Tag Archives: Mary

Our Lady of Fatima and the First Saturday Devotion

End Times, Mary, Redemption, , ,

In the popular devotion of the Church, Saturday has long been a day set aside to honor the Blessed Mother.  It was the 8th Century Benedictine monk and Carolingian liturgical reformer, St. Alcuin, who first composed Votive Masses to honor Our Lady on Saturday.  These masses were so popular among the faithful, that they eventually became accepted into the Missal as the Common of the Virgin Mary.

It was no accident however that Alcuin chose Saturday, for there are deep theological reasons for doing so.  The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy  explains that Saturday is set chosen as a memorial of the Blessed Virgin as “a remembrance of the maternal example and discipleship of the Blessed Virgin Mary who, strengthened by faith and hope, on that great Saturday on which Our Lord lay in the tomb, was the only one of the disciples to hold vigil in expectation of the Lord’s resurrection; it is a prelude and introduction to the celebration of Sunday, the weekly memorial of the Resurrection of Christ; it is a sign that the ‘Virgin Mary is continuously present and operative in the life of the Church.’”

This devotion to Our Lady has been sorely tried in recent centuries, beginning with the Protestant Revolution.  Rather than being met with indifference, she was treated with contempt.  It was within this setting that a practice of receiving Communion in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary arose.  This devotion spread, catching the attention of Pope St. Pius X who attached an indulgence to the practice in 1904.  This practice was expanded when on June 13,1912 he offered additional indulgences for “All the Faithful who, on the first Saturday or first Sunday of twelve consecutive months, devote some time to vocal or mental prayer in honor of the Immaculate Virgin in Her conception gain, on each of these days, a plenary indulgence. Conditions: Confession, Communion, and prayers for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff.”

Fatima

Five years to the day, Our Lady appeared to the Fatima visionaries, showing them the Immaculate Heart surrounded with thorns.  Sr. Lucia would later say that she understood that the vision was “was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity, which demanded Reparation.” It was also during this appearance that Our Lady told the children that Jesus wished to “establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” Our Lady promised Lucia that she would return to explain the practice of the first five Saturdays.

Fast forward eight years and Lucia is now a postulant in a convent in Pontevedra, Spain.  Our Lady appeared to her and said “Look, my daughter. My Heart is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce unceasingly with their blasphemies and ingratitude. You, at least, try to console me and announce that for all those, who for five consecutive first Saturdays, confess, receive Holy Communion, pray the Holy Rosary and accompany me for15 minutes by meditating the mysteries of the Holy Rosary with the intention to do reparation, I promise to assist them at the hour of death with the graces needed for salvation.”

About a year later, she was taking out the trash when she encounters a little child.  She told the child to pray a Hail Mary which He refused to do.  So, she tells him to go to the Church and ask the Heavenly Mother for the Child Jesus.  When the child returns, she asks him if he did what she said to which He replied “And have you spread through the world what the heavenly Mother requested of you?”  She replied, knowing it was Our Lord, that she had met many difficulties in spreading the devotion.  He told her to rely on His grace and to “have compassion for your Mother’s Heart. It is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce at each moment, and there is no one who does acts of reparation to remove them.”

Our Blessed Lord appeared once again to now Sister Lucia on May 29, 1930. He explained that the devotion involved five consecutive first Saturday because it was five kinds of offenses and blasphemies against the Immaculate Heart of Mary that required reparation, namely: blasphemies against her Immaculate Conception, against her perpetual virginity, against the divine and spiritual maternity of Mary, blasphemies involving the rejection and dishonoring of her images, and the neglect of implanting in the hearts of children a knowledge and love of this Immaculate Mother.  Mary had asked Jesus for this to forgive those who “had the misfortune of offending her.”

Why does it Matter?

Why do all these details matter?  Because we are now closing in on the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance to the visionaries in Fatima.  The world has changed in ways the Fatima visionaries could hardly have conceived.  But many of the advances that have been made have left us less human.  Our Lady appeared in order to warn us of this and offered us a remedy to protect us from ourselves—“Penance, penance, penance.”  Many within the Church has chosen to focus on the consecration of Russia as the primary message, but it seems to me that any debate on whether that has actually been accomplished (Sr. Lucia herself said it had) misses the point when we fail to implement the simple call to do Penance.

Our Lady’s instructions are a reminder to all the Faithful of the communal dimension of sin and our obligation to make reparation. Christ came for no other reason than to make reparation.  A Christian is meant to continue His work throughout time and space.  Sure, He could have done the work Himself had He so willed, but He did not will.  Sure, His participation and ours differ immeasurably but He asked for our participation in it when He called upon us to take up our Cross.  We cannot be Christians while at the same time striving to live a comfortable life.  Christians must act redemptively by consciously making acts of reparation, not just for our sins but for the sins of others.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, provided we are willing to act like other Christs.  Our Lady’s very specific instructions to Sr. Lucia offers us a concrete means to make this happen.  She is ever the spiritual mother teaching us.  Can we not give to her Son, the First Five Saturdays in honor of His holy Mother?

Why the Immaculate Conception Matters

Mary,

Throughout the history of the Church, the challenge to orthodoxy of heretical teachings has always brought with it the fruit of a development in doctrine.  Nearly every dogmatic definition has come when a particular teaching was challenged.  At first glance however, the feast that we celebrate today, the Immaculate Conception, appears to be an exception to this rule.  As the 19th Century emerged, many in the Church called for a dogmatic definition of the privilege of the Immaculate Conception.  By the middle of the Century, Pope Pius IX began consulting theologians and convoked a “council in writing” asking bishops around the world about the possibility of its definition.  The response was overwhelmingly positive and in 1854, he issued the Bull Ineffabilis Deus which solemnly proclaimed that “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” Despite its relatively recent history and the elevation to a Feast Day and Holy Day of Obligation, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is little understood today.

When Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he was merely declaring something that the Church has believed from the beginning.  It wasn’t as if he suddenly realized the Church believed this.  It was always believed, but without a direct challenge to its orthodoxy, the Churched lacked some of the necessary clarity to explain how it fit into the deposit of faith.  In other words, it was always a part of the deposit of faith—that which the Apostles left us—but how it connected to the other truths of the faith still needed to be worked out.

We find seeds of the Immaculate Conception throughout Salvation History, beginning with just after the Fall of Adam and Eve when God promised not to abandon mankind but that He would send them a new Adam and a new Eve (Gn 3:15).  The woman and her offspring (a prediction of the virgin birth) will gain ultimate victory over the Serpent by crushing his head and will enjoy enmity with the Evil One.  This enmity, according to John Paul II, is “a hostility expressly established by God, which has a unique importance, if we consider the problem of the Virgin’s personal holiness.  In order to be the irreconcilable enemy of the serpent and his offspring, Mary had to be free from the power of sin, and to be so from the first moment of her existence.”  In other words, enmity means that the devil could have no power over Mary at any point of her existence.

Likewise, we catch a glimpse of the Immaculate Conception during the Annunciation.  The angel Gabriel in his greeting addresses Mary as “full of grace.”  This strange greeting is the name that she possesses in the eyes of God.  The name that God gives is the essence of the person (like Peter being the rock upon which the Church was founded) and so Mary is truly the one who is full of grace.  The Greek word kecharitomene is often translated as “full of grace” but it is more nuanced than that.  It is in the passive participle and is more accurately translated as “made full of grace” to indicate the gift that God gave to the Virgin Mother.

With such strong Scriptural support for the Immaculate Conception, why did it take nearly 1800 years for the Church to declare it as binding dogma?  Using both the liturgy (the law of worship is the law of belief—lex orandi, lex credenda) and the writings of the Fathers of the first millennium it is clearly among the things that the Church believed.  But before it was to be defined, it needed to be better understood.

Ss Ann and Joachim with BVM

The first obstacle was coming to a deeper understanding of Original Sin.  Because of Adam’s transgression, Scripture speaks of all of us as “born in guilt, in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:7).  But rather than seeing Original Sin as something merely tacked on to human nature, the Church came to understand it as a lack.  Specifically it is a lack of the seeds of eternal life or sanctifying grace.  The removal of sanctifying grace also brings with it other effects on human nature such as concupiscence.  In order for one to be “free from the stain of Original Sin” she would need to be conceived with sanctifying grace.

Providentially, we can begin to see what the Holy Spirit had in mind when He waited so long.  Nearly all the philosophical anthropology of man in the 18th and 19th C rejected the idea of Original Sin—it was society that somehow corrupted man, not something that is a result of his fallen state.  In other words, it became widely believed that every man was immaculately conceived.  By declaring that only one such human person was born that way, the Holy Spirit was speaking truth not just about Mary but about mankind.

Once the doctrine of Original Sin was better understood, the main theological problem that needed to be explained is related to St. Paul’s dictum that “all men have sinned” and in need “of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:12,17).  What the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proposing was actually two things.  The first is that somehow Mary was exempt from the “all” men who have sinned.  Secondly it would also appear that because of this exemption, she was not in need of the “gift of justification.”

To explain the exemption, we must first acknowledge that the Supreme Authority has the power to offer exemptions to universal laws in particular cases.  So that when St. Paul says that all men have sinned, he is acknowledging a universal law and like all universal laws there can be exceptions.  The Immaculate Conception means that Mary is the singular exception to this law.  This is why the Church has always seen in Esther a type of Mary.  She alone among all the Jews was to escape the edict of King Ahasuerus that all the Jews in his kingdom must be killed.

If Mary was without Original Sin then it seems on the surface that she did not need a Redeemer either.  This question was the most difficult to address because as a true daughter of Adam, she was still in need of justification.  To explain this, Blessed Duns Scotus developed the idea of her redemption being preventative rather than restorative.  He said that “The Perfect Redeemer, must in some case, have done the work of redemption most perfectly, which would not be, unless there is some person, at least, in whose regard, the wrath of God was anticipated and not merely appeased.”

Blessed Duns Scotus is saying two very important things here.  First is that there are two ways of “saving” someone from falling into a hole.  The first is to rescue them once they are in the hole.  The second is to keep them from falling in beforehand.  He also says that a perfect deliverer would have done both.  A more perfect redeemer is the one who not only rescues mankind from the effects of sin once they are in them but also preserves from falling altogether.

This approach to explaining doctrine is a favorite of St. Thomas and he calls it “fittingness.”  I have also found it a powerful tool to use in order to open Christians (Catholic and non-Catholic) up to important theological truths.  With respect to the Immaculate Conception, it is fitting that Our Lord’s act of Redemption is so powerful that it could redeem at least one member of the human race before she fell.  It also points out how everything we believe about Mary points back to Jesus.  To take away the Immaculate Conception is ultimately taking away the greatness of Jesus’ redemptive act.

The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed this teaching about Mary saying, “Redeemed by reason of the merits of her Son and united to Him by a close and indissoluble tie, she is endowed with the high office and dignity of being the Mother of the Son of God” (Lumen Gentium, 53).  But in the fallout from the Council there has been a movement to de-dogmatize the Immaculate Conception in an attempt to be more “ecumenical.”  The argument goes that belief about the Immaculate Conception is not necessary for salvation so therefore it is relatively unimportant.is based on a false understanding of the idea of hierarchy of truths.

The Catechism says that “In Catholic doctrine there exists an order or hierarchy of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith” (CCC 90).  Cardinal Schönborn in his introduction to the Catechism is quick to point out that “the ‘hierarchy of truth’ does not mean ‘a principle of subtraction,’ as if faith could be reduced to some ‘essentials’ whereas the ‘rest’ is left free or even dismissed as not significant. The ‘hierarchy of truth . . . is a principle of organic structure.’ It should not be confused with the degrees of certainty; it simply means that the different truths of faith are ‘organized’ around a center.”  In other words, the idea of a hierarchy of truths is that there are certain beliefs around which all other beliefs orbit.  These other beliefs support the belief in the core truth.

The truth around which the Immaculate Conception orbits is the true humanity of Jesus.  In order for the Son to become man, He must take on human flesh and be born of a woman (Gal 4:4).  This means that in order for Mary to be a true mother, she must provide Jesus with all that a mother normally gives to her children, namely her flesh.  What happens if her flesh is fallen?  Then Jesus too would inherit a fallen human nature which is an impossibility for God.  God could not take to Himself something that was sinful.  Yes, He could miraculously intervene but then the flesh no longer comes from the woman and she is not a true mother—just an incubator.  But the One who was like us in all things but sin, is a true man and like all men born of a woman.  All of this makes clear why the Immaculate Conception matters—it protects the true humanity of Jesus.  Take away what we believe about Mary and our faith in Jesus begins to crumble.

The Deposit of Faith is truly a seamless garment—tug at any string, no matter how seemingly inconsequential it is, and it falls apart.  Tug the string of the Immaculate Conception and the garment of our faith will be left in tatters.