Dear Parishioners of Mary Immaculate and Saint Rose, Yesterday, August 22, we celebrated the Memorial of the Queenship of Mary, in which Mary is crowned the Queen of Heaven and of Earth. This is the pinnacle of all the celebrations in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Last Saturday, we celebrated her Assumption body and soul into Heaven. Now we honor her as Queen. This honor may disturb our American sensibilities. We are used to electing those who govern us. It is easy to see this as some holdover from the outdated monarchies of Europe. The idea of having a king who was chosen by birth rather than elected was based on the belief that God provided the king to rule. Getting away from a political context it’s more like this: As we go through our lives, we get to choose our own friends, but God chooses our family for us through birth. The title of Queen is the highest earthly honor we can bestow on the Virgin Mary. We recognize that she is given by God to us as our Mother. Giving her the title of Queen is our feeble human effort to honor and glorify her. When we place flowers before the statue of the Blessed Mother in our Church, when we light candles or place a crown on her head during May, all of these things give us a way to show her love and honor. Mary doesn’t need these things, but we need to be able to do them. When we speak of the things of Heaven, we are limited to the things we know on Earth. They all fall short of the glory that exists in the Heavenly realms, but we do the best we can do to understand the mystery of these things. So when we celebrate the Queenship of Mary, we are making an effort to honor her for giving birth to the Son of God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. We know that the Virgin Mary was born of humble people. She was not great and mighty here on Earth. We know she was a humble and prayerful maiden who accepted the will of God for her. We also know that Jesus, from the Cross, gave her to all of us to be our advocate and Mother. We know that Jesus took her body and soul to the Heavenly Kingdom. There she is honored by all the angels and saints as the Mother of God and Mother of us all. We picture this honor as Mary crowned with a crown of gold and jewels because that is the most precious thing we know on Earth. The gold is just shiny metals and the jewels just colorful pebbles in comparison to the glory that surrounds Mary in Heaven, but it is the best we can do to honor her on Earth. Or perhaps the best honor we can give her is to look to her example of doing God’s will, entrusting ourselves into her care, accepting her love for us and begging her powerful intercession on our behalf.
Blessed Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth. . . pray for us.
Msgr. Cox Coronation of the Virgin Mary, middle shrine of the Altar of Our Lady in St. Jodokus Church, Ottenau, Germany.