Mary’s special gifts help her witness to Christ, Mary: Day 038

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 3:30 am by Pete Socks

Mary’s special gifts help her witness to Christ, Mary: Day 038 2015-08-22T06:18:09-05:00 Pete Socks

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Mary’s special gifts help her witness to Christ

Blessed John Henry Newman considers how Mary’s special gifts, and her special dignity in the Church, are necessary for her to bear proper witness to her Son.

If the Mother of God is to bear witness to Emmanuel, she must be necessarily more than the Mother of God. For consider: A defense must be strong in order to be a defense; a tower must be, like that Tower of David (which is one of her titles), “built with bulwarks”; “a thousand bucklers hang upon it, all the armor of valiant men” (see Sg 4:4).

It would not have sufficed, in order to bring out and impress on us the idea that God is man, had his mother been an ordinary person. A mother without a home in the Church, without dignity, without gifts, would have been, as far as the defense of the Incarnation goes, no mother at all. She would not have remained in the memory or the imagination of men. If she is to witness to and remind the world that God became man, she must be on a high and eminent station for the purpose. She must be made to fill the mind, in order to suggest the lesson.

When she once attracts our attention, then, and not till then, she begins to preach Jesus. “Why should she have such prerogatives,” we ask, “unless he is God? And what must he be by nature, when she is so high by grace?”

This is why she has other prerogatives besides, namely, the gifts of personal purity and intercessory power, distinct from her maternity. She is personally endowed so that she may perform her office well; she is exalted in herself so that she may minister to Christ.
—Blessed John Henry Newman, “The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son”

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .
Why is it necessary for Mary to “attract our attention”? How do her special gifts enable her to bear testimony to Jesus?

CLOSING PRAYER
From a prayer of St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Grant, O blessed one, by the grace you found, by the privilege you merited, by that mercy to which you gave birth, that the One who, through you, came down to take part in our infirmity and misery may also, through your intercession, make us take part in his happiness and glory.

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A Year with Mary

Blessed John Henry Newman

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