GOD’S WONDERS IN THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

BLOCK ROSARY PRAYERS - A CONTINUATION OF EARLY CHURCH LIFE

[An expanded version of the homily given at the Eucharistic Celebration for the Congress of Block Rosary Crusades in Ahiara Diocese holding at Holy Ghost Parish, Omega, Obizi, Ezinihitte Mbaise LGA, Imo State, Nigeria, September, 21-23, 2018]

Introduction

With utmost humility I thank God Almighty for this wonderful occasion in which I have been invited to be a part of by His infinite grace. In the same vein I thank the Chaplain of the Block Rosary Crusades in Ahiara Diocese, Fr Matthew Nwoko for granting me this great opportunity to preach on this wonderful occasion in which the children and lovers of the Blessed Mother Mary in Ahiara Diocese have gathered to celebrate and honour Her with a solemn congress of worship, prayers and devotions.

I see this moment as a great privilege for me because it is such an occasion that I love and crave to be a part of in my spiritual journey in this life. I usually long and pray to be afforded the opportunity to add my little voice to the marvelous eulogies [in the sense of blessings or eulogetos] of this peculiarly spiritual creature of God Almighty called the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In fact, I consider myself a slave of the little girl from Nazareth. I follow the tradition begun by St Louis Marie De Montfort, and greatly espoused in our own time in the life and ministry of our Holy Father of blessed memory, Pope St John Paul II. Both Sts. Louis Marie De Montfort and John Paul II declared themselves TOTUS TUUS, meaning a total gift to the Blessed Virgin Mary. With them I also declare myself a TOTUS TUUS, although with small “t’s”. So it is most fitting for me to give a homily on our Blessed Mother Mary on this wonderful day in our diocese.

Congress of Ahiara Diocesan Block Rosary Crusades

If I may ask: why are we gathered here today? What shall we be doing staying together on this haloed ground of Holy Ghost Parish Omega Obizi, Ezinihitte Mbaise LGA, Imo State, Nigeria these few days? The answer is very obvious. We are here to celebrate our diocesan Block Rosary Crusades Congress, 2018. This congress is a gathering of those who are devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary through the praying of the Holy Rosary in their families, compounds, kindred and villages[i]. It is a gathering of those who come together every so often especially in the evening of every blessed day to pray the Holy Rosary around their squares and compounds. The different Block Rosary Crusades centres throughout the diocese of Ahiara Mbaise have chosen these three days to come together at Holy Ghost Parish Omega Obizi to pray and share their joys and faith in the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary through the praying of the Holy Rosary together.

In the cities of the developed world where there are hardly compounds, kindred and villages, communities are conceived and constituted around blocks. That is to say, rather than have compounds, kindred and villages as it is perhaps the case in communities of developing countries like Nigeria; modern communities are often defined as blocks. A modern-day block is a rectangular or square, or, at times, a triangular-shaped community cut out by the interceptions of four, or, sometimes, three streets. The buildings and the people living within such a cut-out space are said to be living in one block.

At the inception of the Holy Rosary Movement following the Apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917, people of the same blocks were encouraged to launch prayer crusades with the praying of the rosary around their blocks as their contribution in the war against atheistic communism and other sins that were undermining Catholicism and Christianity in the world. This was how the Block Rosary crusades movement was born at the beginning of the 20th century. Praying the rosary every evening in public squares, neighborhoods and around people’s blocks gradually became popular among Catholics around the world as a way to fulfill the desires and instructions of Our Lady of Fatima.

Block Rosary Prayers and Early Church Spirituality

But beyond obeying the instruction of Our Lady of Fatima, our gathering here, as members of the Block Rosary Crusades of Ahiara Diocese, is in fact a continuation of the life of the early Church. The spirituality of the early Church was nursed and nurtured in the laps of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The earliest spiritual exercises of our faith were based on two or three main planks, namely, the Paschal Mysteries, meaning, the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, charity works and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary the Mother of Jesus Christ. Some of our early Christian prayers were about our Lord Jesus Christ on the one hand and our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the other. Such prayers as “the Psalter of the Lord” [Our Father], “the Angelic Psalter [later called, the Ave or the Hail Mary],” and “We Fly to Your Patronage” are among the earliest Christian prayers on record.

As the Acts of the Apostles bears eloquent witness [Acts 1:14]; the first Christians used to gather around the Blessed Virgin Mary to pray to Jesus. This is the origin of all Marian devotions including the Block Rosary. In fact, the Block Rosary Crusades and all other Marian devotions and movements are undoubtedly a continuation of this intense prayer life of the early Church with and around Our Lady the Mother of Jesus Christ who is God made man. The Church of the Apostles or the real Apostolic Church of the Fathers of our faith persevered in gathering with and around the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, or, to pray to her for intercession and protection, and to invoke her name in prayer even long after she was dead and taken into heaven in the glorious mystery of the Assumption.

Beginning of Marian Devotions in the Early Church

It all began long before the stories of the New Testament could be put into writing. In a way, devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary began piecemeal before the public ministry of Jesus. It was such devotion alive and thriving in the very early [or, even, pre-Christian] communities that accounted for the stories of the birth of Jesus and his early life in the New Testament. Without such pre-existing [already existing] devotion to the Mother of Jesus, there would never have been stories of the conception and infancy of Jesus included in the writings of the New Testament. The stories of the prehistory [that is, stories of Jesus before he was born] and birth of our Lord Jesus Christ were already being told and had become well established in Christian communities before they would become a part of the New Testament writings. The infancy narratives or stories or Jesus’ early life, were in fact the established beliefs of the early Church who eventually wrote them down as a part of their sacred writings in the New Testament.

Every Christian must know that whatever is read today in the New Testament writings was long accepted, believed and celebrated in the ancient Christian communities that existed before the New Testament writings came into existence. It was those ancient heroes in the faith that eventually put down in writing the stories we read today as a part of the New Testament books. The stories we cherish today concerning the early life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her child Jesus were never thrown down from heaven. They were stories cherished and preserved by the members of the earliest communities of our faith who told them to the evangelists who put them down in writing as a part of the sacred writings of the New Testament.

Therefore, what the evangelists or sacred writers included as the annunciation of the Lord, the visitation of the Blessed Virgin to Elizabeth, the songs of Zachariah, the birth stories of Jesus, the prayers of Simeon etc, were undoubtedly a part of the devotional activities of some communities in the early Church who had become very active before the writing of the New Testament. There would never have been such stories included in the writings of the New Testament if such devotional activities were not already well established and thriving in the different communities of the early Church.

In the history of Christianity, it is action/worship/devotion that produces writing. It is not the other way round as some uninformed people are claiming today. It was not the Bible that produced the Christian faith and community. Rather it was the Christian faith in action - a faith that was already established; a faith that was being celebrated through worship and devotion whose stories and traditions became committed to writing as those we find in the Bible. This is very important for anybody who wants to understand Christianity and its writings.

God Positioned the Virgin Mary for Devotion

The accounts of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ in the New Testament demonstrate quite clearly that God the Father of Our Lord Jesus positioned the little girl from Nazareth, the Blessed Virgin Mary from the very beginning to be honoured, venerated and accorded a special place in the Church of all generations. This was exactly the way God Almighty set up the plan and story of human salvation. We can say with the full certainty of our faith that God Almighty set up the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, to occupy the place She does in the Church of all times. She is the Mother of everything created and redeemed by God.

It is of little wonder that the great Marian saint, St Louis Marie De Montfort describes the Blessed Virgin Mary as “the supreme masterpiece of Almighty God” [True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, nos. 5, 50]. The Blessed Virgin Mary is indeed the best human being God ever created! She is surely the “purest of creatures” as we sing in one of our popular hymns in her honour.

From the very beginning God chose this simple young girl to play a central and decisive role in bringing about human salvation, which is the restoration of the human person to his original state of glory. Like the usual way of God in the Old Testament, Mary’s special place would entail sorrows and honors as well. But from the very beginning God made Mary the object of universal veneration and honour.

The whole tradition of honouring and venerating the Blessed Virgin Mary began with the annunciation of the Lord Jesus Christ [Luke 1: 26-38]. Of His own free will and accord God the Almighty Father sent His chief messenger, the Angel Gabriel to visit a very little and an unknown young girl from a little known village of Nazareth in Galilee. The young Mary [alma in Hebrew/Aramaic], described in the Greek text as parthenos [virgin] and in Latin as Virgine, was, according to folklore, between 12 and 14 years of age when the Archangel Gabriel arrived to meet with her at the instruction of God almighty.

Having been born into a very conservative and strictly religious family of Joachim and Anne, the little girl from Nazareth at such a tender age of 12 or 13 years was in all intents and purposes a virgin both in the natural and spiritual orders. She was way too young and tender to have any knowledge of a man. And that is why the Greek translation of St Matthew’s original Hebrew/Aramaic word for Mary, namely, a young girl [alma], as Parthenos [virgin] is very accurate. The alma [young girl] from Nazareth was a virgin in every sense of the word. She was a perfect virgin in age, a perfect virgin in experience and a perfect virgin in spirit. She was eternally prepared by God to fulfill her maternal vocation of conceiving and bearing the Son of God as a perfect virgin.

Jewish Marriage During Virgin Mary’s Betrothal

It has become well established by bible experts that at the time of the conception of Jesus Christ, marriage was more or less a two-step process which was spread over one or two years. The first step or phase was the ceremony of betrothal or engagement, which was a formal exchange of consents by the two individuals concerned before some witnesses. This usually occurred when the bride-to-be was between 12 and 13-years of age.

Once this consent was publicly exchanged, the bride-to-be was legally bound to her husband-to-be from that moment on. The bond thus established by that public exchange of consent could only be broken or severed through a divorce process that was legal.

The second step or phase in the marriage process was the taking of the bride-to-be into the bridegroom’s home. This took place after one or two years of the public exchange of consent. It can be said that the Archangel Gabriel visited the little girl of Nazareth when she was between the ages of 12 to 14. That was the age-bracket the little girl from Nazareth was when she became the Mother of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit!

Douay Bible’s Version of Angelic Salutation

On encountering this little virgin girl of Nazareth, what did God’s chief messenger do? He literally bent over low and saluted her in the most reverential and obsequious manner an inferior would do to a superior. The chief messenger of God, whom the earliest Christian tradition assigns the most reverential title, “Archangel” or “Chief Angel” because of the greatness of the message he brought, sets aside all his heavenly glories, privileges and accolades as a chief messenger of God and salutes this formerly unknown little girl, Mary, thus: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women [DV].”

The Douay Bible Version’s [DV] presentation of this scene is absolutely fascinating because it presents Mary as if she was a heavenly being superior to the archangel himself. It puts the Blessed-are-you-among-women statement right into the mouth of the archangel. It is Archangel Gabriel who salutes the little girl with the Blessed-among-women statement before it will eventually recur in the mouth of Elizabeth.

In this Douay Bible Version’s rendering of the passage, God’s chief messenger, Gabriel hails the young girl from Nazareth as if she was his superior. And indeed she was and is still superior to the whole angelic order in the kingdom of heaven. In other words, the chief messenger of God, Gabriel, honoured and venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary, first, at the annunciation of the Lord, before any other creature would do so. The veneration of the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary was invented not by any human being but by the chief messenger of God himself who hailed her devoutly as “blessed among women” at the annunciation.

And this is exactly the conclusion of such great saints as St Bonaventure, who according to St Louis De Montfort says, “all the angels in heaven unceasingly call out to her: ‘Holy, holy, holy Mary, Virgin Mother of God.’ They greet her countless times each day with the angelic greeting, ‘Hail Mary,’ while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests.” [cf. True Devotion, no.8].

Reformation and Devotion to the Virgin Mary

Post-Reformation translations [that is, bibles published after the Protestant Revolt in the 16th century], operating with the spirit of their time, which is that of a complete loss of faith in religious devotions, adopted what is described today as a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” This is a mindset that believes, even though falsely, that some passages of the bible were tampered with and doctored to invent and promote devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the veneration of the saints in the Medieval Period. Some of the Protestant haters of the Blessed Virgin Mary erroneously claim that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and veneration of the saints were invented by the Papists [their derogatory name for Catholics] in the Medieval Period.

Working with such a faithless mindset and principle, the bibles of that period and thereafter chose to omit the key phrase of the annunciation: Blessed are you among women – the bedrock of The Douay Bible Version’s rendering of the message, which is the old English translation of the oldest translation of the Holy Bible in the Christian Church. This wonderful achievement that gave the early Church her first bible was accomplished by no other person than St Jerome, the first real bible scholar in the history of Christianity.

St Jerome was the first man to translate the bible from original Hebrew and Greek into a language that was understandable to the people of his time called common Latin. The name of that bible was Vulgate, meaning, common or vulgar [pidgin] language bible, in the sense that the language of that version of the bible was within the reach of the common people of the time who were seen as unruly, untrained and uneducated, hence, they were termed vulgar [vulgate]. It was that Vulgate bible that was translated into the old English Language in the Douay Bible and used throughout the Catholic world for more than a thousand years before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation-inspired bibles claimed that the Blessed-are-you-among-women statement first credited to the Archangel Gabriel in St Luke’s Gospel by St Jerome’s bible translation did not have enough text or source supports from ancient documents. That is to say, those latter-day translators of the post-Reformation bibles claim that they cloud not find enough ancient texts containing and supporting the Blessed-are-you-among-women-statement in the mouth of the archangel.

But in our own view, the post-reformation bibles’ claim here is without any merit whatsoever. It is a claim that forgets a known fact about writing and documentation of human traditions. It is a known fact that traditions predate writings that document them. What any writing does in essence is to document traditions which existed long before their being written down.

It is an invalid and in fact an unreasonable position to hold that a tradition begins to exist only when a document is found written about it or testifying to its origin and existence. This was the meaningless claim propagated by some Protestant bibles and teachers. Blessed-are-you-among-women statement in the mouth of Archangel Gabriel as testified to by the Douay Version of the Bible is a long tradition that must be respected no matter the ages ascribed to its source documents.

However, the post-Reformation scholars do not claim that St Jerome made the statement up and put it in the mouth of the archangel. No. That is not their argument. Rather they acknowledge that there are some ancient texts testifying to the reality of the statement in the mouth of the archangel. But their argument is that those ancient textual testimonies that could add to what they describe as the authenticity and credibility of the statement are not many enough and not old enough. As a result, their decision is to deny that the Archangel Gabriel uttered that statement before the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Once again the judgment of the post-Reformation bible translators is without merit whatsoever. It is arbitrary, faithless, prejudiced and totally unreliable because it goes completely against the way religious practices and devotions evolve. In almost all organized religions, religious practices and devotion do not arise from the testimonies of many individuals or documents. Religious devotions arise from encounters of one individual or a few with a divine being or messenger and their subsequent communication to a few. This communication is gradually accepted and believed by many. And that was how the encounter St Luke records for the Blessed Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel happened. The encounter was initially and first and foremost between the little girl from Nazareth and the heavenly messenger called Gabriel. Gradually individuals and communities, beginning from Elizabeth and her household at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, came to accept and believe the little girl’s experience and story.

What is necessary in the last analysis is the number of communities that gradually accept and believe the encounter and its story in the earliest period but not how authentic the original encounter was. That is to say, in the last analysis, only one text is true and authentic for a particular religious practice or devotion. And that is the text of the original encounter with the divine agent.

In other words, a particular religious practice or devotion does not need to be testified to by many documents or texts for it to be true and authentic. It only needs one authentic testimony and that is the testimony of the original encounter. It was such a testimony that both the evangelist Luke and later translator, St Jerome, relied upon in including the Blessed-are-you-among-women statement as coming from the mouth of the archangel Gabriel.

However, this line of reasoning did not occur to the bible translators that carried out their work after the Protestant Reformation. Working with prejudice and a faithless attitude that falsely claimed that ancient Catholics manipulated some bible passages to further their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, they chose without any sound reasoning to deny that the archangel uttered the Blessed-are-you-among-women statement to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The preferred translations of the after-Reformation bible scholars go thus: “Rejoice, so highly favoured, the Lord is with you” [JB]; “Hail, favoured one! The Lord is with you” [NAB], “Peace be with you! The Lord is with you and has greatly blessed you” [GNB]. These greetings whether in their longer form as found in the Douay Bible Version [DV] or in the abbreviated form that became the norm after the Reformation, are attempts to translate the Greek and Latin statements: (Greek) chaire, kecharitomene, ho kurios meta sou eulogemene su en gunaizin: (Latin) Ave, gratia plena: Dominus tecum: Benedictatu in mulieribus.

As can be recognized from their translations, post-Reformation bibles [Bibles published after Martin Luther’s initiated rebellion in the 16th century] greatly minimize the wondrous and mysterious encounter between the Blessed Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel, which had resulted in the archangel acclaiming the young girl of Nazareth as BLESSED AMONG WOMEN. This was in line with the hostile frame of mind they were operating with at that time. The whole Reformation crisis was more or less a massively unjustifiable attack against the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. The so-called Reformers or the radical Protestants of the period nursed a terrible hatred of the Blessed Virgin Mary down to the marrow of their bones for no just cause. As a result, they set themselves to completely destroy all her devotions in the history of the Church.

Marian Devotion After the Reformation

Any Catholic that reads the Bible with a radical Protestant mindset will miss out on quite a lot about the rich traditions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God that abound in ancient Catholic Bibles represented by the Douay Version or The Vulgate. All bibles published after the Protestant Reformation, whether for Catholics or for Protestants, suffer a little bit from the anti-devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary bias that became fashionable from the Protestant Reformation onwards. From that period on, bible reading took a very dangerous turn to the worse. It is yet to recover completely from this 16th century disaster!

The Reformation thinking created a culture that falsely claimed that the early Church falsified, manipulated and distorted ancient Christian tradition in order to propagate and promote devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary and veneration of the saints. As a result, the post-Reformation period or the period after the Protestant revolt’s attitude to Bible reading was to cast suspicion on whatever they thought was supportive of ancient doctrines of the Catholic Church such as the Real Presence in the Eucharist, devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and veneration of the saints.

However, what this kind of attitude failed to appreciate was the fact that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and other pious doctrines of the Church preceded any writings in the New Testament. Devotion to the Blessed Mother of God had become the established practice and tradition of the early Church before the writing of the New Testament. What became written down as the New Testament were the stories of the early Christian communities that had become long established in the various communities founded by the apostles and disciples of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The evangelist, St Luke, at the beginning of his first work, The Gospel According to Luke, pointed to the existence of the various traditions of Jesus’ stories that had long been established in the various communities before the writing of the gospel accounts. Those stories and traditions were held by the different communities that had come into existence long before the New Testament books would be written. It was from such traditions that St Luke had carefully investigated to draw up his own accounts and tell his story of the event of Jesus [Luke 1:1-4]. From St Luke’s point of view, these earliest Christian communities created the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and veneration of the saints. This is why all these are a part of the earliest creeds of the Church.

It was not the New Testament texts that created the Christian communities but rather the Christian communities created their confessional texts as the New Testament. The Catholic Church was well established before the New Testament writings came into existence. At the writing of the New Testament the sacred writers had so many texts and documents originating from the various confessional communities the apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ had established and presided over before they died. The New Testament writers made use of many of such documents as sources for their writings. But a good many others of such confessional texts were not within their reach and were left out in the final analysis.

It makes sense to hold that at the time of St Jerome’s translation work, the statement in Luke 1:28: “Blessed are you among women” had so many supports in ancient texts that the premier translator of the Bible adjudged it authentic and truthful enough as to include it in his translation of St Luke’s Gospel. He had so many of such ancient confessional texts available to him that enabled him to make the judgment that crediting the archangel with the Blessed-are-you-among-women statement was trustworthy enough as to be included as a part of the Gospel of St Luke. His judgment in this regard served the universal Church well for nearly 1,500 years before the Protestant Reformation. However, sixteen hundred years after, the Reformation Protestant said that the texts supporting it were no longer sufficient. Hence they discarded and removed it from the passage of Luke 1:28.

Church Devotion to Mary as Part of God’s Salvation Plan

Right from the first greeting of the chief angel Gabriel, the little girl, Mary, is put firmly on a pedestal that is unheard of and way beyond anything accorded to any other creature since the beginning of the world. It was in the eternal design of the Almighty God that the little girl Mary be honoured and venerated in His Church. The honour given to Mary is not an offense to God but a part of his eternal design and intention in choosing her for the divine vocation of serving as the mother of His only begotten son.

By the angel’s greeting, the young Mary is immediately made to be a different creature whose privilege goes way beyond that of any other creature. Let us examine it ordinarily. The chief angel sent directly from God comes, hails and bends over low to salute a little girl called Mary. Does that not suggest something special about this young girl? Of course, it does. The young Mary is indeed very special. She enjoys a special relationship with God and the angels. This is what the latter statements will confirm.

Then let us examine the initial words the chief angel says to her. Mary is filled with grace. That is to say, she has all the blessings of God abiding within her. In other words, she is specially favored by God who is permanently abiding in her. Some of the early Christian traditions depended on by St Jerome and recorded in the first Bible ever translated from Hebrew and Greek in the fourth and fifth centuries; The Vulgate, and later translated into English Language as the Douay Version, feature the chief angel of God, Gabriel, describing the Blessed Virgin Mary as specially blessed among other women, which means, Mary is completely different from all other women. All these are qualities Mary does not share with any other creature. And they were announced to her from the mouth of the chief messenger of God who was personally sent to her by God. Who will ever doubt that a person with such unheard-of privileges should deserve to enjoy the honour and veneration of the less privileged creatures?

The little girl Mary understood clearly what was happening to her and around her. She understood the full meaning and implication of what Archangel Gabriel was saying to her. Right from that very first moment of her encounter with the messenger of God, she understood clearly that the archangel was revealing to her what she had not previously known or thought about herself.

As a result, Mary’s response was to become inwardly jittery, afraid, troubled and wondering what the archangel’s words might mean to her and her entire existence. The archangel immediately understood the little girl’s predicament, internal agitation and uncomfortable situation and sought to reassure her by telling her not to be afraid of her new vocation.

But then the archangel went on to make more startling revelations about the mysterious nature of this specially chosen young girl:

Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favour. Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob forever and his reign will have no end [Luke 1:31-33 JB].

Listening to these unheard-of messages, the little girl Mary appeared to have heard enough and burst out into a very poignant question:

How can this come about since I am a little girl without any knowledge of a man, [in other words, a virgin]? [v 34 JB]

Describing herself as a little girl was exactly the truth. A little girl without knowledge of a man is a virgin in all cultures of the world. The Greek interpretation of her state as that of a virgin is absolutely correct.

Mary was a little girl of about 13 to 14 years of age. At that point in her life she was hardly thinking of motherhood. But that was exactly the message the archangel was giving to her. She was soon to become a mother even without prior knowledge of a man. That was the mysterious message that was very frightening to the little girl of Nazareth. And such would be frightening to anyone who receives it. From the natural order it is impossibility. A virgin conceiving and bearing a child by bypassing the natural process of conception is at the heart of the mystery of human redemption and the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

However, the little girl’s mild emotional outburst to the messenger of God could not bring her much relief as the archangel piled on with his revelation of the unheard-of privileges God had bestowed on her:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. Know this too; your kinswoman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God [vv 35-37 JB].

Finding herself completely overmatched, overwhelmed and overawed with what the chief angel was revealing to her about herself, the young girl had no other line of questioning than to surrender to the unmatchable force that had enveloped her. She realized that she had been swept into the mysterious realm of God and had to surrender herself completely by declaring:

Behold, I am the handmaid [slave, handmaid, servant, doulos] of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word [v 38 NAB].

The Virgin Mary and Her Bouquet of Privileges

Let us try to unbundle or unpack the mysterious privileges the chief messenger of God announced to this little young lady from the village of Nazareth.

The little girl, Mary of Nazareth is:

1. Full of Grace [gratia plena]

2. The Lord is with Her [First abode of the Immanuel]

3. She is blessed among women

4. She found favour with God

5. She will conceive in her womb and bring forth a son

6. She will call the name of her Son, Jesus

7. Her son Jesus shall be great

8. Her son Jesus shall be called Son of the Most High

9. The Lord God shall give her Son Jesus the throne of His ancestor David

10. Her Son Jesus shall be king over the house of Jacob forever

11. Her Son’s kingdom shall last forever and shall not have an end

12. The Holy Spirit shall come upon the little girl, Mary

13. The power of the Most High shall cover the little girl Mary with his wings

14. The little girl’s Son, Jesus, shall be called the Son of God

15. Finally, the little girl Mary is given a special revelation on the pregnancy of Elizabeth who would give birth to John the Baptist, the forerunner of the saviour.

These fifteen special privileges granted to the Blessed Virgin Mary are all coming directly from God almighty to her. They are specially made for her. She is the only one qualified to have them. These previleges are not shared by any other human being. Mary enjoys them personally over and above any other creature including the angels, saints, the powers, the virtues, dominions, principalities of the heavenly kingdom etc. No other creature of God has been so endowed as Mary was and still is.

Let us briefly analyze a few of them.

Mary is full of grace. That is to say she is swallowed up, filled up and subsumed in the immensity of the divinity of God. Mary is gratia plena [completely filled up by grace]. The grace of God covers the little girl of Nazareth through and through and over and over again. She is layered over completely and covered from head to toe infinitely by God’s grace. St Louis De Montfort explains the Blessed Virgin Mary’s situation best when he says, “She was full of grace when she was greeted by the Archangel Gabriel and was filled with grace to overflowing by the Holy Spirit when he so mysteriously overshadowed her.” [Cf. True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, No. 44]. No other creature is so privileged like the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Mary abides with and in God. That is to say, she is with God always. Emmanuel - God is with us, first and foremost applies to her. She is the abode and embodiment of the Emmanuel. God does not depart from her even for a single moment. She is totally in and with God. She lives in God who follows her around every movement of her life. She is never outside the presence of God. God is with her everywhere she goes

Mary is blessed among women. She is totally different from all other women dead or alive. The key Greek word used to describe her peculiar nature here is eulogetos [blessed, which derives from eulogia [eulogeo], meaning, good speaking, fair-speaking, praise, eulogy, glory and blessing, etc.]. This word, eulogetos [Blessed] will be used again to describe her peculiar nature in a few other places such as the encounter between the Blessed Virgin Mary and her kinswoman Elizabeth in v. 42. Also, in Luke 1:68, the priest, Zachariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, uses the same eulogetos [Blessed] to describe the God of Israel. But in such other places as Mt 21:9; 23:39 eulogetos [Blessed] is ascribed to the son of David who comes in the name of God and in 25:34 to those blessed by Jesus’ father.

The use of this special word here is meant to signify what Mary shared with God almighty and the Son of God she was to conceive as well as the saints of God. The little girl of Nazareth called Mary, shares and partners God in God’s divinity and supreme holiness. She does the same with God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who is equally her own son. Mary also shares this supremely sublime quality with the saints in heaven even while she was still alive and still on earth. No other creature shared that much with God and the saints of God. The little girl from Nazareth is utterly unique among all creatures as a result of how the word applies to her.

The little girl of Nazareth, Mary, found the favour of God. The simple meaning of this revelation is that God Almighty has a very special interest in this little girl and showers on her His mysterious favours. Mary is absolutely God’s favorite. St Peter says in Acts 10:34 that God has no favorites. But in the little girl of Nazareth God clearly found His favorite. Mary of Nazareth is the favorite of God! No other creature was so favored by God as to become God’s special creature and His favorite.

As a result of these special privileges of hers, God confers on the little girl of Nazareth the unheard-of vocation of becoming the Mother of His only Son. God grants her a special and unheard-of mysterious way of conceiving his son. The virginal conception of the Son of God by the little girl of Nazareth is infinitely beyond any privileges that could be accorded to any other creature. That is to say, God treats Mary as a very different creature of His. Mary was specially made by God for the vocation of conceiving and giving birth to His only Son!

God as the real Father of the Son to be born of the little girl announces beforehand the name to be given to His son. He is to be called Jesus [Joshua – meaning, God saves]. By so doing God Almighty exercises His paternity over His son, Jesus. While the Blessed Virgin is the real Mother of Jesus, God almighty is His real Father while Joseph is only a foster father.

Nos. vii - xi reveal the unimaginable authority and everlasting kingdom of the kingly Son to be born of the little girl from Nazareth. The ultimate implication for Mary was that by the birth of such a great Son she would also become the Queen Mother of all those who dwell in the everlasting kingdom of her Son. By ancient tradition a woman who gives birth to a kingly child becomes automatically a Queen Mother. Since Queen Mary’s Son reigns forever, Mary His mother reigns forever as Queen of all those ruled by her Son in both heaven and earth. Jesus as the everlasting King of kings means that the Blessed Virgin Mary is automatically the everlasting Queen Mother of queens.

xii. But this Queen Mother is unlike what had existed previously before her in the Old Testament. She is enclosed and covered up by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit abides in her and she is a special bearer of the Holy Spirit who has come upon her with her encounter with God’s chief messenger, Gabriel. Mary is so special to God that the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity overshadows, covers and protects her. She is that important to God that she is accorded such a mysterious privilege. If God regards the Blessed Virgin Mary this highly who are we not to accord her the simple honour of devotion?

xiii. For this special little girl, Mary, the infinite power of the Most High shall cover her completely. That is to say, she is perpetually under the protection of the infinite power of God. No other creature either in heaven or on earth has ever been granted such divine security and protection. Mary was absolutely a very special woman with the qualities of God all over her.

xiv. All these privileges of Mary are as a result of the fact that God chose her to be the Mother of His Son who is called the Son of God.

A little icing on the mysterious cake that is the revelation the archangel made to the little girl from Nazareth is the revelation to her of the six-month old pregnancy of her kinswoman Elizabeth. This shows how deeply embedded in the mystery of God that the little girl from Nazareth now participates in God’s intimate secrets. God and His angels confide in the little girl from Nazareth a closely guarded secret.

Mary from the very beginning was revealed as almost a divine woman deeply embedded in God and sharing the confidence and secrets of God.

Mary was the first to realize how different she had become after her encounter with the archangel. She noticed that her life had been completely changed. She realized that she had been sucked into the divine mystery and had to surrender her entire self to the mighty force of God by declaring herself as the slave [handmaid] of God. Declaring herself a slave and a servant of God was her sincere recognition of the enormity and immensity of the divine force that had taken hold of her and taken her in as His instrument.

Mary’s fiat: “Let it be done to me according to your will”, is the first recognition by the Blessed Virgin Mary that she had become an instrument in divine mystery. Initially she had been agitated and afraid of what was coming upon her. But at the end she mustered the courage to accept her destiny and vocation which was totally different from that of any other being ever created.

Earliest Church and Devotion to Virgin Mary

Mary and Elizabeth

The first outing the little girl from Nazareth would make after the mysterious annunciation was to the home of her cousin or kinswoman, Elizabeth. Following through with the information the Archangel Gabriel had given to her concerning the unexpected six-month pregnancy of Elizabeth, the little girl, Mary, now a completely new creature, who had become the perfect instrument of the almighty God, brimming with the infusion of the Holy Spirit, and enjoying the full protection of the Almighty power of the most high, stepped out and set out to meet with her kinswoman, Elizabeth.

It is important to note that Elizabeth, in this story, does not only represent herself and her fetus baby still in the womb, John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Savior, and her entire family. Rather she represents one of the earliest communities of the Church. So, her confession belongs entirely to the early Church whose birth was still a few years ahead and in the future.

It is important also to note that at the earliest period of the Church, there was hardly any centralized authority overseeing the affairs of the entire Church. The early Church, or the Apostolic Church, was not like the Church of today being run by inter-connected parishes, dioceses and the universal Church shepherded by the Vicar of Christ, the Pope, from the Vatican City Rome. No. The earliest Church was made up of small communities scattered around the eastern and western coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. They had only a loose connection to the central body in Jerusalem and Rome.

All of those little communities held strongly to some stories or traditions about Jesus Christ and his earthly family which were traceable to the time of the apostles. Elizabeth represents one of such communities whose stories and traditions the evangelist Luke had relied heavily on when he began to compile the stories we encounter in the Gospel of St Luke today.

In this special encounter with the little girl from Nazareth, Elizabeth hears the greeting of the Blessed Virgin Mary now full of grace and brimming with the Holy Spirit. She immediately notices some big changes occurring in her own life.

First, the child she is pregnant with “leapt in her womb” in full recognition of the very special woman that had come to their home. On her own part, “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” The leaping in the womb of the fetus John the Baptist and the Holy Spirit filling Elizabeth are all miraculous events resulting from what had previously happened to the young girl of Nazareth who had become the bearer of two persons of the Blessed Trinity, namely God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Elizabeth and the child in her womb were the first beneficiaries of these mysterious activities in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Realizing what had happened to her, Elizabeth, gave a loud cry and repeated word-for-word a part of the acclamation of the Archangel Gabriel, namely, that the little girl of Nazareth was indeed BLESSED AMONG WOMEN. But she added another BLESSEDNESS directed at the fruit of the little girl’s womb which is Jesus the Son of God which Mary had conceived through the power of God [Luke 1:42].

And finally Elizabeth closes her speech with yet another BLESSEDNESS to her little girl guest for having the faith to believe that the promise God had made to her would be fulfilled [v. 45]. That is, for Elizabeth, the little girl of Nazareth is blessed times. That is she is supremely blessed because she surrendered her will to that of the Almighty God.

The triple Blessedness of Mary in this encounter has a great meaning. It means that the little girl from Nazareth is perfectly blessed. The number “three” is the number of the Trinity and the number of perfection.

The key word here is the BLESSEDNESS [BEATITUDE] which the little girl of Nazareth, Mary, shares equally with the fruit of her womb. This BLESSEDNESS [eulogemenos from eulogetos – blessed] is exactly the same word which Zachariah in his prayers attributes to God: BLESSED BE THE LORD, THE GOD OF ISRAEL [Luke 1: 68].

This BLESSEDNESS, when applied to God, is of the highest spiritual quality. Only God is blessed in the real sense of the world. But there are some human sharers in this supremely divine quality of Blessedness. Different creatures of God share in various degrees of God’s blessings.

But the little girl from Nazareth shares this quality far and above every other blessed creature of God. She is supremely and perfectly blessed. Mary shares this sublime quality both with God and with Jesus Christ his Son as well as with the saints of the Beatitudes [Matt 5:2-11].

This kind of BLESSEDNESS is the summation of holiness which embodies the essence of God. Only God enjoys full BLESSEDNESS which is His prerogative and essence. Mary therefore has both a share and a stake in God’s very essence and prerogative. She shares specially and greatly in God’s BLESSEDNESS.

Mary as the Theotokos [God Bearer, Mother of God, Mother of Yahweh]

Another deep revelation about the nature of this little girl from Nazareth is contained in the further exclamation of Elizabeth: “Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord?” [v 43 JB]. Elizabeth calls the little girl from Nazareth the MOTHER OF THE LORD.

As a faithful Jew whose husband is a holy priest taking his turn regularly in the sacrifice in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, Elizabeth would never venture to call God by His personal name, YAHWEH, which is forbidden to any observant Jew. She must call God with the substitute name provided for in the Old Testament; ADONAI; which is translated in Greek as Kurios and in English as, Lord. That is to say, Elizabeth, by calling the little girl from Nazareth “the Mother of the Lord” indeed called the Blessed Virgin Mary “MOTHER OF GOD.”

And here lies the root of the doctrine that Mary is God bearer [Theotokos]. As Mary is the Mother of the Lord, Mother of God and God bearer, devotion to her and praying to her is not just the natural thing to do, it is absolutely the necessary thing for all Christians. As the Bible calls her the Mother of God, which other creature on earth should be more honoured than her? She who conceives and bears God has God in her and must be honoured and venerated for that!

The truth is that in the earliest Christian communities represented by Elizabeth, the little girl from Nazareth enjoyed all these qualities – Most blessed among women, Mother of Israel’s Yahweh, bearer of the Son of God, Mother of the King in the line of David, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the very holy one enjoying perpetually the protection of the Almighty Power of God, Queen Mother, etc. That is to say, in that ancient community, the Blessed Virgin Mary received the highest honour after the Blessed Trinity.

The Blessed Virgin Mary was believed in that same communities to have been totally submerged in God’s overwhelming grace and was supremely blessed among all women. She is the Theotokos, God bearer.

No other woman that ever lived came anywhere close to the infinite divine qualities that were granted to this little girl from Nazareth. As she was believed to possess such Godlike qualities, she was honoured and venerated by the less endowed humans in those early communities. At least the God-qualities in her deserved to be venerated and adored by all humans. That was the most ancient thinking in our faith and it is still valid till today!

Virgin Mary Unveils Her Mysterious Self

At this same encounter with her cousin or relative or kinswoman as different bibles may choose to translate the Greek word “suggenis”, Elizabeth, the little girl from Nazareth makes a startling revelation of herself. This was besides what she had already told the archangel about herself. She confessed to the chief angel of God, Gabriel, that she was the humiliated and humbled handmaid and the slave of God. That was her state as a mere human being before the Almighty power of God.

However, having been transformed by the events of the annunciation, the little girl from Nazareth now reveals to her elderly relative or cousin the content of her completely transformed heart and being. The little girl from Nazareth opens up to her cousin Elizabeth! And what is seen there is that the little girl from Nazareth has her entire life - body and soul filled completely with joy and gratitude to God as a result of what God had caused to happen to her. That is to say, the little girl had passed from a state of fear and agitation about the message that was brought to her to a state of joy and gratitude.

Mary is a joyful and a grateful woman because of her encounter with the heavenly messenger and the revelation God’s messenger had made to her about her vocation as the Mother of God. This can only be the work of the Holy Spirit that had taken complete hold of her and taken over her entire life. Joy and gratitude are a part of the fruits of the Holy Spirit [Gal 5:22].

The basis of Mary’s joy and gratitude is because God almighty bent over low and looked way down to encounter and raise up the little girl of Nazareth who describes herself as the lowly and humiliated [tapeinosin] slave/handmaid [doules] and showered on her personal life wonders unheard-of in the history of the created order. God accomplished in the little girl of Nazareth a very marvelous thing [megalos] and for that reason she is joyful and grateful.

In response to what God had done for her and in her, Mary blesses the holy name of God with words of praises that both recall and surpass in both mystery and excellence the very similar ones the holy woman Hannah had praised God with after presenting her child, Samuel, for the services of God at the shrine of God in Shiloh before the priest, Eli [1Sam 2:1-10].

The little girl from Nazareth knew full well the wonders God had accomplished in her life. She won the admiration and adoration of the chief-angel of God, Gabriel. She was declared as possessing and embodying the essential quality of God, namely, God’s blessedness. She was gifted with the Holy Spirit and God’s almighty protection became her unassailable security outfit. She was declared the Mother of God, the Queen Mother of the Son of God, the Queen-Mother of the Messiah-king, who would sit on the throne of David and reign over the human race forever etc.

Mary knew also the consequences of the wonders [megala] God had done in her life. Hence she says that the wonders God had accomplished in her life would automatically translate into, and, in fact, compel all generations both of the present and of the future to acknowledge her as BLESSED, and call her out for the same purpose.

By such a declaration, the little girl from Nazareth acknowledged that God’s essential quality which she had become her own embodiment, namely, God’s Blessedness, which she had received would not remain a private thing any longer. It would not just be for her personal spiritual nourishment. Rather, the blessedness which she had become a part of is something every generation of human beings would recognize, acknowledge and benefit from. The little girl’s blessedness is of service to all generations. All generations that acknowledge her blessedness would gain from her abundance of God’s quality of Blessedness.

Mary’s Blessedness

It is worthy of note that the highest point of Mary’s song of praise is her statement that all generations will call her BLESSED as a result of the mighty work [megala] of God in her. The word she employs here for this BLESSEDNESS is totally different from that employed initially by both Archangel Gabriel and Elizabeth, her kinswoman, to address her new situation. Both the archangel and Elizabeth had employed eulogemenos/ eulogetos for Mary’s BLESSEDNESS.

In the early New Testament time, this kind of blessedness was more or less on the ordinary level of praise. It was used in a way to describe somebody who is fortunate and favoured in a way as to receive something special either from the divine or from ordinary people. In that sense Mary was considered to have been supremely favoured over and above all other women.

But Mary, in her song of praise, employs for her BLESSEDNESS [Makariousin – from Makar]. According to her, all [future] generations will call her BLESSED [makariousin]. The very important question for a true understanding of Mary and her devotion in the Church centres on the meaning of this word she chooses to describe herself in this particular context. All the while, others have been describing her as blessed but in rather ordinary sense of the word. But when she decides to disclose herself truly in the presence of her cousin, Elizabeth, she prefers a different word altogether. She employs a particular term different from the ones the archangel and Elizabeth had favoured and employed.

The question is: does the Blessed Virgin Mary employ the word BLESSED in the sense of eulogemenos or in the sense of makariousin? Some bible experts would insist that the two words mean one and the same thing, that they are synonymous.

Admittedly it seems true that in some instances in the bible the two terms do appear to mean the same thing. Such instances may include Mt 5:3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11; 11:6; 13,16; 16,17; 21:9; 23:39; 25:34; Mk 11:9,10; 14:61 Lk 1:28; 42;2:34; 6:20, 21, 22; 7:23; 10:23; 11:27; 13:35; 14:14,15; 19:38; 23:29; 24:50; Jn 12:13; 13:17; 20:29.

But in this particular instance, especially with regard to this particular hymn of the Blessed Mother Mary, BLESSEDNESS does seem to have an added layer of meaning that is different from the ordinary meaning contained in eulogemenos.

First, it is Elizabeth who appears to introduce this special meaning of Makar. When Elizabeth encountered the visiting little girl from Nazareth, she cried out with the words, Blessed [eulogemenos] are you among women… [Luke 1:42]. This is the primary layer of meaning on the word blessed. That is, for Elizabeth, the young little girl from Nazareth was special, different and fortunate among other women. She was the fortunate and praiseworthy one among the womenfolk.

However, when Elizabeth is talking to Mary in the context of the little girl’s faith in the promise God had made to her, she changes the beat and does not use the ordinary Blessedness [eulogemenos] again. Rather she employs another layer of meaning, one that could be considered the highest form of the word [v 45]: “Blessed [makaria] is the one who believes that what God had spoken to her would be fulfilled”.

For Elizabeth, the type of blessedness represented by makaria appears to be as a result of the little girl’s surrender to the will of the Almighty God [fiat]. That is, for Elizabeth, the little girl from Nazareth acquires the divine quality of blessedness by her self-surrender to the will of God expressed through Archangel Gabriel.

As if to second her cousin and kinswoman Elizabeth, the little girl from Nazareth appears to take a cue from her. She makes a very conscious decision to continue approvingly in the line of thought introduced by Elizabeth. She does not employ the word eulogemenos [ordinary blessedness] to describe the present state of her life after expressing her self-surrender to the will of God [fiat], and accepting the divine proposal of the archangel. Rather the little girl from Nazareth emphasizes her peculiar BLESSEDNESS [divine blessedness] and prophesizes that all generations to come will recognize and acknowledge the divine quality she now has.

So, there must be some reason why the word BLESSEDNESS changes in the mouth of Mary on this particular occasion. After all, this is the only time in the bible that Mary opens up and tells us a little bit about what is going on in her personal life. This is where she lets us into her world and lets us know what is going on internally in her life. This is the only time she describes herself in this manner. So, it must be taken with utter seriousness.

Divine Blessedness of Mary

The question is: Why would Mary change the already known word for Blessedness [eulogemenos/eulogetos] to [makariousin-makar] in describing the wonders God has accomplished in her life? The answer is MAKAR– BLESSEDNESS. It is this particular word that truly brings out the true meaning and implications of the marvels [megala] she proclaims that God had accomplished in her life.

In ancient Greek language, MAKAR has a different quality from eulogemenos-eulogetos. According to the Classic Dictionary of Greek Language, the root of makariousin - MAKAR or MAKAIRA means “blessed, happy, [a quality] properly of the gods.” Makares means the blessed one, i.e. the gods.”[ii] This type of BLESSEDNESS belonged entirely to the gods in ancient times. Only divine figures were qualified to be described with makaria-makar.

The little girl from Nazareth describing herself as BLESSED with the word MAKAR truly acknowledges that God has given to her, the once lowly and humiliated slave of His, some qualities only possessed by divine beings. In other words, Mary is saying; “I am not just blessed among women; I am also blessed among divine beings!” Even without saying it, Mary is hereby stating that she is endowed with divine qualities. In a way she proclaims with this word that she is in fact a divine figure. And here lies the root of devotions to her in the early Church.

In some of the earliest communities preserving the tradition of Elizabeth, Mary was almost treated like a divine being. And with all the divine privileges God gave to her, it is difficult to arrive at a different conclusion other than that the early Church reached by instituting her devotion and veneration in the Church. Mary is a creature endowed with divine qualities. She does acknowledge that much herself. She has divine blessedness!

If a created person with such qualities as the Virgin Mary is not adored and venerated, who else deserves to be? What the Archangel Gabriel reveals about Mary qualifies her for all veneration and adoration. And when you add also what the Blessed Virgin Mary reveals about her inner life, it becomes utter foolishness if any created being refuses to honour, venerate and adore her!

St Matthew’s Earliest Community and the Virgin Mary

It is not entirely certain that the earliest church of Matthew the Evangelist knew about the tradition [stories and practices] of high devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary that was available to the earliest Church of St Luke’s community. Rather, from its vey beginning St Matthew’s earliest community was in possession of the tradition [stories and practices] emphasizing the virginity of the little girl from Nazareth, her interaction with the Holy Spirit and what she suffered initially as a consequence of her divine motherhood [Mt 1:18-25].

As a result of this uncertainty, St Matthew’s Gospel misses out completely on the traditions of the annunciation and the encounter between Mary and her kinswoman Elizabeth in St Luke’s Gospel. It jumps over all that and focuses for the beginning of its story of Jesus on the condition of the little girl from Nazareth at her betrothal to Joseph, her would-be husband.

According to this tradition, the cause of the pregnancy of this little girl from Nazareth which the tradition in St Luke had ascribed to her interaction with the Archangel of God, Gabriel, and her overshadowing by the Holy Spirit was not quite known to the general public. The little girl did not disclose or share her story with the public. As it is repeatedly noted in the gospel, the little girl from Nazareth had the reputation of keeping everything to herself and in her heart [Luke 2:19, 51]. Mary was a very private person.

What was generally known by all was that the little girl at the age between 12 and 13 had consented to marry a man called Joseph from the lineage of King David of ancient times. But her would-be husband, Joseph, was yet to embark on the second phase of the marriage process which was to take the little girl into his home as his wife.

But before Joseph could embark on this second phase maternal pregnancy inexplicably appeared on the little virgin girl to the surprise of all. As a result, Joseph was caught in-between doing what the Jewish law prescribed for such a woman, which would result in the little girl being publicly humiliated, and perhaps stoned to death, or, doing some other thing else which is not stated in the account. Joseph mercifully opted for something more humane for the little girl. He would divorce her quietly and hand her over to her parents to do with her whatever they wanted.

In the earliest community of St Matthew’s Gospel, the story line was that pregnancy suddenly appeared on the young girl, Mary, without any concrete explanation as she was yet fully unmarried when her maternal situation changed. There is a sense in the story that some in the community believed that the little girl’s pregnancy had come through the Holy Spirit. But how that came about, hardly did anybody appear to know.

One can only wonder today what this little girl went through as suspicion on the cause of her pregnancy persisted, and as Joseph her would-be husband hesitated to decide on what to do with her. Obviously this was a terrible period marked by calumny and disparagement for the would-be Mother of the Savior. For several months before the final decision of Joseph to take her to his home and keep her, Mary might have endured some terrible period of persecution in the hands of her kinsmen and women who did not know what was going on in her private life.

However, a situation similar to that of St Luke’s community plays out in St Matthew’s as well. The angel comes to the rescue of Mary in a very difficult and unclear situation. An unnamed angel [perhaps, Gabriel, also] appears to Joseph in a dream and says; “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her” [Mt 1:20 NAB]…. When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. He had no relations with her until she bore a son and he named him Jesus [vv 24-25 NAB].

The earliest Church of St Matthew’s Gospel based its devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary partly on the vision of Joseph about her virginity and partly also on Joseph’s own practice of not having any sexual relations with Mary both before and after the birth of her child, Jesus. The virgin conception of Jesus Christ is at the heart of devotion and veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the earliest Church of St Matthew’s Gospel.

First Christians and the Little Mother from Nazareth

The two gospels [Matthew and Luke] that possess the earliest traditions [stories and practices] of the Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary also give us samples of the little communities that might have begun these traditions in the first place. According to these traditions, some of the original individual devotees to the Blessed Virgin Mary were Elizabeth, the wife of Zachariah, and the Mother of John the Baptist, who was devoted to her as the Mother of God [Theotokos], and Joseph, her would-be husband who was devoted to the virginity of the Mother of Jesus.

However, there were also groups who manifested early devotion to the little girl from Nazareth especially in company of her newborn divine child. Both the angelic choirs and the shepherds who received their midnight message on the birth of Jesus are caught up in the adoration of both the newborn child and her parents [Luke 2:8-20].

At the presentation of the divine child in the Temple, the little pro-Christian temple community led by Simeon and Anna manifests some ancient devotion to the little girl from Nazareth as a very special and divine woman among all women. The elder man, perhaps, a priest called Simeon, acclaimed as righteous and devout, who has the Holy Spirit present in him [Luke 2:22], happens to be in the Temple during the ceremony of the presentation of the divine child Jesus. He immediately recognizes the divinity of the infant Jesus. Taking the divine infant in his arms he blesses God by acknowledging the child as “salvation,” “revelation” and “glory” [Luke 2:30-31].

But in a dramatic show of devotion to the little-girl-from-Nazareth-turned-the Mother of the divine child, the righteous Simeon addresses her thus: “Behold this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be contradicted and you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” [Luke vv 34-35 NAB].

It is not possible to fully unpack the devotional contents of this address of Simeon to the new mother of the divine child. But the fact that he singles out this young lady for this special revelation and address, shows nothing but his recognition of her special quality among all the people present at the occasion including her foster husband Joseph. And the fact that Simeon reveals to Mary the sufferings she was to undergo as the mother of the controversial divine child has been at the foundation of the church’s ancient devotion to Mary as the Mother of Sorrows.

It is not possible that the holy and righteous Simeon who enjoyed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit did not know what he was talking about, or, did not believe in what he revealed to Mary about her vocation as the Mother of Sorrows. The truth is that the holy Simeon believed his revelation to the Blessed Virgin Mary and made it known to her in devotion and humility. Later Christians who built part of their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the revelation of Simeon see him as their ancestor in the devotion to the little girl from Nazareth who suffered most tremendously in her contribution to human salvation.

The case of Anna as a member of the earliest pro-Christian community at the Temple of Jerusalem at that time is not quite clear. But one thing seems certain. When she thanks God for the child and speaks favorably about him to “all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem” [v 38], in the presence of Mary and her husband Joseph, she is elevating their status before the people. While such may not amount to devotion to Mary in the way it is practised by the Church today, it shows that Anna recognizes that there is something special about the child and her parents that changes the course of the history of the people of Israel. This recognition itself is a form of devotion.

Earliest Christians and Devotion to Virgin Mary

Shortly after the ceremony of presentation in the Temple the new family of Joseph, Mary and the newborn child, Jesus, fled the impending persecution that was aimed at destroying the newborn child by King Herod. And this renders cold the trail of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary that was getting stronger and stronger as the tradition developed in the earliest period of the Church.

For more than a decade nothing would be heard and recorded about Jesus and his family now spending time in Egypt as refugees. Fortunately Matthew did record what happened when their time in exile in Egypt ended. They returned home to the land of Israel after the death of their persecutor-in-chief, King Herod [Mt 2:19-23 [NAB].

Thanks to the tradition of the earliest Church retained in St Luke’s gospel, after the exile of the holy family in Egypt we encounter a different Mary, the Mother of Jesus. We now have a Mary who is no longer the little girl from Nazareth. She is now fully grown up as a woman perhaps transformed by the hardships they faced both at home and in exile in Egypt.[iii] The boy Jesus has now clocked twelve years of age and is obligated to fulfill his duties as a Jew by making pilgrimages back to the Temple of Jerusalem at least three times a year.

At the Passover celebration when Jesus was twelve years old, the family went to Jerusalem to fulfill their Jewish obligations. But after the feast, Jesus got lost as he slipped back to the Temple to listen to the Rabbis and argue with them. Mary, his mother, went toe-to-toe with his foster father Joseph as they searched for their lost son. And when eventually they found him among the wisest in the Temple, it was Mary who took the initiative to question the young lad vigorously and eventually obtained his compliance and obedience and finally took him back home in Nazareth.

Mary demonstrated full control over the divine child Jesus [Luke 2:41-53 NAB]. The early Church saw this as Mary possessing the power to sway Jesus and persuade him to do her bidding. For the early Church developing and building the tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, the incident at the Temple demonstrated the power of the Blessed Virgin Mary to persuade Jesus through entreaty and prayers.

Gospels’ Communities and Devotion to Virgin Mary

Present all over the pages of the gospels are little voices demonstrating how the earliest communities behind the gospels, the earliest church so to speak, manifested some devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. One or two examples will suffice to demonstrate the attitude of the earliest church to the Mother of God. In chapter two of St John’s Gospel, we read about the story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee [John 2:1-12 NAB]. At this special wedding Mary the Mother of Jesus was already there.

The condition under which Mary the Mother of Jesus was already there is not stated. She seems to have been there on a special capacity, perhaps, as a custodian or the over-all supervisor of the affairs of the wedding party. Some experts suggest that the wedding couple might have been Mary’s relatives or people who enjoyed some special relationship with her. If Mary did not have a special role at the wedding, perhaps, it would not have been possible for her to notice that their wine had run short. She would have noticed the shortfall late like any other guest at the wedding perhaps only when there was no more wine to serve the guest. But she noticed the problem well ahead of time and tried to arrest the situation.

But Jesus and his disciples were clearly invited. As the story goes, when the wine for the wedding ran out completely, the Mother of Jesus took the initiative and reported the matter to Jesus, who, after hesitating a little bit, did the wish of her mother. And subsequently the six stone jars filled with water were turned into good wines. After this miracle described as the first in Jesus’ public ministry [and he did it at the request of his mother], Jesus, his mother, brothers and his disciples went down to Capernaum and stayed there only a few days [v 12].

For the earliest Church, the story of Jesus and Mary at Cana in Galilee had a powerful devotional implication for the Blessed Virgin Mary. It demonstrated Mary’s intercessory powers. Mary could get Jesus to do her bidding even when there is some initial hesitation. The implication was and still is that Mary’s persistence in prayer can change things for the better for people in need. The original pro-Christian community at that wedding ceremony who received the wonderful miracle of Jesus through Mary’s intervention and supplication might have looked on her with reverence and devotion.

Also, the story reveals Mary as a part of the travelling companion of Jesus. That is to say, she was at times a member of Jesus’ disciples. She travelled back to Capernaum with them and spent few days in their company.

The Blessed Virgin Mary playing a double role as Jesus’ Mother and his disciple throws a great light on the incident in Luke 11:27-28 and similar other incidents across the gospel. “While Jesus was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out and said to him “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” Jesus’ reply is a little confusing: “Rather blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” Other similar incidents where Jesus appeared to have preferred his disciples to his mother and relatives include Matthew 12:46-50 and Mark 3:31-35.

From the early Church the fathers have warned that these statements should not be interpreted as Jesus putting Mary down or rejecting her special relationship to Him as radical Protestants of the 16th century and later have tried to insinuate Rather, these passages serve as an emphasis on the role of Mary as a premier disciple of Jesus. She was the one who first heard the message of God at the annunciation and observed it through her fiat – let it be done to me as you have said [Luke 1:38].

What the passage of Luke 11:27 reveals is that while Jesus was still active in his public ministry, devotion to his mother which had begun long before Jesus was born, had not relented any bit, but was rather picking up steam. There were Christians who held the view and were devoted to Mary as a makarios woman [a divinely blessed woman]. They believed that everything about the Blessed Virgin Mary enjoyed some special blessing from God. For this woman of Luke 11:27 both the womb of the Blessed Virgin that carried the fetus Jesus and the breasts the infant Jesus had sucked were all specially divinized and blessed. The woman of Luke 11:27 is a representative of this group of the earliest Christians who were devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. They let their voices be heard even while Jesus was still alive and active in his ministry.

Devotion to Mary Takes a New Turn

At the most horrible moment of the crucifixion with Jesus nailed to the cross, his terribly wounded head hanging down low; the principles of the Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary would become somewhat standardized. First, the gathering at the foot of the cross would arguably transform into the gathering together of the earliest Church at the moment of its greatest sorrow. And this community would not disband after the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Even though they had mainly come from Galilee, they would stay back in Jerusalem for a while and immediately transform into the earliest Church once the news of the resurrection broke.

And see who were the original members – they are the women and some friends of Jesus [disciples] who had gathered there with the Mother of Jesus.

Matthew [27:55-56] testifies thus: “And many women were there watching from a distance, the same women who had followed Jesus from Galilee and looked after him. Among them were Mary of Magdala, Mary the Mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons”.

Mark’s list [15:40-41] include Mary of Magdala, Mary who was the mother of James, the younger, and Joset, and Salome. These used to follow him and look after him when he was in Galilee. And there were many other women there who had come up to Jerusalem with him.”

Luke [23:49, 55-56] expands the group a little bit. Included among the group are Jesus’ friends [meaning, some of his disciples] and of course the women. They were all there watching the horrifying scene from a distance.

John’s account [19:2527] is very dramatic. Jesus’ mother is explicitly mentioned as being there, and so also were his beloved disciple and the other women. All these were all there. And what were they doing there at the foot of the cross? They were weeping and praying with Mary the soon-to-be bereaved Mother of Jesus. What all this means in essence is that the reconvening Church at the foot of the cross was engaged in an intensive prayer with the Mother of Jesus!

And Jesus confirmed what they were doing. At the moment he was to die on the cross, Jesus kind of made formal the place of his mother Mary at the centre of His Church by handing her over to his beloved disciple, John, who was a representative of the other disciples who might have been watching the scene from a distance as Luke testifies. The beloved disciple responded immediately by giving the Mother of Jesus a home in his own house.

These may appear like simple gestures. But they are not! Rather, these are the gestures that constitute the foundation stones of the earliest Church and her spirituality. At this last moment of his earthly life Jesus first hands over his mother to his beloved disciple [John 19:27-28]. Second, he, Jesus, hands over also his spirit to God and to his disciples [v 30]. And when he has accomplished all these, he declares his work and ministry on earth finished. It can be said that these two gestures constituted the two key principles that are most dear to Jesus. In fact, they lie at the foundation of his church.

Obviously, the mother of Jesus would remain in the home given to her by the beloved disciple until the event of the resurrection.

What about the other large contingent of the women who had followed Jesus and his mother from Galilee? Did they return home to Galilee immediately after the crucifixion? It is not possible. They might have hung around Mary as events unfolded following the death of Jesus on the cross. So, it is true that they did not stay far away from where Mary lived at the home of the beloved disciple.

Moreover, they were the same group that would discover the empty tomb after the resurrection of Jesus. According to some accounts, the same group of women who had stayed back in Jerusalem after the crucifixion went to the tomb as a group: Mt 28:1: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary; Mark 16:1: Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Salome; Luke 23: 49, 55-56; 24:10: Mary Magdalene, Joana, and Mary the Mother of James and the others who accompanied them.

With Mary a resident at the home of Jesus’ beloved disciple, John, she immediately became a part and the centre of the earliest Church that was forming in that house that belonged to John the beloved disciple.

It is undoubtedly true that Mary was not far from where Peter and John had taken off to run to the tomb when they were told by Mary Magdalene that the body of the dead Jesus was no longer in his tomb. That is to say, from the very moment she was handed over to the Church in the family of the beloved disciple, Mary became the integral member of the earliest Church and the centre of her spirituality.

From the home of the beloved disciple, Mary was obviously involved in the journey that the earliest community of the church made back to Galilee to witness the event of the ascension of the Lord Jesus.

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles testifies that she had not stayed back in Galilee after the event of the ascension but returned with the disciples alongside the other women to the Upper Room in Jerusalem. There it is explicitly mentioned what they were doing in the Upper Room as the earliest church reorganized and waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

While in the Upper Room, “all of these [disciples of Jesus] joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary the Mother of Jesus and with his brothers” [Acts 1:14]. The brothers mentioned here are obviously the disciples of Jesus.

The three gospels called the synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark and Luke], including the Acts of the Apostles, cover the earliest Church’s life from the time of the death of Jesus around AD 33 till sometime around 70 AD when most of these books were published and made available to the public. So, it can be safely said that they report accurately the earliest Church’s life during this formative period. And devotion to Mary the Mother of Jesus was at the centre of the entire life of that earliest Church.

In the absence of Jesus in the flesh, Mary was the rallying point of the earliest Church. This is the only meaning that can be attached to Acts 1:14.

Devotion to Virgin Mary in John’s Earliest Church

The Gospel of St John and The Apocalypse give us further picture of the spirituality of the early Church with regard to the devotion to the Blessed Virgin. These two books, John’s Gospel and the Apocalypse were published around the close of the first century AD 100 or thereafter.

Apart from the great passage of the changing of water into wine at Can in Galilee, the Gospel of St John contains the dramatic scene in which Jesus hands over His beloved Mother to the beloved disciple representing the entire early Church. Both of these incidents say a lot about St John’s early Church devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. By the time the gospel of John was written around AD 100, the long-dead Mother of Jesus had become a powerful symbol in the community.

The gesture of Jesus handing over his mother to the beloved disciple shows that at the time of the publication of the gospel of John which was around AD 100, Mary, even though long dead, was still highly regarded as the centre of the prayer life or spirituality of the earliest Church. The community from which the Gospel of John originated held Mary the Mother of Jesus in highest honour not only as the Mother of the Son of God but as having been a special responsibility given by Jesus to the founder of St John’s gospel community namely John the beloved disciple. For this community, Mary was not only the Mother of Jesus but also the Mother of their community Church.

However, it is in the Book of Revelation published in the second century that we see a little clearer how sophisticated the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary had grown especially at that period in the second century of Christianity. The Book was written at a time of extreme persecution of the early Christians. The author, John the beloved disciple, was in prison in the Island of Patmos because he was accused, arrested and imprisoned for preaching the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was from there that he recorded what he had seen in a series of visions from Our Lord Jesus Christ.

As a book written under persecution, Apocalypse employs symbolic language that is meant to be understood by those who belonged to the community. John in the Apocalypse used what is called a sign language. This is a language that is understandable only to the initiated. It is a language that uses signs and codes to deliver its message to its audience. For any outsider to get into the language and understand it, he or she must first master the signs and codes of the language. And with such a sign language he talks about the Blessed Virgin Mary in the twelfth chapter of his work [Rev 12:1-6].

The Blessed Virgin Mary is the first sign of the episode, a woman that appears in the heaven, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon and with twelve stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant, in labour and crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth. This woman that is portrayed as the Queen of the Universe, clothed with the sun and standing on the moon with twelve stars forming the crown on her head is undoubtedly Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Son of God, who at that point in time in the second century is portrayed as the Queen of the entire universe.

As the story goes, she goes on to triumph over the dragon that was poised to attack her. She had her baby, a male child who was to rule all the nations. The child was taken straight to God and to his throne while the woman escaped into the desert where God had made a place of safety ready for her to be looked after in the twelve hundred and sixty days.

The story of the Book of Apocalypse here is a symbolic representation of the story of the Blessed Virgin Mary as it was told in the very dangerous environment that was marked by intense persecution of Christians. It was symbolically telling a story that was often told about the Blessed Virgin Mary in the second Century. Such stories put in symbolic form the entire history of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her death was a mystery and the whereabouts of her incorrupt body unknown till today. It was this tradition that would eventually result in the mystery of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Two Wings of the Earliest Church

It is important for all Catholics and especially for the lovers of the Blessed Virgin Mary to know that there were at least two prominent wings of the earliest Church operating out of Jerusalem following the news of the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Only one of these is adequately represented in the New Testament writings.

There was the more renowned community which was active, and in fact, an activist Church, the evangelizing and missionary Church that was headed by the apostles. This wing of the early Church went about the Mediterranean world spreading the gospel message in obedience to Jesus’ command [Matthew 28:19-20]. Their whole charge was the ministry of the word, the preaching of the gospel to all people of the world as far as they could go [Acts 6:2]. That wing of the earliest Church has a lot of its activities recorded and narrated in the New Testament.

But there was also another wing of the earliest church, the praying Church that formed around Mary, the Mother of God and the other apostles and disciples of Jesus in the Upper Room in Jerusalem whose leaders St Paul would later describe as the pillars of the Church. This local or Jerusalem wing of the early Church was headed by the apostle James who was called the brother of Jesus. St Paul describes this Jerusalem wing of the Church as “the churches in Judaea that are in Christ” [Gal 1:22].

In other words, the Upper Room praying community did not disperse after the event of the Pentecost. In fact, this silent community of contemplatives so to speak is believed to have survived until around AD 70. They used to move from home to home praying and celebrating the Eucharist [Acts 12:12-17].

This praying community which was predominantly Jewish was made up of women and some other disciples who could not immediately embark on foreign missions for evangelization. Members of this local community had supported the missionary efforts of the other apostles and disciples of Jesus through prayers, charity contributions and distributions [Acts 6]. They also formed the initial local community for the first bishop of Jerusalem, James.

This latter wing of the earliest Church does not receive as much coverage in the New Testament as the missionary Church of the Apostles. But they were equally powerful as a contemplative wing of the Church. Their legacy is preserved more in the early Church’s traditions and less in the bible narratives.

The manual of prayer of the praying wing of the earliest Church in Jerusalem was modeled after the Jewish prayers in the Temple. It consisted of the 150 psalms in the Jewish Psalter. So, the manner of prayer of the Jerusalem’s earliest Church consisted in the recitation of the psalms as contained in the Old Testament - the 150 psalms of the Old Testament and many other prayers of the Bible especially those that would later be included in the writings of the New Testament.

The prayers drawn from the New Testament traditions were variously described as Our Lord’s Psalter [the Our Father], Marian or Mary’s Psalter [Angelic Salutation and the Magnificat], Angelic Psalter, Gospel Psalter, Zachariah Psalter and Simeon’s Psalter. A Psalter is another name for the collection of the 150 hymns, prayers, confessions, etc, called psalms in the Hebrew Bible. A Psalter has to do with inspired hymns, prayers and confessions as contained in the Bible.

In the Gospels, there are many of such inspired hymns and prayers. The pronouncement of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary is included in both the Angelic Psalter and Mary’s Psalter. Elizabeth’s statement is also another of such with double inclusions. But the Magnificat is a hymn particularly credited to the Blessed Mother. Zachariah’s prayer [Benedictus] and Simeon’s songs of praise [Nunc Dimitis] are all a part of the Gospel Psalter that formed the core of the prayers that were said in the earliest communities that stayed back in prayer in Jerusalem and elsewhere as the apostles and disciples of Jesus fanned out into the missions for the evangelization of the nations.

There was the active church of the apostles going all over the world with the gospel message. And then there was also the contemplative church whose main job was praying with the Blessed Virgin Mary as a central figure of their faith. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary arose mainly from the contemplative wing of the Church in Jerusalem.

This is one of the reasons why Catholics insist on the bible and tradition as the basis of doctrine and faith. There are so many practices of the ancient Church that are not contained in the bible. The New Testament part of the bible is mainly a narrative of the missionary wing of the early Church. But the contemplative church, the praying Church that stuck with the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Jerusalem Church has little or no narratives about it in the bible.

Virgin Mary and Jerusalem Wing of Earliest Church

It seems pretty clear that the contemplative or praying church in Jerusalem drew and grew from the group that hanged out around the crucified Christ. That group had stayed put with Mary when she took residence in the home of the Beloved Disciple. It was some members of that group who would discover the empty tomb and report their findings to the disciples. It was also the same group that was there in the Upper Room praying when the Church was reorganizing and waiting for the descent of the Holy Spirit. And there is no reason to doubt that they were there when the Holy Spirit eventually descended on the apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ thereby inaugurating the missionary wing of the early Church. So, it was a group that was well integrated in the life and activities of the earliest Church.

The question is; what became of them afterwards? What happened to them after the event of the Pentecost? Did they disband? It is most unlikely. Some pieces of information from tradition suggest that they continued their intensive praying mission with the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God as their inspiration. And when Mary died they continued praying around her incorrupt body.

This would continue until the mysterious disappearance of the incorrupt body of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is this tradition that would crystallize into the feast of Assumption. When the Blessed Virgin vanished completely from the scene, the group that rallied around her began to invoke her name in prayer. This would mark the beginning of full-blown devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God as an official Church practice.

However, devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary would not be the practice of a few in the early church. Rather as the message of the gospel spread everywhere, believers embraced the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary as more or less a divine being. As the traditions of her divine privileges and her virginity spread because of the writings of the evangelists and their interpretation by the fathers of the church, so did the invocation and veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary spread throughout the early Church. Many in the early Church were not only invoking her intercession in prayer but praying to her for protection.

Devotion to Virgin Mary Inspires Early Reflection

Moving toe-to-toe with popular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary were serious reflections on her life by way of doctrinal and theological teaching. One of the earliest known teachers on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the history of salvation is Justin Martyr who lived in the second half of the first century and the first half of the second century. His life time is dated from AD 100 to AD 165. Justin Martyr described Mary as the second Eve.

It is easy to discern that such a description by such a great thinker as Justin Martyr could only be an offshoot of an already entrenched devotion among the ordinary folk. What Justin Martyr did was to give a theological basis to a popular devotion of the Blessed Virgin Mary during his time.

Another great teacher of the 2nd century was Ireneus, the premier bishop of Lyon in present-day France, who is acclaimed to be “the first theologian of the Blessed Virgin Mary”. He is regarded as the earliest Church father to present a systematic account of the theology of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ireneus presented a systematic account of the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in bringing about the redemption of human beings. By the fourth century there had arisen in the early Church great thinkers and theologians who dedicated themselves to expounding the qualities and role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in human salvation. Such thinkers include Ambrose of Milan [339-397].

An example of the teaching that was most prevalent about the Blessed Virgin in the early Church is found in the teaching of St John Damascene, described by Pope Pius XII as the interpreter of this tradition par excellence:

It was fitting that she who in giving birth had preserved her virginity unspotted should keep her body incorrupt even after death. It was fitting that she who had borne the Creator as a child in her bosom should have a dwelling-place with God. It was fitting that the bride espoused by the Father should dwell in the bridal-chambers of heaven. It was fitting that she who had gazed on her Son on the cross receiving then in her breast the sword of sorrow she had been spared at his birth, should behold him seated with the Father. It was fitting that the Mother of God should enjoy the privileges of the Son and should be honoured by all creation as the Mother and the handmaid of God.

Around the middle of the second century, there was already widely in use in Churches around the Mediterranean world the powerful prayer pleading for the protection of the Blessed Mother of God. The Sub Tuum Praesidium [We fly to your patronage] is the oldest recorded prayer to the Blessed Mother of God. A copy of this ancient prayer to the Mother of God was discovered in Egypt around the middle of the twentieth century. The discovered copy dates as far back as AD 250.

That is to say, from the first century to the second century, devotion continued to grow to the extent that by the middle of the second century the Blessed Virgin Mary who was long dead and assumed into heaven was still being invoked for protection because she was believed to be a divine being. We-fly-to-you-patronage prayer describes Mary as the Mother of God [Theotokos] long before it would be defined as such in Ephesus in AD 431.

St Paul and Early Church Devotion to Virgin Mary

A fact which some latter-day haters of the Blessed Virgin Mary try to exploit to no avail is that devotion to the Blessed Virgin never features prominently in the traditions [stories, teachings and practices] of St Paul whose works constitute exactly one half of the books of the New Testament. Out of the twenty seven [27] books of the New Testament, St Paul is personally credited with thirteen letters [Romans, I&II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, I&II Thessalonians, I&II Timothy, Titus, Philemon]. And there are three other books that clearly originate from his tradition [St Luke’s Gospel, The Acts of the Apostles and Letter to the Hebrews].

In all of the books personally authored, credited to, or perhaps dictated by St Paul, the story of the Blessed Virgin is virtually absent. Some shallow readers of the bible use this fact as a proof-text to show that there was not much of Marian devotion in the early Church that St Paul lived and operated in.

But nothing could be further from the truth. All through his ministry St Paul acknowledged the existence of the local church in Jerusalem headed by James. He describes the local Church of Jerusalem as “the Churches in Judaea that are in Christ” [Gal 1:22]. He always returned to them to seek their recognition of his ministry Gal 1:18-20; 2:1-10; Acts 12:25; 15:1-12]. That is to say, he recognized their authority over and above his own ministry in the missions. In fact, St Paul describes the leaders of the local wing of the early Church as “pillars” of the early Church [Gal 2:9]. He quarreled with the local church of Jerusalem a lot because they had their own tradition which they rigidly held on to against the position St Paul was pursuing in the missions.

The virtual absence of stories about the Blessed Virgin Mary in St Paul’s letters and traditions does not mean that St Paul hated the Blessed Virgin Mary as some people try to argue or insinuate. God forbid! The truth is St Paul knew the tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin in the early Church. That is the meaning of Gal 4:4. But he was never a part of the Jerusalem wing of the early Church that regularly met at the Upper Room and in private homes. Rather St Paul was a Johnny-come-lately in early Church spiritualitt. He was converted to the Missionary Wing of the Early Church that was already embedded in missionary work.

Many scholars have put out a chronology of St Paul’s life and times. His conversion took place in AD 34. From AD 34 to 37, Paul was in Damascus and later in the Syrian Desert. His first visit to the Apostles in Jerusalem took place either in AD 37 or 38. And from AD 38-44, he was in Tarsus and came to Antioch from AD 45 to 47. The chronology continues until Paul’s death AD 64 or 67. This chronology demonstrates that it would have been impossible for the paths of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Paul to cross while the former lived. While St Paul was away in the missions the Blessed Virgin Mary lived for a while around Jerusalem. Both of them could never have met each other in any way.

According to St Paul’s story in the Acts of the Apostles, and elsewhere like Galatians [1:11-24], he was converted on his way to Damascus [Acts 9:1-9]. He was baptized and brought into the Christian faith by a missionary agent resident in Damascus, Ananias [Acts 9:10-19]. Paul’s first preaching was in Damascus [vv 19-22]. Then he traveled to Arabia [Gal 1:17] and spent some time praying, studying and doing retreat or reflection.

From Arabia, Paul returned to Damascus [Gal 1:17]. It was only after three years that he travelled down to Jerusalem to meet with Kephas [Peter]. He stayed there with Peter and a few others in Jerusalem for only fifteen days [v 18]. The other apostle he met during that short visit was James the brother of the Lord [v 19]. Paul never met with the Mother of Jesus during his very short stay in Jerusalem, assuming that Mary was still alive when he visited. After his brief visit to Jerusalem, Paul began his missionary work going into the regions of Syria and Cilicia [v 21].

As we all can see, after his dramatic conversion, Paul joined straight the missionary wing of the early Church without being first introduced to the Jerusalem local Church headed by James and Peter whose premier members might have included Mary the Mother of Jesus and the great women and perhaps men that had accompanied them from Galilee.

Having not been a member of the powerful Jerusalem Church Paul did not receive any instructions or traditions from the praying community there. He was not schooled in the stories and traditions of the contemplative wing of the Jerusalem community. He often stated in his letters that he had received the gospel he preached from no one but rather from revelation [Gal 11-12].

At the beginning of his ministry, St Paul lacked any input from the stories and practices of the Jerusalem Church. He depended solely on what he claimed to have received from revelation. That was why his disciple, Luke, had to make extra efforts through research and investigation [Luke 1:3] to get the stories about the Blessed Virgin Mary from other sources when he began to write his gospel. It seems pretty clear that the sources that provided Luke the stories of the early life of the little girl from Nazareth came from the members of the Jerusalem Church.

This seems the main reason why Paul hardly mentions the Blessed Virgin Mary in his numerous writings in the New Testament. It is obvious that he did not meet the Blessed Virgin and had not known her in person. But he did inherit and accept the tradition that when the fullness of time had come God sent His Son into the world born of a woman [Gal 4:4]. E.R. Carroll in the New Catholic Encyclopedia states that the tradition Paul represents in Gal 4:4 hails Mary the “‘Mother of my Lord’… meaning ‘queen-mother of the Messiah-king,’ [which is] likely the oldest Christian greeting of praise to the Mother of Jesus.”

How the Praying of the Rosary Developed

While devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary goes way back to the earliest Church that produced the New Testament, the praying of the Holy Rosary did not take off at the same time. It evolved gradually with time. But its history goes far deep into the early Church. History writers are not quite agreed on a specific point in time in which the praying of the Rosary began in the early Church. But nearly everybody agrees now that the Rosary developed out of the praying of the 150 Psalms in the Old Testament in the early Church.

Some writers like W.A. Hinnebusch of The New Catholic Encyclopedia who drank from the spring of post-Reformation prejudice against devotion to the Blessed Mother of God and were infected with the spirit of downgrading devotion and elevating written texts as proof of practice, trace the origin of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary to “tender devotion to Jesus and Mary that arose in the 12th century.”

But such claims are completely false. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary from where the praying of the Rosary originated around the second and third centuries, existed long before the writing of the books of the New Testament. The ingredients or parts with which the Rosary came to be articulated are all drawn from the Bible especially the New Testament.

For instance, the opening statement: “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” is from the New Testament. The “Apostles Creed” is fashioned out of the New Testament teachings by the Apostles themselves. The “Our Father” is copied straight from the mouth of Jesus Christ as contained in the New Testament. The “Hail Mary” is made up of words straight out of the mouths of the Archangel Gabriel and the holy woman called Elizabeth. The “Glory Be to the Father…” is from the New Testament. The mysteries are all drawn from events in the New Testament.

Though the articulation of these different parts of the New Testament writings into the Rosary we know today took a long time to materialize, the journey to fashion them into the powerful Rosary that is very popular around the world today began at the earliest period of the Christian religion. The earliest Church was famous for deriving and fashioning out its prayers from the words of the New Testament. It was that Church that began the process that eventually produced the Rosary.

The Rosary we pray today, whether as a group or privately, is a perfect continuation of the spirituality of the earliest Church. The early Church was built around Jesus and later around Mary his most blessed Mother. Mary was a key factor in bringing about and holding the Church together after the events of the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and descent of the Holy Spirit.

Any form of spirituality that invokes her name must trace its origin back to the period Mary stood at the foot of the cross to receive her mandate as the centre of the Church from the dying Jesus himself, and from the period she prayed along the apostles and disciples of Jesus in the Upper Room as they waited for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

In order to demonstrate quite clearly how the praying of the Rosary began in the Church, it is important to look at some of the key moments in the history of Christianity.

The New Testament Community

Among the prayers which the praying community that grew out of the ones we meet in the New Testament used to recite was our Lord’s Prayer called the Paternoster Psalter and what was then called the Angelic Psalter or Marian Psalter or the Aves. As the praying of the Our Father was the standard prayer of Christians from the earliest times, so also was the prayerful recitation of the Archangel Gabriel’s salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary called the Aves.

The praying community of the New Testament included both of these prayers alongside the Psalms they prayed in their private and public worships. Both the communities that gathered around the Blessed Virgin Mary and those that invoked her name for protection after her death and assumption into heaven used both prayers in their common worships. That tradition of praying to the Blessed Virgin for both protection and intercession would grow out from the New Testament communities into the communities of the Church fathers.

The Desert Fathers and the Beads of the Rosary

From around the 3rd Century AD or even earlier, there arose in the early Church monks who were called the Desert Fathers who practised their monastic spirituality in the desert. As a part of their spiritual exercises they recited the 150 Psalms in the Jewish Psalter. W.A. Hinnebusch of The New Catholic Encyclopedia is right in claiming that “the Rosary’s origin is that it developed gradually as various Christological and Marian devotions coalesced.” Many other experts state quite accurately that many centuries before St Dominic would inspire a revolution in the praying of the Rosary, the monks in the desert had begun to recite all the 150 psalms as a part of their liturgy.

However, monasteries at that time were made up of both the literate and uneducated brothers. While the literate brothers prayed the 150 Psalms in the Psalter, the lay brothers who were called the conversi were availed an alternative to the 150 Psalms which they could learn off by heart. They were provided the Our Father which they prayed some 50, 100 or 150 times to march the number of the Psalms. The uneducated conversi used beads to help them in counting correctly the number of the Paternosters prayed. When those 150, 100, 50 beads were strung together, they were called a chaplet. Among them there were chaplets of 50, or 100 or 150 Paternosters.

As Hinnebusch states, the ultimate origin of the Rosary has to be traced back “to the desire to give the unlettered faithful closer participation in the liturgy. Thus, the recitation of 150 ‘Paters’ [Our Father] as a substitute for the psalms became the “poor man’s breviary’”. “The ‘Paters’ were often divided, as were the psalms of David, into sets of “three fifties”. Strings of beads, called “paternosters” were used to count these prayers. Marian devotion followed a similar trend.”

That was the period when the entire copies of the bible throughout the world could not have numbered up five hundred. The entire bible was hand-copied by expert scribes. And the entire work written on parchment papers was extremely bulky and unwieldy.

The invention of the printing press that multiplied copies of the bible and made them available to a large population of Christians was still more than a thousand two hundred years away. The praying of the Rosary initially arose out of the need to provide the lay people some semblance of the spirituality of the so-called Desert Fathers. So, in place of praying the 150 psalms in the Old Testament, they were encouraged to pray what was described then as our Lady’s or Mary’s Psalter which was technically the recitation of the Our Father and the Angelic Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary into 150 times.

As education was not for the poor masses of those days, the recitation of Marian or Angelic Psalter made it easier for the uneducated masses to learn the essence of their faith by heart and practise true Christian spirituality without much stress. Also, the monks invented the beads to enable uneducated Christians keep track of the number of the Angelic Psalters they were praying. This was pretty much how the praying of the Holy Rosary with beads evolved from the 2nd to the 4th centuries AD.

Other Key Moments in the Development of the Rosary

The Council of Ephesus

In the year AD 428, a monk called Nestorius was appointed patriarch of Constantinople. One of the first things he did was to outlaw the title “Mother of God” [Theotokos] that had been applied to the Blessed Virgin Mary since the beginning of Christianity. This caused a lot of anger and outrage throughout the world.

The reason Nestorius gave for his action was that he claimed in his teaching that while God had begotten Jesus as God, Mary bore him as a man. For Nestorius, Mary was just Christotokos [Christ bearer] and not Theotokos [God bearer]. His teaching was vehemently rejected by other bishops including the patriarch of Alexandria at that time called Cyril. Both sides appealed to Pope Celestine 1 for intervention. And for that reason a synod was called in 431 known as Council of Ephesus. This Synod would reemphasize in no uncertain terms that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mother of God the Theotokos.

Nestorius was deposed as a bishop and he fled to Arabia and later to Egypt with his followers. At the news of the deposition of the heretic bishop, Nestorius, the whole city of Ephesus kept all night candle vigil singing and praying the Marian Psalter which later became the rosary. In 451 at Chalcedon the Blessed Virgin Mary would be described again as the Theotokos, the Mother of God.

The Medieval Period

The Medieval Period was the greatest period for the evolution of Marian cults and devotions especially the praying of the Rosary. As E.R. Carroll testifies in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, this period featured three elements that constituted the cult or devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. These included “* veneration, or the reverent recognition of the dignity of the holy Virgin Mother of God, * Invocation, or the calling upon our Lady for her motherly and queenly intercession; and, * Imitation which may take such forms also as dedication and consecration.”

One of the greatest spokespersons of the Medieval Period on devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was St Anselm. In one of his greatest teachings on the Blessed Virgin Mary, he declared:

Every nature is created by God, and God is born of Mary. God created all things and Mary gave birth to God. God himself, who made all things, made himself from Mary. In this way he remade all that he had made. He who was able to make all things out of nothing, when they had been defaced would not remake them without Mary’s help.

God is, then, Father of all created things and Mary is mother of all that has been recreated. God is Father of the institution of all things and Mary is the mother of the restitution of all things. God begot him through whom all things were made and Mary gave birth to him through whom all things are saved. God begot him without whom nothing at all exists and Mary gave birth to him without whom nothing that exists is good…

The clear thinking of this period about devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary would lead to a very clear distinction of the veneration or cult due to the Blessed Virgin vis-à-vis those of the Blessed Trinity and the saints. Veneration, cult or devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is described in Latin as hyperdulia which means “the external recognition of her excellence and of the superior way she is joined to God”. Mary’s veneration, devotion or cult differs infinitely from LATRIA or worship which is offered to God alone. It is the sort of worship “that is given to Christ and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit.” LATRIA is the type of worship the angels and the saints give to God eternally in heaven. Humans on earth join the inhabitants of the heavenly kingdom in giving God this singular worship that is due to Him and to Him alone.

St Augustine whose teaching gave birth to much of the spirituality of the Medieval Period, notes about LATRIA; “it is only God whom we worship and think ought to be worshipped with that degree of worship which is called LATRIA because it is the form of total service due properly to the divinity. It is in this kind of worship that the offering of sacrifice is appropriate. Therefore to offer this LATRIA to idols is called ‘idolatry’” [St Augustine’s “Treatise Against Faustus”, Book 20, 21]

Mary’s veneration or cult or devotion [hyperdulia] is also distinguished from dulia which is the veneration due to the saints. And this is the ordinary reverence made to them as redeemed creatures dwelling with God in heaven.

It would be during the Medieval Period that the praying of the Rosary began to take some definitive shape. In early Medieval Period, veneration of Mary was quite popular in monasteries, especially with the Benedictine monasteries. Chants like Ave Maris Stella and the Salve Regina were composed and they became the favorite songs of monasteries. “In the 8th century, The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary developed from the monks' practice of praying the Canonical hours.”

The height of the Medieval Period devotion to the Blessed Virgin would come with the revelation the Blessed Virgin made to St Dominic. It was this revelation that would give the praying of the rosary the definitive shape it wears till this very day.

St Dominic and the Rosary

According to stories that have been well documented in the history of the Church, the Rosary in its present form was first given to St Dominic in the year 1214 by the Blessed Virgin Mary as an instrument to use in converting the Albigensians.

The Albigensians were a kind of a Christian sect that arose in Southern France in the 12th century. The movement was a reaction against the spread of evil in the world. They quickly spread all over the place and were extremely powerful as they gathered many followers around them. They were very ascetic people. They abstained from flesh in all its forms. They would not eat meat or even drink milk or cheese.

The Albigensians were divided into two groups, the believers and the perfect. The believers were numerous and they formed something like the catechumenate group. The Perfect were few and were constituted by those who had received what was called “the sacrament of consolamentum”, which was a kind of ordination by the laying on of the hand.

The Albigensians held a double or dualistic vision of the world. The world is made up of the good and the evil. Since evil abounded in the world, the world was of no good. To go out of the world was something they desired most earnestly. So they encouraged suicide.

As the popularity of the Albigensian movement spread and overpowered local churches, it became a worldwide concern. The Popes at that time sent in great preachers like St Bernard of Clairvaux and other great Cistercian preachers to confront them. But all to no avail. They kept spreading, upstaging and overrunning local churches.

It was at the height of the Albigensian challenge that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St Dominic. The story as told by Blessed Alan de la Roche in his book entitled Diginatate Paslaterii, goes like this in paraphrase.

When St Dominic realized that the gravity of the sins of the people was slowing progress in the conversion of the Albigensians, he withdrew into the forest near Toulouse where he prayed continuously for three days and night. During this period of his prayers he did nothing but weep and to do serious penances to appease the anger of God. Having suffered so much as a result of his penances and the bodily harm he inflicted on himself, he fell into a coma. While in coma our Lady appeared to him accompanied by three angels and addressed him thus: “Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?” “Oh, my Lady, you know far better than I do, because next to your Son Jesus Christ, you have always been the chief instrument of our salvation” answered St Dominic. Then our Lady replied “I want you to know that, in this kind of warfare, the principal weapon has always been the Angelic Psalter, which is the foundation-stone of the New Testament. Therefore, if you want to reach these hardened souls and win them over to God, preach my Psalter.”

When Dominic awoke from his coma, he was fired up and filled with zeal for the conversion of souls and went straight to the Cathedral in the district. And at once an unseen angel rang the Cathedral bell and people immediately gathered to listen to St Dominic preach. From there his apostolate took off as well as the miracles that followed including the unbelievable defeat of Albigensians and their heresy.

From Psalter to Rosary

The term “Rosary” or “The Holy Rosary” was not the original name for the chain-like prayers made in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In fact, according to some traditions, from 1214 when St Dominic formalized this manner of honouring our Lady the Mother of God to the period the Blessed Alan de la Roche re-established it in 1460, this manner of prayer was called “the Psalter of Jesus and Mary.”

The reason for the name Psalter was because “it has the same number of Hail Mary’s as there are psalms in the Book of the Psalms of David. Since simple and uneducated people are not able to say the Psalms of David, the Rosary is held to be just as fruitful for them as David’s Psalter is for others.” According to a tradition credited to St Louis Marie Grignion De Montfort,

Ever since Blessed Alan de la Roche re-established this devotion, the voice of the people, which is the voice of God, gave it the name of the Rosary, which means "crown of roses." That is to say, every time people say the Rosary devoutly, they place on the heads of Jesus and Mary 153 white roses and sixteen red roses. Being heavenly flowers, these roses will never fade or lose their beauty. Our Lady has approved and confirmed this name of the Rosary; she has revealed to several people that each time they say a Hail Mary they are giving her a beautiful rose, and that each complete Rosary makes her a crown of roses.

So, the complete Rosary is a large crown of roses and each chaplet of five decades is a little wreath of flowers or a little crown of heavenly roses which we place on the heads of Jesus and Mary. The rose is the queen of flowers, and so the Rosary is the rose of devotions and the most important one.

Additions to the Angelic or Marian Psalter, “The Hail Mary”.

After the revelation of the Rosary as the weapon of victory against the Albigensian heresy in 1214 and its reestablishment more than two hundred years after by Blessed Alan de La Roche in1460, the next big thing that happened to the praying of the Rosary was the elongation of the Hail Mary by the Council of Trent.

The Hail Mary which is traditionally called Angelical Salutation or Marian Psalter derives from salutation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”

And the second part of it is derives from the inspired words of St Elizabeth: And blessed is the fruit of your womb” [Jesus].

The last part of it: “Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen” is contained in the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

The Catechism of Trent states “Most rightly has the Holy Church added to this thanksgiving, petition also and the invocation of the most holy Mother of God, thereby implying that we should piously and suppliantly have recourse to her in order that by her intercession she may reconcile God with us sinners and obtain for us the blessing we need both for this present life and for the life which has no end”

The Rosary and the Naval Battle of Lepanto, 1571

The miraculous victory of Christians over the very vicious and ferocious Islamic militants of the Ottoman Empire on October 7, 1571, at Lepanto, is one of the greatest victories attributed to the praying of the Rosary. This was one moment in the history of Christianity that greatly popularized the praying of the Rosary and various devotions to the Blessed Mother of God. That victory resulted in the institution of the Feast of the Holy Rosary or Feast of the Our Lady of Victory on October 7 every year.

The Battle of Lepanto, as it is called in the history of the Church, was a naval combat between the alliances formed by Christian European forces with the Holy See under Pope Pius V known as “the Holy League,” against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. This particular victory would become very crucial in the history of Christian Europe as it marked a comprehensive defeat of Islamic domination of the world that was championed by the violent and vicious Ottoman Empire [present-day Turkey] that was intent on taking over the entire world and turning it to the Islamic Religion. The victory at Lepanto saved the Catholic Church from being wiped out completely from the face of the earth by violent Islamism.

That epic battle that saved both Europe and Catholicism as a religion had taken place on October 7, 1571. A large armada made up more than two hundred warships was assembled by the Holy League which was made up of forces drawn from the Kingdoms of Naples, Venice, the Papacy, Genoa, Savoy and the Knights Hospitallers. This alliance fought a titanic battle against a formidable armada, or fleet of warships amassed by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire at Lepanto. The miraculous aspect of the battle was that the Holy League was completely outnumbered and overmatched by the forces of the Ottoman Empire.

Before the start of the battle, Pope Pius V who had paid part of the cost of the battle from the coffers of the Church had not stopped there. He had ordered the Churches of Rome and around the Mediterranean world to go into chains of prayers every night and day appealing to the Blessed Virgin Mary for intercession through the praying of the Rosary. The praying of the Rosary worked miracles.

The arrogant Ottoman forces who were boasting of being able to overrun the entire Catholic world were humiliated in the battle by the Holy League. Pope Pius V attributed the miracle to the praying of the Rosary and therefore instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory on October 7 in the Liturgical Calendar to be celebrated throughout the world every year. His successor Gregory XIII changed the name of the feast to Our Lady of the Rosary.

VII. The Apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes and the Rosary, 1858

The praying of the Rosary would receive a great boost in the little known village in Southwest France known as Lourdes when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared there to a little girl of 14 years called Bernadette Soubirous beginning from February 11, 1858. The popular story of this apparition says that one day the little girl called Bernadette Soubirous went with her friends into a nearby bush to gather firewood. As her friends sang and played about, Bernadette stood still with her wide-open eyes fixed on something that was very mysterious to her. It turned out that the little Bernadette had seen a beautiful lady dressed in blue and white apparel. The lady had stars around her head while rose flowers were on her feet.

When Bernadette shared her story with her parents and others, they could not believe her. But the apparition or appearance of the Lady to little Bernadette would continue for a considerable length of time. From February 11 to July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary would appear to this little girl 18 times.

On one occasion during the numerous appearances, the Lady ordered Bernadette to dig a hole at the spot. She obeyed only for a cool, fresh spring to come rising and bubbling up out of the ground. The spring produced enough water that sick people who took bath in it became well again. Many blind people had their sight restored. And so many miracles became associated with the spring that was miraculously created by our Lady through the little girl Bernadette.

The Lady would order Bernadette to build a great church in the place and tell people to pray the Rosary, do penance and walk in processions. The order of the Lady was obeyed and soon the great shrine of Lourdes rose with a beautiful Church of the Notre Dame where miracles have continued to happen on a daily basis through prayers especially the Rosary and the doing of penance.

The principal message of Our Lady of Lourdes was her call for the praying of the Holy Rosary and for penance for the sins of the world. Since Our Lady’s Apparition there, The City of Lourdes has been playing host to one of the most popular Marian shrines in the world. One of the highlights of the series of the apparitions and the visions to Bernadette Soubirous was Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary revealing herself to Bernadette thus: “I am the Immaculate Conception” which was a miraculous confirmation of the Dogma with the same name that had been defined about four years earlier by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854.

VIII. Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima and the Rosary, 1917

The town called Fatima is a town in Portugal with Arabic name “Fatima”. It is a parish in the Diocese of Leiria in central Portugal. Since the apparition that came to be associated with the town took place from May 13, 1917, Fatima has transformed into one of the most popular Marian shrines in the world.

Fatima’s story began in 1916. This was a period of serious problems in the world. The First World War was raging all over Europe. And it was also one year before Russia would plunge herself into the communist revolution that would bring about widespread violent atheism and hatred of religion around the world. It was in this year, 1916, that a wonderfully beautiful figure appeared to three little children who were in the bush looking after their family sheep.

The children were Lucia Abobora, 9, and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, 6 and 7. The figure told the children “Do not be afraid. I am the angel of peace. Pray with me,’” Abobora — “later renamed Lucia de Jesus de dos Santos — recounted in her memoir, “Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words,” published in 1976.”

The angel would appear two more times to the children in that same year of 1916. During those appearances, the figure which the children regarded as an angel would urge the children to accept their sufferings which the Lord allowed them to experience as an act of reparation for the sins of the world which offend Him very much. The angel urged them to pray constantly for the conversion of sinners.

The apparition would take place about six times in the year. The 1917 episodes of the apparitions started on May 13, when three shepherd children – Lucia dos Santos [b. 1907] and her cousins Francisco [1908 – 19] and Jacinta [1910-20] reported “a lady dressed in white, shining brighter than the sun, giving out rays of clear and intense light,” dos Santos wrote. In a conversation which one of the three, Francisco, claimed not to have heard, “the Lady instructed the children to return to the place on 13th of every month until October” of the same year when she would “disclose her identity and reveal what she desired.”

Jacinta would tell her mother about the apparition. Although her brothers and sisters treated the whole thing as a joke, her mother was alarmed by the story and immediately took her to their parish priest for her to renounce the entire story.

However, news of the apparitions would “spread by word of mouth, and the following month a small crowd waited with the children to witness the second apparition June 13. At the third sighting, on July 13, the children said the Virgin Mary revealed three secrets to them about the future”.

Despite the way some people treated the story as a mere joke, interest in the apparitions at Fatima would gradually grow more intense attracting many more people at each episode.

In a swift reaction to the growing popularity of the Fatima apparitions, the state authorities would on Aug. 13, take the children into custody. The government took them by car to Vila Nova de Ourem with a view to forcing them to renounce the entire stories of the apparitions. But rather than renounce the stories the children insisted on the truth of what they were seeing.

As a result of the action of the government who kidnapped and interrogated the children for two days, their meeting in August had to be delayed. The Lady had to meet them on August 19 instead of the 13th promising that in October a great miracle would occur.

As a demonstration of the growing popularity of the Fatima Apparitions, thousands of people began gathering at Cova da Iria, the venue of the apparitions. It was reported that on Sept. 13, about 30,000 people were gathered at the venue when dos Santos reported that the Virgin Mary told her, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.”

On that promised day of Oct. 13, 1917, the crowd of curious enthusiasts on the apparition had grown to about 70,000.

As it would be reported about the event of that day, at about 2 p.m., “some began to see what later became known in the Catholic Church as “the Miracle of the Sun.” The rains that had plagued the day ceased, and the sun emerged from behind clouds to spin and tremble for 10 minutes.

“Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bareheaded, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws — the sun ‘danced’ according to the typical expression of the people,” reported O Seculo, a Lisbon newspaper.

The strange phenomena included odd colors.

“Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything had assumed an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color. Everything both near and far had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask,” said José Maria de Almeida Garrett, a science professor from Coimbra, Portugal, who was at the scene.

Onlookers from as far as 25 miles away noted the strange phenomena in the sky.

According to H.M. Gillet writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia; “On that date, in wet and dismal weather, the lady announced to them that she was Our Lady of the Rosary and called for amendment in men’s lives. Then the sun appeared and seemed to tremble, rotate violently and finally fall, dancing over the heads of the throng before it returned to normal. Many of the crowd reported having seen this “Miracle of the Sun” that was repeated twice more.”

At the heart of the Fatima apparitions are the secret messages the children claimed the lady had revealed to them. As summarized in the Grand Finale of “The 1st National Marian Year & 3rd Marian Congress, 12th-14th October 2017,” “in all the apparitions Our Lady told them to ‘pray the Rosary everyday’. She told them to ‘pray, pray very much and make sacrifices for sinners for many souls go to hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and to pray for them.’

She warned: ‘Do not offend the Lord, our God anymore, because He is already so much offended.’ She told them to continue to pray the Rosary everyday in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war [First World War, 1914-1918] because only she can bring peace. She assured them ‘in the end, my immaculate Heart will triumph.’”

The apparition of Fatima was long doubted by the local churches of Portugal. But it gradually grew in strength as it gradually won many adherents across the world. Heeding to the messages and request of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima, many Rosary movements and sodalities sprang up throughout the world. Seeing how popular devotions for the praying of the Rosary had grown throughout the world on the inspiration of the apparition of Fatima, the Church had to recognize it as an authentic apparition in 1930.

The Block Rosary Crusades in Nigeria is an offshoot of the growing popularity of the apparition of Fatima. It gained prominence in Nigeria during the Civil War [1967-1970]. It arose as a reaction to the important messages of Our Lady of Fatima: Some of the messages of the Our Lady of Fatima which The Block Rosary Crusades try to respond to are well articulated in the Brochure of the 1st National Marian Year celebration thus:

1. “I have come to warn the faithful to amend their lives and ask pardon for their sins. They must not continue to offend Our Lord, who is already too much offended.”

2. “If my requests are not granted, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. Many good people will be martyred; there will come another Great War [Second World War], and various nations will be destroyed.”

3. “Wars are a punishment for the sins of mankind.”

4. “More souls go to Hell because of the sins of the flesh than for any other reason.”

5. “Certain fashions will be introduced that will offend Our Lord very much.”

6. “Many marriages are not good; they do not please Our Lord and are not of God.”

7. “Say the Rosary every day to obtain peace for the world. And after each decade say the following prayer: ‘O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of thy mercy.”

8. “Pray, pray a great deal, and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to Hell because they have no-one to make sacrifices and pray for them.”

9. “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If people do what I tell you, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”

10. “I promise to help at the hour of death with the graces needed for salvation those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, go to confession, receive Holy Communion, say five decades of the Rosary and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the mysteries, with the intention of making reparation to my Immaculate Heart.”

11. “Tell everybody that God gives His graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Tell them to ask graces from her, and that the Heart of Jesus wishes to be venerated together with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the Lord confided the peace of the world to her… In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph, Russia will be converted and there will be peace.”[iv]

1. Block Rosary Crusades as continuation of Early Church Spirituality

Though the Block Rosary Spirituality traces its origin to the Fatima apparitions, it is in fact a continuation of early Church’s life and spirituality. The earliest Church first converged at the foot of the cross with the Blessed Mother Mary as Jesus her Son was hanging there on the cross staring down the face of his imminent death. The core group of the earliest Church was there with the dying Jesus during that last moment of his life. The group saw to the burial of Jesus and reconvened with the Blessed Virgin after the resurrection. In the Upper Room awaiting the event of the Pentecost, the earliest Church prayed with Mary and the other women who were a part and parcel of that earliest community of Jesus’ disciples.

There is no doubt that as long as the Blessed Virgin was alive the earliest Church continued to pray with her and through her. Her intercessory role in the Church began long before she died. However, when the Blessed Virgin Mary passed on, the tradition of praying with her and through her did not die with her in the early Church. That tradition continued and prayers were said to God through her. The Blessed Virgin Mary as an intercessor is one of the most enduring ancient traditions of the Christian religion.

The prayers that were said for the Blessed Virgin Mary’s intercession included a recitation of her AVES which was a prayerful recitation of the words the archangel Gabriel had spoken to her at the Annunciation. The Rosary developed from these early prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As W.A. Hinnebusch rightly states in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the praying of the Rosary developed gradually as “Mary’s clients celebrated her joys by saluting her with liturgical antiphons especially Gabriel’s Ave, believing that when they did so she relived the joy of the annunciation. Hence they multiplied their Hail Mary’s, especially in ‘chaplets’ of 50 [mystical crowns placed on Mary’s brow], groups of 100, or Psalters of 150.”

By early second century AD, a feature of the Blessed Virgin Mary which became prominent in both the apparition of Lourdes and that of Fatima had already assumed great prominence in the spirituality of the early Church. From the Book of Revelation [12] the Blessed Virgin Mary began to be fully associated with some features of the universe especially the Sun, the moon and the stars. From that period the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary became associated with some alterations in the movements of the Sun, moon and Stars. These features would become real again in the apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima.

1. The Unbroken Tradition of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary

One of the most intriguing facts about the Blessed Virgin Mary is that right from the earliest Church period the tradition of devotion to her has remained unbroken. In every age and every era, Christians from all parts of the world have consistently maintained great devotion to the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

A parallel tradition to what is available in the Christian tradition about devotion to the Virgin Mary is seen in the Koran. In the Islamic Holy Book Koran [Quran], Miriam [the Blessed Virgin Mary] the mother of Issa [Jesus Christ] is about the only woman mentioned there and her virginity affirmed. The Blessed Virgin Mary is allegedly mentioned about four times in the Islamic Holy Book of Qu’ran. Hardly is any other woman mentioned in that book.

Also, right from the first and second centuries of the Christian era, great scholars and fathers of the Church have espoused the unique qualities and privileges of the Blessed Virgin Mary and urged that devotion to her be sustained and even intensified. From St Ignatius of Antioch in the First Century, who succeeded St Peter as Bishop of Antioch in Syria, to Justin Martyr in the Second Century to Ireneus in the second and third centuries, to Hypollitus in the fourth century to Ambrose and St Augustine in the fifth century right down to the period of the Middle Ages when there was a sort of explosion of devotions and writings espousing the virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, devotion to her has only grown in leaps and bounds.

As Marian devotion became universally popular so did reflection on her life grow in intensity. It is impossible that this unbroken tradition of devotion to the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is without the inspiration of God. In fact, the only reason why the tradition has remained unbroken and lasted for more than two thousand years is because of its truthfulness and the fact that God is behind it all. God is the source and inspiration of the age-long devotion to Mary the Mother of God. This fact has remained indisputable among authentic Christians for more than two thousand years.

The Medieval Period was a very special time in the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. This period produced great teachers of the faith who taught about the devotion not only with their mysterious writings but also with the examples of their devotional lives. Who could ever forget such great teachers as St Bonaventure, St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Catherine of Siena and a host of many other luminaries too numerous to mention in the history of the Church?. This period featured a great array of scholars and saints who devoted their entire lives studying and teaching about the necessity of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And despite the slander and distraction of the Protestant Reformation, the teachings of these great fathers of the Church have remained unshakable till today!

1. The Rosary at the Heart of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary

Keeping pace with the growth of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is the praying of the Holy Rosary. From the earliest period of the Christian Church the praying of Our Lady’s Psalters or Aves with beads has always been at the heart of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Holy Rosary devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary arose from poor, ignorant and uneducated people. They were the ones that had needed the instrument of counting which the beads of chaplets had provided them in the earliest times of the Church. The beads were arranged in chaplets of fifty Aves or Psalters interspaced with five Our Fathers or Paternosters.

From its humble beginning among illiterate and rural people the praying of the Holy Rosary grew to appeal to both the high-ups in spirituality and to the down-under. It is a prayer that brings together the learned and the wise with the poorest of the poor. The Rosary meets and satisfies the spiritual needs of all categories of Christians. From the Pope to a child preparing to make the first Holy Communion, all enjoy praying the Rosary and find spiritual satisfaction doing so.

The Rosary is so powerful that lots of miracles have been attributed to it since the beginning of Christianity. There has never been any age when there was not reported numerous miracles attributed to the praying of the Holy Rosary. Both on individual and on group levels, the Rosary has remained a very powerful weapon for accomplishing many miracles in the Church. From the numerous miracles St Dominic attributed to the praying of the Holy Rosary to the great miracle of saving the life of Pope St John Paul II on May 13, 1981, after an assassination attempt on his life, the praying of the Rosary has been credited with so many miracles.

Even when devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary has come under some very severe attacks especially from heretics and Protestants, such attacks rather than diminish its popularity, turned the Rosary into an unmatchable weapon to combat them. And in all such situations the Rosary won overwhelmingly.

1. The Rosary and the Popes

Over the centuries, the Popes have become the chief advocates for the praying of the Holy Rosary. Pope Paul V invoked the Rosary to secure a monumental victory against Islamic invaders at Lepanto in 1571. In remembrance of that great miracle Pope Paul V instituted the Feast of Our Lady of Victory as a universal feast to be observed throughout the world. His successor, Pope Gregory XIII changed the name of Pope Paul V’s feast of Our Lady of Victory to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. From this period onwards the Rosary assumed its proper place as the heartbeat of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In his own contribution, Pope Pius IX elevated an ancient belief of the Church that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin into an article of faith [dogma] that is binding on all Christians in his proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. This took place four years before Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to the young girl called Bernadette Soubrious in the Apparitions at Lourdes in which she confirmed that she was indeed Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

Following in the footsteps of his great predecessor, Pope Pius XII in 1950 elevated another ancient belief of the Church to an article of faith in the proclamation of the Dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The dogma states in line with a popular belief that originated from the earliest times of the Church that Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary was taken body and soul to heaven after her death.

1. The Great Marian Pope: Pope St John Paul II

The dogmas and the proclamations of the Popes on the Rosary and devotion to the Blessed Virgin in the previous centuries appeared to have reached their peak in the emergence of a great Marian Pope in the 20th century in the person of Pope John Paul II. Pope St John Paul II modeled his life and papacy after the great Marian saint, St Louis De Montfort and took Marian devotion and the praying of the Rosary to the highest level so far.

Pope St John Paul II attributed the miracle of his survival of an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981, to the praying of the Rosary. As a result, the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima bore a special significance to him personally and to his papacy. He made pilgrimages to Fatima about three times, the first of which was on May 13, 1982, to mark the one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt on his life. One of the bullets fired at the wounded body of Pope St John Paul II adorns the crown of the Madonna at the Shrine of Our Lady at Fatima till this day.

To mark the beginning of the 3rd millennium, Pope John Paul II flew back to Fatima in May of 2000 and celebrated a mass in which he beatified the Marto siblings, Francesco and Jacinta. It was at that Mass that the Holy Father revealed the “third secret” which the Fatima children testified to having received from Our Lady [Madonna] during the apparition in 1917. That “secret”, which had been kept sealed for decades, was revealed as a “bishop dressed in white [meaning the Pope] on his knees at the foot of a cross, killed in a hail of bullets and arrows, along with other bishops, priests and various lay Catholics.”

Pope St John Paul II would make devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the praying of the Rosary the corner stone of his long-lasting papacy that changed the face of Catholicism for the greater part of the second half of the 20th century and beyond. He set the tone and put Marian devotion in the third millennium of Christianity on the fast-track it is today. The climax of his long reigning papacy was when on October 7, 2002, he published the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae in which he announced the introduction of the Luminous Mysteries being a new set of five mysteries to reflect upon when praying the Rosary.

The present Pontiff, Pope Francis follows in the footsteps of Pope St John Paul II his predecessor. He is equally devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. To mark the 100th anniversary [centenary] of the Fatima Apparition, Pope Francis on Saturday, May 13, 2017, proclaimed the two Marto siblings, Francesco and Jacinta, saints before a mammoth crowd numbering more than half a million people from all over the world. Many had spent days ahead of the celebration praying the Rosary in front of the Madonna and watching in anticipation for the main event that was the canonization of the two of the three heroes of the Fatima Apparitions.

1. Conclusion

The Block Rosary Crusades continue in this wonderful tradition of strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary through the praying of the Holy Rosary. They do so in obedience to the instructions of Our Lady of Fatima, the Madonna. Through the praying of the Rosary, we, the members of the Block Rosary Crusades, believe that we will overcome all challenges both personal and those confronting the Church of our time.

We believe that through the fulfillment of the instructions of Our Lady of Fatima we the members of the Block Rosary Crusades in Nigeria will help in overcoming the greatest challenge facing the Catholic Church of Nigeria today. It is the challenge of Islamic militancy and fundamentalism.

Our Lady of the Rosary, the Madonna, is historically known as an unassailable champion in efforts to defeat all kinds of unjust warfare especially those mounted by Islamic fundamentalists. The Rosary is the nuclear weapon to defeat Islamic militancy. Let us not be afraid to deploy our greatest weapon in the war that is raging against Christianity in Nigeria.

Let all Nigerian Catholics join hands with the members of the Block Rosary Crusades to form a large army armed with the Holy Rosary to defeat the ever dangerous Islamic militants. Let the formidable Block Rosary Army arise and confront the enemy of our faith with our most effective weapon, namely, THE HOLY ROSARY.

1 Prosper Uzor, A Welcome Address Presented by the President of the Block Rosary Crusade Ahiara Diocese At the Event Marking the Golden Jubilee of the Block Rosary Crusade in Ahiara Diocese. At St Peter’s Catholic Church Umueleagwa Onitsha, Ezinihitte Mbaise on 14th – 16th July, 2017.

[ii] Cf. The Classic Greek Dictionary, Greek-English and English-Greek, Chicago, Il: Follett Publishing Co., 1951.

[iii] The Church has traditionally included the flight to Egypt in the list of the seven sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The full list is thus: The Prophecy of Simeon; The Flight into Egypt; The Child Jesus lost in the Temple; Mary meets Jesus carrying the cross; Mary at the foot of thee cross; Mary receives the body of Jesus; Mary witnesses the burial of Jesus.

iv Cf Grand Finale of The 1st National Marian Year & 3rd Marian Congress, 12th-14th October, 2017 Brochure, pp. 13-14

About the Author

Fr David A. Ihenacho is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara, Mbaise, and Parish Priest of Holy Ghost Parish, Omega, Obizi. He specializes in New Testament Studies. He is former Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies, Sacred Heart University, Fairfield Connecticut, USA. Fr Ihenacho has published several other books which include “The Community of Eternal Life”, Two volumes of “African Christianity Rises”, Three Volumes of “How to Read the Holy Bible as a Catholic” and many others. He is also a journalist with hundreds of essays published in newspapers, magazines and websites across the world.