Why Do We Pray to Mary?

Since Catholics pray to Mary we’re sometimes accused of mariolatry, or the worship of Mary.  Yet nothing could be further to the truth.  Everything that begins with Mary always ends with Jesus, and so it is with prayer as well.

We pray to the Virgin Mary because we want her intercession.  Whenever we pray to Our Lady we are in essence asking her to pray for us, and with us, to her Son.  Could we skip Mary and go straight to Jesus?  Yes.  But this is a mistake.  We ask our family and friends to pray for us, so why would we not ask our Heavenly Mother to pray for us?  I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get down here.  So there’s no way I’m going to deprive myself of the help of the most powerful intercessor in the Church!

Praying to Mary doesn’t take anything away from Jesus.  In fact it honors Him, because now instead of just one person praying to Him (us), there’s two (Mary and us).  It also honors Jesus because He gave Mary to us as our Mother.  When we pray to her, we are honoring His command to take her into our homes/hearts (Jn 19:26-27)!  But when we don’t allow her that role in our lives, it is we as her children who suffer.  Like any good mother Mary loves us and wants to help.  But she can only help as much as we allow her to.  So the more we make her a part of our lives, the more she can help lead us to Jesus.

I like to think of it this way.  Mary is seated at the right of Christ (like Queen Bathsheba seated to the right of her son King Solomon in 1 Kings 2:19).  I go to her with a request, and she and I both turn to her Son with my request.  Then, knowing His divine will perfectly, she turns back to me and dispenses the appropriate and necessary graces to do His will.  Then we both turn back to Christ in thanksgiving, since it is only because of Him that those graces are there to be given.  Could we ignore Mary and only talk to Jesus?  Yes.  But she’s right there next to Him so that would be insult to both the King and Queen.

The bottom line is that Mary loves us and wants to help.  The more we “behold our Mother” (Jn 19:27), the more she can work in our lives.  Mary’s will was, and is, in perfect conformity with the will of her Son – so therefore like her Son, she desires the good for us more than we ever could for ourselves.  Let us not deprive ourselves of so great a Mother and Advocate!

Pray for us O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ!  Tota tua…

See Also: Why Bother with Mary?

St. Francis de Sales On Living For and Loving God

Today the Church celebrates the life of St. Francis de Sales.  If you’ve ever read anything by him (he’s most famous for Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God), then you’ve experienced his infectious love for God.  It’s amazing that hundreds of years later his words still have the power to make readers fall more in love with the Lord!  That being said, rather than another post about St. Francis, it seemed more fitting to simply let the saint speak to you directly through quotes:

In His great love, Jesus is always pursuing our hearts…

• “Behold this divine Lover at the gate, He does not simply knock, but stands knocking; He calls the soul, come, arise, make haste, my love (Song 2:16), and puts his Hand into the lock to try whether He cannot open it.”

And the more we come to know His love for us, the more we desire to love Him…

• “When the soul sees her God wounded by love for her sake, she immediately receives from it a reciprocal wound…And we, seeing the Savior of our souls wounded to death by love of us, even to the death of the cross, how can we but be wounded for him, but wounded with a wound as much more dolorously amorous as his was amorously dolorous, and a wound as great as is our inability to love him as much as his love and death require?”

And Jesus always responds to our desire to love Him more by giving us the ability to do so…

• “For the measure in which our heart dilates itself, or rather lets itself be dilated and enlarged, and does not deny the void of its consent to the Divine Mercy, in the same measure the Divine Mercy always pour into it, sheds over it, and increasing and ever increasing inspiration under which we also increase, growing more and more in divine love”

Love of God and a life of prayer then help teach us to place God’s will above our own…

• “Our free will is never so free as when it is a slave to the will of God, nor ever so much a slave as when it serves our own will.  It never has so much life as when it dies to itself, nor ever so much death, as when it lives to itself”
• “The indifferent heart is as a ball of wax in the hands of its God, receiving with equal readiness all the impressions of the Divine pleasure; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God, and placing its affections not upon the things of God but upon the will of God who wills them”

When we have died to ourselves we are then able to joyfully embrace all the Lord sends us…

• “Look at tribulations in themselves, and they are dreadful; behold them in the will of God, and they are love and delights…In truth, love either takes away the hardship of labor, or makes it dear to us while we feel it”
• ” God has given [crosses] to you with His holy hand; receive them, kiss them, love them.  My God!  They are all perfumed with the dignity of the place from which they come “

I hope you will meditate on some of these quotes because they are so rich!  We have so much to learn from St. Francis de Sales, and it’s my most fervent prayer that we will come to know him better and let him teach us to love God as he does!

For a more autobiographical post on St. Francis de Sales, check out The Patience & Perseverance of A Saint

Getting to Know Your Guardian Angel

Today, October 2nd, the Church celebrates the feast of guardian angels. Some think of angels as make believe, or only for children, but Scripture makes it clear they are real. There are many occasions where angels do God’s bidding: for instance, Gabriel at the Annunciation, or Raphael with Tobit, or Michael in the book of Revelation, or angels ministering to Jesus at Gethsemane. There are also many times in the Old Testament where unnamed angels do God’s work (especially in Genesis and Exodus).

Perhaps more importantly for us, though, we have guardian angels. Jesus told His disciples, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven” (Mt 18:10). Though in this context Jesus is talking about children, we all have guardian angels. The Church has believed this from the beginning (see Acts 12:15) and continues to teach it today. In fact, back in the 50s Pope Pius XII reminded us, “Each one of us, even the poorest of the poor, has angels watching over him. The angels are glorious, pure and splendid, but they have been given to us as companions along the way of life. They have the task of watching over you all, so that you do not stray away from Christ, your Lord.”

God has given us guardian angels to help us get to Heaven, to Him! Opus Angelorum tells us that our guardian angels are charged with the task to provide each one of us with:
1) Assistance in the Adoration of God
2) Assistance in the Contemplation of the Word of God
3) Assistance in the Imitation of the Crucified Savior
4) Assistance in the Mission and Office in the Church

God endowed angels with intellect superior to man. Further, our guardian angels have seen God(!!) and have been serving Him faithfully from the beginning! What more could we want in a guardian angel?

Talk to your guardian angel. Get to know him/her (angels are pure spirit, and so don’t have gender, but it’s generally helpful to think in terms of him or her, especially if we want to build a relationship). Ask for help. God gave you a guardian angel for your benefit! But just like with God, the more you cooperate with your angel the more he can do for you. So today, take a little time to thank your guardian angel for all he’s done and to get to know him a little better!

A Deeper Understanding of the Mass

Since the changes to the texts of the Mass are rapidly approaching (I can’t believe Advent only about 2 months away!) now seems like an ideal time to look a little more closely at the Mass itself.

The Form
The Mass has two main parts: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  Why these two parts?  Because the Church follows the example Jesus gave her at Emmaus.  You probably remember the story of Jesus appearing two disciples right after His resurrection, though they don’t recognize Him.  Confused about all that has happened, Jesus patiently explains it to them.

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself. So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, but they constrained Him, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent.” So He went in to stay with them. When He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight (Luke 24:27-31)

In the Mass, we follow the pattern Jesus set here.  We begin with the Scriptures, then have the Word of God explained further for us in a homily (which finishes the Liturgy of the Word), and then we celebrate the breaking of the bread, that is, the Eucharist.

This is why our Mass is so amazingly similar to the Mass of the early Christians – because we’re just following Jesus’ example.  Descriptions of the Mass from St. Justin Martyr in the 2nd century, from St. Hippolytus in the 3rd century and from St. Cyril in 4th century are so close in form to our Mass that I can’t recommend enough checking it out for yourselves (Mike Aquilina’s The Mass of the Early Christians is great, or you could also go straight to the sources and read the saints’ primary texts).  It will give you goosebumps!

It’s incredible to think that for nearly 2,000 years the Mass has had a rough form of: confession/contrition for sins, alternating verses between the congregation and the celebrant (i.e., the Psalms in our Mass), the reading of Scripture, a homily, an offering/donation we make to the Church, prayer intentions, a sign of peace, the consecration and finally the distribution of the Eucharist.  And so each time we go to Mass we’re sharing in a Tradition that is truly ancient!

The Eucharist
The Mass is the “source and summit of Christian life” (according to the Second Vatican Council) because it is the highest form of worship.  It is where the Church, and we as individuals, give the greatest glory to God as we remember and make present Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice.  And it’s also where we are most fully united with Him since the Eucharist makes possible a participation in His very divinity!

St. Paul was very careful to ensure the words of institution, which Jesus established at the Last Supper, would be passed down. He wrote:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:23-25)

Jesus’ words are very explicit – not only here, but also in John 6 in His famous Bread of Life discourse.  Jesus is telling us that we are to eat His Body and drink His Blood.  Not symbolically, not figuratively, but literally. “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day’” (Jn 6:53-54).  (For more on this check out my post Why the Real Presence Matters)

This literally understanding has been the teaching of the Church from the very beginning.  The early Church Fathers are unanimous in their belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Less than 100 years after the death of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Antioch explains, “Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”

Likewise, St. Justin Martyr just a little over 100 years after Christ’s death wrote, “For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.”

The Eucharist is the heart of the Mass.  If we don’t properly understand it, if we can’t explain it to others, then we’re shortchanging ourselves and our relationship with Jesus.  The Eucharist is the greatest expression of Christ’s love (and I say this because it’s the flipside of His sacrifice on the Cross – the two are so intimately connected they’re like the two sides of one coin) and we must always be striving towards a deeper understanding of this love so that we may experience it more fully, and then return it more fully.

Further Study
Since changes are coming, now is the perfect time to learn more about the source and summit of our lives as Christians: the Mass!  The small amount of time it takes to read a book on the subject will pay dividends not only in this life as you attend Mass, but for all eternity as well.  Some of my favorites include:

For brief introductions to the Mass: The How-To Book of the Mass and The Mass

For more on the Eucharist: The Lamb’s Supper, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, Worthy is the Lamb: Biblical Roots of the Eucharist

May the Lord bring us all to deeper understanding of His great gift: the Eucharist.  And may that same Eucharist bring us all to everlasting life, where the veil around His presence will fall and we will finally see our Lord face to face.