St. Louis de Montfort encourages us to give Mary EVERYTHING, especially our merits that we win from our sacrifices and our specific prayers. At first, we are hesitant to do this, right? How many of us read this and was taken aback? I WAS! But I LOVE the analogy St. Louis gives us. He says, “It is as if a peasant, wishing to gain the friendship and benevolence of the king, went to the queen and presented her with a fruit which was his whole revenue, in order that she might present it to the king. The queen, having accepted the poor little offering from the peasant, would place the fruit on a large and beautiful dish of gold, and so, on the peasant’s behalf, would present it to the king. Then the fruit, however unworthy in itself to be a king’s present, would become worthy of his majesty because of the dish of gold on which it rested and the person who presented.”
Mary is never outdone in generosity. When we give her our trust and our whole heart, she is going to take care of us and our loved ones, well beyond anything that we can imagine or pray for!
But I want to focus on this point that Mary is able to take the good things we give them and make them more perfect. What is it about Mary that makes her able to perfect our offerings? SHE IS FREE FROM SIN. Her soul is pure, beautiful, and free from the stain of sin; free from the stain of selfish motives, half-hearted prayers. So, when she presents us and our intentions to God, God is pleased with them because he is pleased by her humility. She is free from sin because of her Immaculate Conception. Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin. Once again, Mary is free from sin. She never sinned. But she was still a creature, subject to emotions and temptations, the difference is she just always chose to follow God perfectly.
Christ’s work of Salvation, the work that he performed through the events of Holy Week, was all a free gift bestowed to the whole human race. Sin entered the world through Adam and Eve and the possibility of heaven had been closed to humans. Sin brought death; so Christ comes to give us the GIFT of himself so to conquer sin and death, making it possible for us to be united back to the Father.
If Christ wants to bestow gifts upon us, how much more does he wish to bestow gifts on His Most Blessed Mother? That is the nature of being a son - to honor your parents and gift them with your love and affection.
This union between Christ and Mary is similar, but also very different from the average mother/son union. Christ, being God, dwelling in existence in the Trinity before He became flesh, had the unique ability to CHOOSE his Mother; to choose the woman who would bear Him to the world.
You see, the Son existed before His mother and he was able to choose the mother that would be best for him. Further, he was able to bestow on this woman all the gifts he would wish as well; there is no limit to God’s giving power.
One of the gifts that Christ gave to his Mother was at her conception: it is known as the Immaculate Conception. Many people think this refers to Christ’s conception in the Virginal womb of Mary; but indeed it refers to MARY who was conceived naturally by her parents, Anne and Joachim. Christ chose to give his gift of salvation to His mother at the moment of her conception - she was “conceived without sin”. When her soul was created, Christ, in union with His Heavenly Father, kept her free from Original Sin (the sin that we inherit from Adam and Eve; all humans are born with this sin on our soul).
This teaching of the Church, that Mary was conceived without sin, also applies to her whole life. She was sin-less. In the gospel account of the Angel appearing to Mary and announcing that she would conceive a son , the Angel first greets Mary as “full of grace.” “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). These words refer to an abundance of grace that is apart of Mary’s very nature. A theologian and professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Mark Miravalle, says, “It is true that no person with a fallen nature could possess a fullness of grace, a perfection of grace appropriate only for the woman who was to give God the son an identical, immaculate human nature” (emphasis added).
With the Original sin by Adam and Eve, our human nature tends toward sin. That first sin also lost grace, which was then won for us on the Cross by Jesus. He opened up the floodgates of grace, which is help from God to be like Him. Sin and grace do not exist with each other; when we sin, we lose grace. St. Paul says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue to sin that grace may abound? By no means!...For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:1-2, 14). So if Mary is full of grace, then there is no room in her soul for sin. This points to, really, the great mercy of God! In her Magnificat, Mary’s says, “My soul rejoices in God my Savior”. “To save men from their sins is a great mercy, but to save one woman from ever sinning is an even greater mercy. Not only that, sinless as she was...she was still a member of a fallen race, a race to which heaven was closed. The Savior’ redeeming act opened heaven up for her as well.” (F.J. Sheed).
Mary was kept sinless so that Christ could dwell in her. She was the first Tabernacle, destined to hold God-made man. And the Holy Spirit, also God, would overshadow her and impregnate her. She was a worthy dwelling for both the Christ and the Spirit as she was free from sin.
Fr. Gaitley briefly mentions that Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes, France and proclaimed “I am the Immaculate Conception”. I want to give you the brief story of St. Bernadette and this apparition. Bernadette Soubirous was a poor 14 year old girl in France when she received visions of a woman dressed in white with a blue sash around her waist. This woman spoke of the importance of prayer for sinner and penitence of behalf of sinners. The townspeople thought Bernadette was crazy; even her parish priest had a hard time believing her. Eventually, this woman appeared to Bernadette and asked her to unearth a very live, powerful spring underneath the Earth. Still, people thought she was mad. At one apparition in particular, Bernadette asked this woman her name (b/c that’s how poor and uneducated Bernadette was, she didn’t even know to think it was Mary) and that is when the woman said, “I am the Immaculate Conception”. This teaching was declared by the Pope only four years earlier, so there is no way that Bernadette could’ve known the depth and significance of Mary being referred to as the Immaculate Conception. When she took this to her parish priest, he wept, because he knew, he had no doubt, that it was Mary.
So this is where St. Maximilian is coming from - this is a very new teaching to the Church in his time, and it blows him away to think about it and dwell upon it. He committed his whole life to meditating on it. And that's what we'll read about from days 8 through 14!
