Tag Archives: Our Lady

Our Lady’s Army

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Given the present turmoil, devout Christians can’t help but wonder whether the End is near.  We are probably not alone in this consideration as history is replete with Saints and Sages who thought the same thing.  Our Lord, on the other hand, sought to curb such speculation when he declared that “of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone” (Mt 24:36).  The speculation is not without its fruit however.  Wondering can lead to wakefulness—”Watch ye therefore, because ye know not what hour your Lord will come” (Mt 24:42).  While we should close the door on conjecture, Our Lord wants us to always live as if the End is right around the corner. 

Like the Apostles in the Garden, our battle is to stay awake.  The Satanic Sandman wants to lull us to sleep.  His battleplan is to make us woke so that we won’t be awake.  Knowing how he does this will enable us to enter the fray with eyes wide open.

Staying Awake

In a very real sense we could say that it is of the nature of Man to be a warrior.  When the Enemy entered the Garden and caused the Fall of Adam and Eve, the battle was begun.  It may have been the Fall of Man but it also marked the battle lines by which Satan’s downfall would occur.  Turning first to the Serpent, God said “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed” (Gn 3:15, DR translation).  Just as God in creation separated the light and the dark, He made a permanent enmity between the Serpent and his offspring and the Woman and hers.  The Woman of course is not the Eve of the Old Creation, but the Eve of the New Creation, Mary (c.f. John 2:4, 19:26-27 and this entry).  Once having set the commanders in the two armies, God set forth the foot soldiers—Satan’s demonic and human minions and the blessed angels and Jesus’ beloved disciples. 

In his True Devotion to Mary, St. Louis de Montfort offers and important reflection on what this enmity.  He says it is the only enmity that God has made; He did not merely permit it, but positively created it.  It would be total, indomitable and eternal.  The great Marian Saint says:

God has never made or formed but one enmity; but it is an irreconcilable one, which shall endure and develop even to the end. It is between Mary, His worthy Mother, and the devil—between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and instruments of Lucifer. The most terrible of all the enemies which God has set up against the devil is His holy Mother, Mary. He has inspired her, even since the days of the earthly Paradise, though she existed then only in His idea, with so much hatred against that cursed enemy of God, with so much industry in unveiling the malice of that old serpent, with so much power to conquer, to overthrow, and to crush that proud impious rebel, that he fears her not only more than all Angels and men, but in some sense more than God Himself. It is not that the anger, the hatred, and the power of God are not infinitely greater than those of the Blessed Virgin, for the perfections of Mary are limited, but it is, first, because Satan, being proud, suffers infinitely more from being beaten and punished by a little and humble handmaid of God, and her humility humbles him more than the Divine power; and, secondly, because God has given Mary such a great power against the devils, that, as they have often been obliged to confess, in spite of themselves, by the mouths of the possessed, they fear one of her sighs for a soul more than the prayers of all the Saints, and one of her menaces against them more than all other torments.   

This battle isn’t just between Mary and the Devil, “but between the race of the holy Virgin and the race of the devil; that is to say, God has set enmities, antipathies, and secret hatreds between the true children and the servants of Mary, and the children and servants of the devil. They do not love each other mutually. They have no inward correspondence with each other. The children of Belial, the slaves of Satan, the friends of the world (for it is the same thing), have always up to this time persecuted those who belong to our Blessed Lady, and will in future persecute them more than ever…”

If we are to battle on God’s side, under the Standard of the Cross, we must submit to Christ and His Battle Commander.  We must join Our Lady’s army, and because the war is total, we must do so through a total consecration.  That is the only way because God has declared it as such.  When John describes the War in Heaven (Rev 12), Our Lady once again leads her offspring into battle.  For St. Louis de Montfort, this enrollment, especially in the End Times becomes crucial.  These Apostles of the End Times will be the only ones who are able to remain faithful because “the devil, knowing that he has but little time, and now less than ever, to destroy souls, will every day redouble his efforts and his combats. He will presently raise up new persecutions, and will put terrible snares before the faithful servants and true children of Mary, whom it gives him more trouble to surmount than it does to conquer others.”

Living as if the End is Near

If we are to live then as Our Lord commanded, that is, as if the End is near, then we should live consecrated to Our Lady as part of her army.  This consecration also enables us to see the weapons that Satan uses.  Once we realize that this enmity is total, the war absolute, we realize that there can be no compromise between the two armies.  We may actively pursue defectors from the Enemy’s camp, but they must come on Our Lady’s terms.  We can make no compromises with the world or provision with the flesh (Romans 13:13-14) because those are the Enemy’s landmines.  We must take upon ourselves the yoke of Our Lord from the hands of Our Lady.

The Devil’s battleplan is always the same and we would do well to know the diabolical rhythm.  Before he unleashes hell on believers in total persecution, he denies the ontological character of the enmity.  He creates structures and systems that promise a false peace; always false because it goes against reality as God has constructed it.  “Peace” that consists in compromise with the devil, the world and the flesh.  But “Christ must be all in all”  and until His reign is complete we must continue the fight.  We must reject the false messianic hopes of things like Marxism, One World Orders, and technocracy because they are diabolical landmines.  This is his chosen tactic for now, that if we yield, will lead to total persecution.  Those in Our Lady’s Army can never compromise.  It is Our Lady sitting at Our Lord’s right hand (Ps 45:9) that will protect us and obtain for her children true wisdom that never yields to false promises. 

The Second Greatest Saint

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Over the course of 13-plus centuries, the Roman Canon (what we call Eucharistic Prayer I) remained virtually unchanged and is practically the same prayer that was written during the time of Pope Gregory I with one notable exception—the addition of the name of St. Joseph.  On November 13, 1962, Pope John XXIII inserted his name into the prayer, an act that was carried forward into the other three Eucharist Prayers of the Mass of Paul VI and officially completed by Pope Francis in 2013.  The recurrence of the number 13 conjures up October 13, 1917, the date of the last apparition at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun.  Just prior to the sun hurling towards the earth, the children, according to Lucia, “beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun. St. Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands.” The message is obvious—Jesus wants to bless the world through St. Joseph—and confirmed when he was added as a direct liturgical intercession.  We are entering period of great emphasis on reliance upon the great saint and human father of Jesus. 

Next to Our Lady, he is the greatest and most powerful saint in heaven.  The time is ripe for this great power to be unleashed upon the Church.  To receive all of the blessings that God wants to bestow upon us through the hands of St. Joseph we must first grasp his greatness.  This starts with a proper theology of St. Joseph, a Josephology if you will, that puts forth the reasons for his greatness.

There are good reasons for his pre-eminence, reasons that will be easy to grasp once we make clear an important principle.  St Thomas said that “an exceptional divine mission calls for a proportional degree of grace.”  This principle is most clearly affirmed with Our Lady.  All of her greatness, her fullness of grace, her immaculate conception, her glorious assumption and queenship, is because of her predestination to Divine Maternity.  She is great because God made her so and He made her so because she was eternally predestined to be linked to the Incarnation of the Son.   When God determined to become Incarnate, He also determined who His Mother would be.  She is most perfect then because it was God Who is infinitely wise that appointed her and equipped her for her indispensable role in the Incarnation.  Jesus could have appointed other Apostles, He could have chosen a different precursor than John the Baptist, but He could not have chosen another mother.  She is not alone among men in being tied directly to the Incarnation such that it quite literally was determined to depend upon her.  This is where St. Joseph comes in.

St. Joseph was predestined to serve as the earthly father of Jesus Christ.  Many theologians hesitate to call him “foster father” precisely because a man becomes a foster father of a child because of some accident, but St. Joseph was eternally predestined and therefore given a father’s heart despite, as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says, nature never making him a father.  It was, according to Bossuet, the same hand that gave “Joseph the heart of a father and Jesus the heart of a son.”

The Mission of St. Joseph

Joseph’s mission then is twofold.  The first is the one that has most often been attributed to him as being in support of Mary’s maternity.  It is this regard that he is often given an “also run” status as though he were merely a figurehead or just tagging along.  Probing a little deeper however we are forced to conclude that there is more than initially meets the eye.  He is, first and foremost, the protector of Mary and not just in the physical sense.  He is also the guardian of both her chastity and perpetual virginity.  St. Joseph as validly married to Our Lady had conjugal rights over her.  Nevertheless through grace he was able to not only refrain was marital relations, but to be her “most chaste spouse.”  Likewise, as head of the Holy Family, he had authority over a sinless wife.  In order to exercise that authority God would have given him the grace proper to such a high calling.

The second aspect of his mission is likewise revelatory in that he was also, not only responsible for protecting Our Lord, but also to contribute to His human formation.  This mission would have carried with it a proportional amount of grace.  He was also in a very real sense the savior of the Savior by protecting Him from harm, especially when Herod sought His life.  Like with Our Lady, St. Joseph would have exercised authority over Our Lord requiring that he be not only infallible in his commands, but impeccable in his example. 

The Privileges of St. Joseph

Given this exceptional role in the Incarnation, St. Joseph would have been given a relative fullness of grace that enabled him to carry out his mission.  This is why many saints and theologians throughout history have posited that he was completely sanctified.  When this happened however we can only speculate.  We know that it was not at his conception as Pius IX said the Immaculate Conception was a “singular grace” and utterly unique to Our Lady.  Some have said it was during the nuptials that he exchanged with Our Lady mostly because that is the last moment at which such a redemptive act on God’s part would have occurred.

In a homily given for the Feast of the Ascension, the aforementioned “Pope of St. Joseph”, John XIII, claimed that that it may be piously believed that St. Joseph was bodily assumed into heaven at the time of our Lord’s ascension.  This belief finds it foundation in Matthew’s assertion that at the resurrection of Jesus many saints came forth from their tombs and entered the holy city (c.f. Mt 27:51-53).  Reasoning that he being the highest of the saints and thus worthy of a first-fruits share in the Resurrection and Ascension saints such as Bernadine of Siena and St. Francis de Sales have claimed that Joseph indeed lives in heaven with both body and soul united.  The latter even went so far as to say that “We can never for a moment doubt that the glorious saint has great influence in heaven with Him Who raised him there in body and soul—a fact which is the more probable because we have no relic of that body left to us here below!  Indeed it seems to me that no one can doubt this as a truth, for how could He Who had been so obedient to St. Joseph, all through His life, refuse him this grace?” (quoted in Fr. Donald Calloway, Consecration to St. Joseph).

Building on the logic of St. Francis de Sales of Jesus’ obedience to St. Joseph, we can begin to see why St. Joseph is such a powerful intercessor.  That obedience did not cease but remains because Jesus remains forever his son.  This power has lain dormant for many centuries, but now is the time for the silent witness of Christ to finally be heard.

The Heresy of Scientism

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Modern science has brought us many wonderful things, but we would be naïve to think that it has made us wonder-full.  In fact, our obsession with the empirical has left us wonder-less because we mistakenly believe that everything can be explained.  We can, of course, explain how a lot of things in nature work.  The problem comes in when we accept these merely mechanistic explanations as the only explanation.  Our forefathers may have lacked the empirical skills that we have, but they most certainly were wiser because they were able to order all things.  Like ourselves, these wise men and women were obsessed with answering the question why, but unlike us they were unsatisfied with just knowing how nature worked.  They wanted to know why it worked the way it did more than how it worked.  For all their supposed backwardness they knew that nature could have worked differently, but it worked the way it did for a reason.  They sought to discover the reason first.  To use Aristotelian language, they wanted to understand formal and final causes and not just material and formal causes.

Scientism

The overemphasis on the how without any concern for the why has led to the heresy of scientism.  Notice that I called it a heresy and not just a philosophy.  It is a heresy because it rejects the truth that there is a universe.  It looks only at objects, but never objects as they fit into the whole.  He loves the trees but knows nothing of the forest.  To borrow from Chesterton, the scientistic heretic is “moved to discuss details in art, politics, literature…He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe…Everything matters—except everything.”  It is a heresy because it ignores the religious implications of Nature.  Religious because God is its Creator and He has written into it His-story.  Implications because it is just Creation and never meant to be worshipped.  It is a sign, a sacrament if you will, that reveals to man His Creator.  In fact, creation exists for man so that He might come to know the Creator.  That is its purpose and so we must read it that way.  Just as in the Book of Scripture God has revealed Himself, so too in the Book of Creation.

Like any heresy, there is always a temptation to overcorrect and reject scientistic explanations whole cloth.  But when we do this we are creating a false opposition between the scientistic and sacramental standards.  Both creation and Scripture have the same Author telling the Truth in different forms.  Just as it is foolish to remove Scripture and only “find God in Nature”, it is likewise imprudent to diminish the story that God is telling through Creation.  Aristotle thought all four causes were necessary to come to a more complete understanding of things.  The medievalists may have been wiser because they were able to focus on the formal and final causes, but they were limited in their understanding of the material and efficient causes and therefore were not as wise as they could have been.  We, on the other hand, have at our disposal a great power to more fully plum the depths of the material and efficient causes.  In short we have an opportunity to be wiser than our predecessors, but only if we avoid the heretical pitfalls we are speaking about here.

Our Lady, the Morning Star

An example will help to illustrate what this might look like.  The Litany of Loreto describes Our Lady as the “Morning Star”.  This moniker came about because of the wedding of the book of Scripture with the book of Creation.  The Church has long interpreted a verse from the Song of Songs (6:9) as descriptive of her: “Who is She that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?”.  Turning towards creation we find that there is, in fact, a  “star” that is found in the sky just prior to the rising of the sun.  This “star” reflects the light of the sun and suggest the rising of the sun.  Our Lady, as the truest reflection of the brightness of her Son, always points to His coming (c.f. Jn 2:5). 

Some might accuse Catholics of over-spiritualizing things by doing this until we actually look at this empirically.  The planet Venus, which is named for a Roman goddess of fertility (could there be anything more fertile than a Virgin Mother?), has its orbit inside of the Earth’s orbit.  This means it is always relatively close to the sun in the sky.  When it is on one side of the sun it appears to follow the sun and brightens in our sky just after the sun sets.  When it is on the other side of the sun it precedes the sun in our sky so that it brightens the sky just before sun rise.  One can readily see how this one aspect of the book of nature perfectly describes Our Lady.  Apropos of our impending Solemnity, Our Lady is a Heavenly Body.  Nevertheless, even if she is closer to the sun, she still remains inside our orbit as one of us.  She always reflects the “Light of the World”, but especially in times of darkness.   

We could go on, but you get the point.  In fact, the more we wonder about this one particular aspect of creation, the deeper we could make of the connections.  Clinging to the complentarity of nature and Scripture enables us to see this in its fullest meaning.  If nature is nothing but the random collision of atoms, then you won’t care about why Venus is the way it is.  If you think nature something completely doomed for destruction, then you won’t care what it has to say.  But if you take the authentically Catholic both/and approach then you will be led deeper into the awareness of how close God is to us.