+JMJ+ Welcome to Day 7 of the Octave of Christian Unity. In Conversation with God, volume 6 (ICWG, 6) by Fr. Francis Fernandez Carvajal, is what I’m using as a jumpstarter for this series of posts. Keywords for tonight are, well, in the title: Mary and Mother of Unity. Notes and links will be at the end of the post.
“The disciples devoted themselves with one accord to prayer with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.”
ICWG, vol. 6, p. 57.
Growing up as a young Methodist I heard very little about the Blessed Virgin Mary. After discovering the Catholic Church I began to hear about her a lot. But I didn’t know what to make of all the things I was hearing, and I made the not uncommon mistake of thinking that I didn’t need to pay much attention to all of that because all that mattered was the truly important stuff. This is an understandable mistake for a newcomer to Catholicism to make, but over the years I’ve heard plenty of Catholics mistake the Marian doctrines of the Church for lower level unnecessary (even optional) doctrines, too. I’ve heard Catholics and non-Catholics alike say, “as long as we agree on the essential things we’re all okay,” but that’s just it: we do not agree on the essentials. We don’t even agree on what the essentials are.
Continue reading “The NT shows Mary as the Ark of the Covenant”
I just discovered a treasure trove of audio: Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life is Worth Living talks in MP3 format and especially for our series on Mary, his talk on The Mother of Jesus. I’m listening to it now. In these Life is Worth Living radio talks, Archbishop Sheen is not speaking before a live audience but is, if memory serves, sitting at a desk and speaking into a microphone. The recordings would then be pressed onto discs. (Disks? I can never remember which spelling is which, and I think I’ve read conflicting things anyway.) The audio can be scratchy at times but I don’t care. I feel like he’s sitting down and talking with me. (Links and notes at the end of this post.)
Continue reading “The Mother of Jesus”
I never got to watch Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen when I was growing up. I think I’d only heard about him and I’d seen photos of him. Sometime around my conversion (give or take a few years) I saw his program, Life is Worth Living, on EWTN and realized what I’d been missing. (Video of Bishop Sheen below, links at the end of this post.)
At that time I still didn’t now what to make of Marian apparitions and it would be some years before I would dip my toe in the water. But now that I have, one apparition in particular means a lot to me. In Catholic-speak I would say I have devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. This talk by Archbishop Sheen will go some way in revealing why I like him so much and why Fatima means so much to me and not just me but countless others. And to the world, whether it knows it or not. Especially now.
Continue reading “Bishop Sheen, Fatima, and the Conscience of the West”
Contrary to what many non-Catholic Christians charge, we do not honor Mary at the expense of Jesus. We do not give her too much honor thereby taking away from the honor due her Son, as if it were some zero sum game with only so much honor to go around. “Oh, no, I’ve given too much honor to Mary, now I don’t have enough left to give Jesus, oh, no!”
Continue reading “Queen Mother, Mary and Rachel”
I watched a video about the Blessed Virgin Mary and I want to share it one with you: Mary is a Warrior Queen battling the Dragon, by Bishop Robert Barron, referring to The Woman in Revelation 12 and promised in Genesis 3:15. The video is less than 13 minutes long and well worth the time it takes to watch. (Video below, links are at the end of this post.)
Continue reading “Warrior and Queen of the Angels”
Non-Catholic Christians on Twitter ask me this question a lot: “So why do you Catholics worship Mary?”
And I answer: “We do not worship Mary.”
Non-Catholic: “You sure do seem to.”
Me: “But we don’t.”
NC: “I think you do.”
Me: “And I know we don’t.”
This can go on for as long as we can both stand it. Which usually isn’t very long. So let me address it here: The Catholic Church does not consider the Blessed Virgin Mary to be someone to be worshiped. She is someone to honor, someone we have great, deep, abiding affection for, someone who knew and knows the Lord better than any other human person alive.
Continue reading “For the thousandth time, we Catholics do NOT worship Mary”In the previous post I shared a little something about one of my new used books, The Mother of God: Art Celebrates Mary, but I didn’t have time to do much more than mention it. Tonight I want to begin looking inside it and I’ll share that with you. I can’t reproduce the works from the book without violating copyright, but I’ll share what I can find in the public domain where possible. (Links at the end of this post.)
Continue reading “Madonna and Child, some favorite paintings”Just watched an episode of Catholic Answers Live with Elizabeth Lev talking about her latest book, How Catholic Art Saved the Faith. Oh, my goodness, I’m enjoying this interview. When they were talking about Caravaggio I had tears in my eyes. Still do. (Video below. Links at the end of this post.)
Continue reading “Beauty: Catholic Art vs Iconoclasm Past and Present”I wonder when I’ll get used to having anything delivered on Sunday. This time it was a used book: Purest of All Lilies: The Virgin Mary in the Spirituality of St. Faustina, by Fr. Donald Calloway, MIC. (Links at the end of this post.) The back cover reads that “the Virgin Mary is a spiritual mother of St. Faustina and us” and that the book is an “in-depth study of the very special relationship between the Virgin Mary and St. Faustina.”
Continue reading “Purest of All Lilies”“Before Holy Communion I saw the Blessed Mother inconceivably beautiful. Smiling at me She said to me: ‘My daughter, at God’s command I am to be in a special and exclusive way your Mother; but I desire that you, too, in a special way, be My child” (Diary, 1414).
Fr. George Kosicki, CSB, quoted on the back cover of Purest of All Lilies.
It’s a bit of a long ramble tonight. Sorry, I didn’t have time to make it shorter. (Hiya, Pascal!) ;)
I don’t know how many of my readers are Catholic and how many aren’t. I assume most are but I wonder. I don’t even know how many actual readers I have. Probably a fraction of those who “follow” me ever get around to reading anything I’ve written. Well, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing, and write as if I’m addressing fellow Catholics or someone who is at least interested in Catholicism. And since this is supposed to be a post about the Blessed Virgin Mary (in the Something About Mary Every Day In May series), tonight I will write about one of my favorite Marian topics: the Rosary. Eventually. ;) Here goes.
When I was a young woman, fresh out of high school and no longer expected to accompany (I used to like that word) my family to church on Sundays, I began to search. I didn’t know what I was searching for, but I knew there had to be something. There had to be some way to know more. More about the reality, truth, the universe, more about how Christianity was supposed to work. No one could ever answer when I asked these things at home or at Sunday School or anywhere else. But I knew that someone somewhere had answers, to my questions, to my deepest longings, and I was determined to find that someone and get my answers, once and for all.
Continue reading “A longish ramble about my longish rambling, the Church, the Rosary, and other things”
Mary is the antidote for the crisis of womanhood we find ourselves facing. The Marian Option is not like the many other options being written about now, based on saints and noble persons. Because Mary is not like any other saint or noble person. Mary is the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Full of Grace, Mother of Mercy, the Queen Mother of the King of the Universe. Those are some pretty important titles. And Mary is a pretty important Woman. (Ahem. That’s a deliberate echo of the Woman in Genesis, the Gospel of John, and the Apocalypse, also by John, the Beloved Disciple. More on that in posts about another book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary.)
“God really sends the antidote to the problem of each era…What we’re really facing in the culture today is a crisis of womanhood, so in light of that it makes perfect sense that our Lady would be the antidote to that. Those who have devotion to her, who are striving to be like her, would be the ones that can renew the culture based on the kinds of destruction we’re seeing in western civilization.”
Carrie Gress on Women of Grace. (1) talking about her book, the Marian Option. (2)
Watch the video here on the blog for the rest of that interview. Other links follow the end of this post.
Continue reading “Mary is the Antidote for This Crisis of Womanhood”
Catholic Heart and Mind 