humbly and fervently do I present him
to be caressed by your arms, loved by your heart, and offered to the
adorable Trinity as the highest act of worship for your honor and glory,
for my needs and those of the whole world, I beseech you, therefore,
dearest of mothers, to secure for me pardon for my sins, a full measure of
grace to serve Jesus more faithfully henceforth, and at last the heavenly
privilege to praise him with you forever and ever. Amen."
Confidence in the Mother of God as his
mediatrix of grace, which those prayers of the Church breathe forth, the
author of True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary has simply
developed into a treatise. He would have us understand from the authority
of tradition that even the prayers we address to God the Father, or God
the Son, or God the Holy Spirit, or again to angel or saint, with no
mention of Mary, may nevertheless by a tacit consent and permanent
disposition of the will be entrusted to her intermediacy. He agrees with
St. Bernard that, if you have anything to offer God, take care to offer it
through the hands of Mary—unless you wish to have it rejected. He quotes
St. Augustine as saying that the suppliant, armed with the merits and
intercession of the Mother of God, lovingly vanquishes the Almighty. He
shares the conviction of Saints Bernard and Bernardine and Bonaventure
that the Queen of Heaven gets her way with God. They mean to say, says
their interpreter, that "her prayers and petitions are so powerful with
God as always to pass for commandments with his majesty, because she is
always humble and conformed to his will."
There, in that final clause, lies the heart of
the matter. What God wants her to do she does: she cooperates with her
Son, our Mediator, on our behalf. All the daring statements of Louis de
Montfort find their justification in that basic truth. But neither he nor
his quoted authorities have expressed it with the finesse of a much later
theologian. Our blessed mediatrix of grace intercedes for us, writes
Cardinal Newman, "according to Christ's will, and when he wills to save,
Mary at once prays. He wills according to her prayer, but then she prays
according to his will."
They might better try to separate light from
the sun, True Devotion challenges its carpers, than go looking for
an incompatibility between Jesus and his sinless mother. She does not
oppose, taking attention from him. She directs it to him. She
intensifies it. She is all for God. She is perfectly attuned to the Holy
Trinity. "You never think of Mary," her apologist tosses off the words in
high glee, "without Mary's thinking of God for you. You never
praise or honor Mary without Mary's praising and honoring God with
you. Mary is altogether relative to God. She only exists in reference to
God. She is the echo of God, that says nothing and repeats nothing but
God. If you say 'Mary' she says 'God'. St. Elizabeth extolled Mary as
the most blessed of women. Mary replied with her Magnificat anima mea
Dominum."
The book revels in flourishes of the kind,
which state nothing essentially new, yet do it with a verve peculiar to
the author. But not exclusively so! Such verve he must share with a man
he acknowledges as one of his teachers. It was St. Bonaventure, not St.
Louis Marie, who sang of Mary: "She not only abides in the fullness of the
saints, but abides in fullness with the saints, lest they fly; she
takes hold of demons and keeps them in check, lest they do harm; she takes
hold of her Son, lest he strike sinners." What originality belongs to
True Devotion does not derive from its pleadings to consecrate oneself
to Mary. Other great mystics have recommended the same. "Such were St.
Ephrem, St. John Damascene, St. Bernard, St. Berardine, St. Bonaventure,
St. Francis de Sales," the book itself admits. The unique distinction of
its author lies rather in the unreserved generosity he demands of the
consecrated.
The consecrated must not rest content with
acquiring merits from alms-giving, mortification and so on; a sacrifice is
expected of them which even the vows of religious orders do not include;
they must surrender to their queen and mediatrix and spiritual mother the
right to apply those merits how she chooses. The servants of Mary, as St.
Louis Marie defines them, must not stint in their pledge. It must be
total. They must will their all to her discretion as she presents the
merits of both her body and soul, the sinless actions and sufferings of
the one, the prayers and virtues of the other, to Christ the supreme
Mediator and therefore no less truly to Father and Holy Spirit.
For never let so glorious a truth be forgotten,
that what is offered to the Second of the Three Divine Persons is equally
offered to the other Two. There exists no rivalry in their undivided
Unity. The Three are One in essence. "Do you not believe," Philip was
asked, "that I am in the Father and the Father in me?" Nor did Jesus keep
the rest of the truth to himself. "The Spirit of your Father speaking
through you," he told the apostles, will inspire your preaching when the
times come (Mt. 10:20). But his Last Supper discourse alone,
independently of other texts to the same effect, sufficiently bear out the
sublime doctrine: that the Third Person of the Trinity is from all
eternity and without end the mutual Spirit of Love between Father and
Son. St. Paul, stating the Unity of the Three to his converts, does it
with a brevity worth its size in gold: "God has sent the Spirit of His
Son into our hearts" (Gal. 4:6).
Please do not think the bringing in of those
sacred texts a digression. It was not. They belong to the subject. If
True Devotion means anything, the Blessed Trinity must always
remain its ultimate purpose. The whole idea of relying upon Mary's
mediation between ourselves and our Triune God is that her offering of our
defective efforts, united with her perfect adoration, renders them a most
pleasing gift to Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Those consecrated to Mary the Louis de Montfort
way freely concede to her the privilege of using their spiritual resources
to whatever end will most please God. What that is, she will know better
than the smartest angel. Accordingly, it becomes a practice of common
sense to let her decide whether, from one's treasury of merits, to aid a
soul in purgatory, restore harmony to a family, help convert a sinner,
obtain peace of mind for the distressed, or do this or do that, in any
given instance. She might very well accomplish the entire series of
objectives at once. Leave it to her to get results.
The method does not disallow the servants of
Mary to specify the intentions for which they pray, for which they perform
acts of self-denial, for which they especially have Masses offered. She
expects them to intercede for their parents, their family, the friends of
their choice. They have her encouragement, St. Louis does not hesitate to
say, to ask for particulars. They may request the conversion of an
atheist neighbor, the finding or holding of a job, fair weather at a
picnic, anything at all not evil, so long as they understand that their
mediatrix has the option to answer the prayer in a different way than
specified. If the petition is for the cure of a bedridden invalid, she
may aid the patient to a happy death instead. Should the father of a
quarreling family offer up his self-denials toward peace in the world, she
may reward the efforts with a deeper harmony in his home.
This freedom of hers to decide, her dedicated
servants desire her to have. They have pledged themselves to it. Since
she cannot misuse it, being who she is, they cannot lose. As has been
said and shall without apology be repeated, her power to do what she will
with their petitions only means that she will make the best of these
before God, granting from him the fulfillment of some and the diversion of
others to benefits not stated, yet always to the advantage of the
petitioner. Who of us doesn't thank heaven now that many a prayer in the
past did not get answered the way it was spelled out?
The conviction, that Mary promotes in her
trusting children a predominant love for Jesus and that she takes no
credit to herself but directs their praises of her to the Holy Trinity, is
as ancient as the Church. But St. Louis, who characteristically selected
Marie for his confirmation name, made the doctrine his specialty. He
probed more deeply into its possibilities than any former proponent. That
he succeeded admirably, the esteem of the Holy See for his True
Devotion bears witness, Pope Pius IX strongly recommended it. Pope
Leo XIII, besides beatifying its author, attached a plenary indulgence to
its prescribed act of consecration. Pope Pius X conferred upon its
readers the apostolic benediction. Pope Benedict XV declared it "a book
of high authority and unction" and Pope Pius XI, speaking of its from of
dedication, admits to "have practiced it ever since my youth." It was
obviously because Louis Grignion had himself practiced what he wrote, that
Pope Pius XII canonized him.
His treatise has another sanction from the
accuracy with which it predicted that, as Satan would intensify his modern
assault upon Christian civilization to estrange it ever more and more from
God, the Mother of God would visibly counteract him. Starting with her
apparitions to St. Catherine Labouré, she has done that: intervened to
warn and admonish a sin-blinded humanity against the threat. The advance
of militant atheism has had enough said about it already. What remains to
be said is that, in addition to her many appearances in France since 1830,
Our Lady has appeared not infrequently in other countries of the world to
prove the prophet of Montfort right in having designated these latter
times the Age of Mary.
Of her authenticated apparitions outside
France, none of course enjoys the prestige of the six at Fatima. But she
is the same holy Mother of God, wherever seen, and always deserves
attention. The need of reparation for the sins of the world has remained
the theme of her message,, in place after place. At Heede, Germany she
again emphasized the importance of the daily rosary for the conversion of
sinners. Her visionaries were four carefree girls who became models of
piety, which brought about an investigation and approval of their claim
from the Church. As interesting feature of Our Lady's 1938 series of
apparitions to the quartette is that during the first one she expressed
the desire to be called Queen of the Universe and that not many years
later Pope Pius XII with all the dignity of his high office honored the
request. He published his encyclical Queen of the World on October
11, 1954, and then put the fervor of his panegyric into action by making
room in the liturgy for a new Marian feast by that title.
To one of the four seers, Greta Gansforth,
Jesus himself appeared. Divinity shone from his gracious figure as he
stood before the German girl a breathtaking vision of the compassionate
Christ, who once sat at Jacob's well to converse with the Samaritan woman,
but now grieved over the fact that so comparatively few had heeded his
mother's pleas at Fatima. "Mankind is suffocating in sin," he said,
"hatred and greed rule their hearts. This is the work of the devil."
But have no fear, the visionary was told.
Satan and his evil spirits and human agents would not prevail, despite
their current success. The many martyrs for the cause, the imprisoned,
the tortured, the hounded, all those who are "privileged to participate in
my captivity, my scourging, my crowning with thorns, my way of the cross,"
are not suffering in vain. Nothing of their affliction is wasted. It is
contributing to the final triumph. "Through the wounds that bleed now,"
are the divine words the girl heard in a transport of joy, "mercy will
again overcome justice." It would be gradual, yet certain. And his holy
mother with the aid of the holy angels, Jesus promptly added, was exerting
her powerful influence over the process.
His divine instruction to Greta Gansforth
reasserted the message of Fatima, with its great prophecy. What Our Lady
had predicted, and St. Louis de Montfort as well, the Omniscient
confirmed. After deploring the gradual deterioration of the human race
under the influence of Satan, indeed pronouncing it "worse than before the
deluge," the Son of God ended the lament with the exhilarating summation:
"The devils of hell believe they are sure of the harvest, but I will
snatch it away from them."
Our Lord will do it through his mother, his
chosen mediatrix of all grace. We have the divine assurance of the
unified victory over Satan in the most ancient of prophecies (Gen. 3:15).
It is the prophecy that encouraged St. Louis de Montfort to write: "The
power of Mary over the devils will be particularly outstanding in the
latter times. She will extend the Kingdom of Christ over idolaters and
Moslems, and there will come a glorious era in which Mary will be the
ruler and queen of human hearts." Antichrist and his reign will have been
destroyed, and the survivors on the renewed earth will know at last the
undisturbed joy of peace because they will have learnt of Mary to love God
as she does, their hearts beating in unison with hers. The plea of
centuries to the Eternal Father, that his name be hallowed and his will be
done on earth as in heaven, will have been fulfilled. To read St. Louis
attentively to our troubled age: "In the end my Immaculate Heart will
triumph."
St. Louis de Montfort, who wrote a good two
hundred years before Our Lady spoke it, throws light upon the Fatima
message. His True Devotion therefore makes an ideal handbook for
anyone interested in our evil times and desirous of seeing them
rectified. Father Frederick William Faber in the foreword to its English
edition, which he translated, admits "a growing feeling of something
inspired and supernatural about it." And what impressed him, aside from
the sublimity of its contents, was its author's presentiment that his
unpublished manuscript would by the malice of enemies be consigned to "the
silence of coffer to prevent its publication," but that in God's due time
it would appear.
Mysteriously so the manuscript did get buried
out of sight, remaining lost during the French Revolution and right on
into the mid-nineteenth century. Then, true to the prediction, it was
found in 1842 in a chest of discarded old tomes. The treatise was
promptly printed, bound into book form, circulated throughout France, and
by popular demand translated into the vernacular of nation after nation.
True Devotion became a quick favorite with the devout and has
maintained its renown among them.
Was the discovery of the hidden manuscript an
accident? Or only what looked to be? Certainly its author felt
confident that Providence meant to make use of it to prepare the faithful
for the later ages of the Church. As Faber observes, "he comes forward
like another St. Vincent Ferrer, as if on the days bordering on the Last
Judgment, and proclaims that he brings an authentic message from God . . .
about his blessed Mother and her connection with the second advent of her
Son." The appreciative foreword goes on to suggest that, since the
treatise had now come to light and was approved, it shouldn't be long
before the author is beatified. Nor in fact was it.
The Holy See recognized Louis Marie Grignion
for the man of the hour he was, the advocate of a timely message, the
herald of the Age of Mary. Pope Clement XI conferred upon him the title,
Missionary Apostolic in France, to encourage him to preach his gracious
way to holiness against the harsh heresy of Jansenism. This he did
through his mere sixteen years of priesthood before his early death at
forty-three. After his death, just eleven years after his famous
manuscript and his other compositions had been recovered from oblivion, a
decree from Rome declared his writings free of all doctrinal error. Pius
IX, the reigning pontiff, rejoiced in their showing the connection between
a contempt for Mary and a lapse into heresy. Before the century was out,
Pope Leo XIII beatified the Athanasian lover of truth against its
Jansenist foe.
The robust Breton presented a method of serving
God as refined and gentle and durable as Mary because she is the
method. The one perfect creature of all the human race, from whom the Son
of God assumed his humanity without diminishing his divinity, to whose
care he entrusted his infancy, to whose guidance he submitted his
childhood, in whose home he spent thirty of his thirty-three years and
then in his departure from it did not take leave of her solicitude, and in
death found her standing by his cross, she it is who can best teach her
other children how to follow Christ, their divine Exemplar. "I am the
way," he who leads to heaven said of himself, and none understood his
meaning so unerringly as his immaculate mother (Jn. 14:6). She never
deviated a step from his sovereign will, never by deed or word or thought
struck a false note in her total harmony with the adorable Trinity.
If St. Louis de Montfort would have the
servants of Mary will their merits to her custody, it is only to render
the merits the mere acceptable to the All-Holy. Those theologians who
accuse True Devotion of stealing honor from the Most High can scarcely
have read the treatise with any care, for it is hard to believe that a
careful reader could be so dense as to miss the logic of its common
sense. Its noble thesis requires no apology. Its purpose stands complete
in a dozen unmistakable words: all for Jesus, all for the Truine
Majesty of God, through Mary.
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