Vigils Reading – Queenship of Mary

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SPEAK

OF THE QUEENSHIP OF MARY?

From the writing of Thomas Merton1

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Mary alone, of all the saints, is, in everything, incomparable. She has the

sanctity of them all and yet resembles none of them. And still, we can talk of

being like her. This likeness to her is not only something to desire — it is one

human quality most worthy of our desire: but the reason for that is that she, of

all creatures, most perfectly recovered the likeness to God that God willed to

find, in varying degrees, in us all.

It is necessary, no doubt, to talk about her privileges as if they were

something that could be made comprehensible in human language and could

be measured by some human standard. It is most fitting to talk about her as a

Queen and to act as if you knew what it meant to say she has a throne above all

the angels. But this should not make anyone forget that her highest privilege is

her poverty and her greatest glory is that she is most hidden, and the source of

all her power is that she is as nothing in the presence of Christ, of God.

This is often forgotten by Catholics themselves, and therefore it is not

surprising that those who are not Catholic often have a completely wrong

conception of Catholic devotion to the Mother of God. They imagine, and

sometimes we can understand their reasons for doing so, that Catholics treat

the Blessed Virgin as an almost divine being in her own right, as if she had some

glory, some power, some majesty of her own that placed her on a level with

Christ himself. They regard the Assumption of Mary into heaven as a kind of

apotheosis and her Queenship as a strict divinization.11

Hence her place in the Redemption would seem to be equal to that of her

Son. But this is all completely contrary to the true mind of the Catholic Church.

It forgets that Mary’s chief glory is her nothingness, in the fact of being the

“Handmaid of the Lord,” as one who in becoming the Mother of God acted

simply in loving submission to his command, in the pure obedience of faith. She

is blessed not because of some mythical pseudo-divine prerogative, but in all

her human and womanly limitations as one who has believed. It is the faith and

the fidelity of this humble handmaid, “full of grace” that enables her to be the

perfect instrument of God, and nothing else but his instrument. The work that

was done in her was purely the work of God. “He that is mighty has done great

things in me.” The glory of Mary is purely and simply the glory of God in her,

and she, like anyone else, can say that she has nothing that she has not received

from him through Christ.

As a matter of fact, this is precisely her greatest glory: that having nothing

of her own, retaining nothing of a “self” that could glory in anything for her own

sake, she placed no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted his love

and his will. Hence, she received more from him than any other saint. He was

able to accomplish his will perfectly in her, and his liberty was in no way

hindered or turned from its purpose by the presence of an egotistical self in

Mary. She was and is in the highest sense a person precisely because, being

“immaculate,” she was free from every taint of selfishness that might obscure

God’s light in her being. She was then a freedom that obeyed him perfectly and,

in this obedience, found the fulfillment of perfect love.