The Apostolic Origin of Marian Consecration

When I first heard someone speak of being “consecrated to Mary,” warning bells went off in my head. The Holy Spirit had already moved me, over the course of a year, from a complete rejection of the Church’s Marian teaching to an acceptance of Mary’s connection to me in the communion of saints, her spiritual motherhood, intercession, immaculate conception, and assumption. I came to see how these truths were either taught in Scripture or coalesced with what I found there. The thought of being “consecrated” to Mary, however, seemed completely without basis. Whenever I had heard the term consecration, it was always in reference to something – such as the bread and wine brought forward at the offertory in Mass – being consecrated to God. Wasn’t Catholic belief supposed to be rooted in Scripture and Tradition? I could find no reference to the practice in Scripture or any writings from the first centuries of the Church. It appeared to be a moot point.

That was when the example and teaching of Pope St. John Paul II opened my eyes. The Pope’s pure devotion to Christ was undeniable, as was his love of the Blessed Mother. I knew that he wouldn’t lead me astray, so when I discovered that his papal moto, “Totus Tuus,” was drawn from the words of St. Louis de Montfort’s famous text on Marian Consecration (True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary) I was open to hearing the Pope’s thought. He shared how “This treatise by De Montfort can be a bit disconcerting, given its rather florid and baroque style, but the essential theological truths with it contains are undeniable.”[1] The Pope also used the word “entrustment” as a synonym for “consecration,” connecting the practice of entrusting ourselves to Mary’s motherhood with Christ’s entrustment of the John to Mary at the foot of the Cross.[2]

What I had failed to recognize in my naivete was that when spiritual writers such as De Montfort wrote of being “consecrated” to Mary, they spoke by way of analogy. Theologically–speaking, man can only consecrate himself to God.^[3] When we pray an act of “Marian” consecration, we entrust ourselves to her heart and motherly intercession and, united with her, renew and intentionally deepen our baptismal consecration to Jesus. Jesus, and not Mary, is the goal of our action. The Pope explained how De Montfort’s teaching showed him that “Mary does bring us closer to Christ; she does lead us to him, provided that we live her mystery in Christ.”[4]

This practice of entrusting ourselves to Mary, of entering into her own interior life with Jesus, has its origin at the foot of the Cross. It is there in Scripture and Sacred Tradition – in Jesus’ act of mutually entrusting John to Mary, and Mary to John. The Apostle accepted that entrustment; “from that hour the disciple took her into idia [literally ‘his own’]” (Jn 19:26-27). John took Mary into all that was uniquely his – his home, heart, prayer, life as an apostle, etc. John already had a relationship with Jesus, but his entrustment to Mary brought him to an even deeper understanding of and surrender to the Master. You and I continually reap the fruits of John’s entrustment when we read his Gospel, his penetration into the mystery of Christ’s Person. His deep relationship with Mary did not lead John to make an idol of her; rather, their shared life was a catalyst opening his heart to understand and communicate Christ’s life and teaching in an utterly unique and profound way. This is the apostolic origin of Marian Consecration.

John’s shared life with Mary – an extension of Christ’s shared life with her – is accessible to each of us in the mystical Body of her Son. Mary is a spiritual mother who is very much alive, joined to us in the communion of saints, and acting on our behalf (see Rom 12:4-5; Heb 12:1, 22-24; Rev 5:8). Like John, our goal in entrusting our lives as disciples to Mary’s heart is to come to share her total receptivity to God – to let Christ be formed in the womb of our hearts and be born into the world through our words and actions.

Adapted from The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

 

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[1] Gift and Mystery (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 29.

[2] See Arthur Burton Calkins’ insightful study, Totus Tuus: John Paul II’s Program of Marian Consecration and Entrustment (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate, 1992).

[3] John F. Murphy, Mary’s Immaculate Heart: The Meaning of Devotion to the Immaculate Heart (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co., 1951), 100-1.

[4] Gift and Mystery, 29.

Immaculate Conception: Saved by Grace

The Immaculate Conception – our Catholic conviction that Mary was preserved from contracting original sin at her conception – is something that seems to set us apart from our Protestant brothers and sisters. The truth, however, is that it expresses a point of faith particularly dear to the Protestant Reformers: We are brought into relationship with God, or justified, not through any works or merit on our part but solely by the grace of God. Mary was saved from sin as a result of Christ’s redemptive work. . .reaching back through time to preserve her from sin and unite her soul to God from the first instance of her existence. And we Catholics have strong biblical precedents that we can share with separated brothers and sisters to help illuminate this Marian dogma.

Let’s begin with a principle that is embraced by all Christians: The realities of the New Testament far surpass their “shadows,” their prefigurements, in the Old (Heb 10:1; 8:5-6; 12:22-24). Saint Paul, for example, referred to Adam – God’s created son, the physical head of our race – as “a type of the one who was to come,” Jesus (Rom 5:14). So too, Christ is the head of a new, redeemed humanity; but in a glorious contrast to Adam: Adam was God’s son by adoption, but Christ by divine filiation. The first man was of earth, the second of heaven (1 Cor 15:45-49). “As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom 5:18). The New does not just equal, but vastly surpasses the Old; and what is true of Adam and Jesus is also true of Eve and Mary.

When we meet Eve in Scripture, she comes to us fresh from God’s creative hand. She was a daughter bearing His image and likeness (Gen 1:26; 5:3), living in intimate friendship with God. When her sin, however, placed her under the dominion of death and the devil (Gen 3:3; Wis 2:24; Eph 2:1-3; 1 Jn 5:19), God immediately spoke of another Woman – one at “enmity” with the devil – and her Seed, who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). In the Gospel of John we find Jesus referring to Mary as the prophesied Woman (2:3-4; 19:26-27), with this point reinforced in John’s Book of Revelation (12:1-5, 17). If the first woman, the “mother of all the living” (Gen 3:20), was created in God’s friendship; the biblical principle we have observed up until this point, would say that the same was true of Mary. When we turn to the annunciation narrative we find the Angel Gabriel addressing Mary exactly as we would expect – “Hail Kecharitōmenē”(Lk 1:28) – meaning one who has been, and is now, absolutely filled with the grace, the supernatural life, of God.

But how could Mary experience such freedom from Original Sin and union with God prior to Christ’s incarnation and redemptive sacrifice? It was because her Son is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rv 13:8). Jesus is a divine Person, Who offered himself to the Father “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb 9:14). His redemptive sacrifice reached forward in time to embrace us; but it also reached backward, meriting God’s mercy toward Abraham and his descendants (Heb 10:3-4; 9:24-26; 11:1-2, 17-19, 39-40).  Christ’s merits – and they alone – redeem man from the curse of the Fall. There is no supernatural life, no union with God, apart from Him, whether we are talking about the saints of the Old Covenant or the New. We can do nothing to merit this gift of divine adoption, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2:8-9). And at times, God does not even require our faith to appropriate this gift of grace – He is free to distribute His gifts however He wishes (Mt 20:15)!

We see this in the Old Testament and the New. God’s grace, given in view of the merits of Christ, cleansed the prophet Jeremiah of original sin and “consecrated” him a prophet in utero (Jer 1:5). It caused St. John the Baptist to be “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb” (Lk 1:15).  God extended this grace to Jeremiah and John to mold them for the divine work that lay ahead. He did the same for Mary when He called her to the most sublime work, the most intimate union possible between God and a creature - her divine motherhood. Jesus’ sacrifice reached back to not just cleanse Mary of original sin as in the case of Jeremiah and John, but to preserve her from even contracting that damage to our nature that inclines us toward selfishness and sin. She was saved by grace – as are we – but in the most radical way possible; and that grace consecrated her as the New Eve, the new mother of all the living!

After centuries of pondering God’s Revelation the Church came to the point where it could clearly enunciate the truth of Mary’s “Immaculate Conception” to itself and the world. It was not adding something new to the deposit of Faith (Jude 3) from the outside but clearly articulating a truth implicit since the beginning. On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX invoked his authority as the Successor of Peter to teach infallibly:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. (Ineffabilis Deus)

When the Church calls us each year to celebrate what God did for Mary, we recognize and praise what He has done for us too: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved [Christ]” (Eph 1:3–7).

Adapted from  The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

St. Joseph: First to be Consecrated to Jesus through Mary

Many mistakenly believe that the spirituality of “Marian Consecration'' only arose in the Church a few hundred years ago. Some correct them, pointing out that the practice of completely entrusting one’s discipleship to Mary’s motherly love and intercession can be seen in  surviving sermons from fifth and sixth century Africa and in the writings of St. Idelphonsus of Toledo (d. 667 A.D.), and Doctor of the Church, St. John Damascene (d. 750). It is tempting to say that Christ first established the practice when He entrusted John to Mary at the foot of the Cross, and John then “took her into idia [literally ‘his own’]” (Jn 19:28), meaning that which was uniquely his – John’s interior life, his dwelling, his apostleship. But we can actually discover this practice of uniting one’s life of discipleship to Mary’s own even earlier – to St. Joseph at the time of Christ’s incarnation.

When we meet Joseph in the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, he is described as a “just” man, dikaios in Greek (Mt 1:19). This term refers to one completely devoted to God’s law. Joseph already possessed an intimacy with God when the angel was sent to Him with the invitation to draw nearer to the divine presence. “Do not fear to take Mary your wife for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:20). Joseph, instead of breaking off his betrothal to Mary, was to formally entrust himself and his heart to her by taking her as his wife, making her mistress of his home and all that was his. This was the means that God had ordained for Joseph to be united to Jesus – this way and no other.

Joseph and Mary had contracted marriage with the intention of loving one another into ever-deeper service to the Lord. Their virginal union, far from denigrating the marital act, proclaims marriage’s ultimate fulfillment in the soul’s union with God in eternity. Joseph watched as Mary, on a daily basis, made a perfect return of herself to the Lord. She did not do so in a multiplicity of words but in quiet, daily tasks that Emmanuel, Jesus, asked of her. Joseph desired to reciprocate the Lord’s love for him by living the vocation to which he had been called; he was to be an earthly manifestation of God’s spousal love for the soul of Mary and fatherly love for Jesus. He shared Mary’s prayerful pondering of God’s word—in Scripture and the events of Jesus’s life—and reaped insights that the Spirit granted her contemplative heart. With Mary, he quietly persevered in prayer and went about the daily work that God placed before Him, loving his family and plying his trade, teaching Jesus the ways of life in Nazareth, confident that God was bringing good out of his humble offering. Joseph was at Mary’s side in joy and sorrow. He was there for Simeon’s prophecy, and together they pondered its meaning. When Jesus disappeared for three days in the temple, Joseph shared Mary’s anxiety and relentlessly searched for their Son. And as he once shared in her struggle to protect and raise Jesus to adulthood, so he now shares with Mary in the wonders of Jesus’s heavenly life.

The supernatural union of Joseph’s heart with Mary’s was supernaturally fruitful – God the Son’s chosen means for entering the world and bringing about our redemption. All that Joseph did was for love of Jesus, by God’s grace, and accomplished in union with Mary. That is the spirituality of Marian Consecration! Like Joseph we ask the Holy Spirit to knit our hearts to Mary’s in the communion of saints, so that we can make a perfect gift of ourselves to Jesus. It is the same spirituality to which Jesus invited the Apostle John as he stood with Mary at the foot of the Cross (Jn 19:25-28). It is the same spirituality to which He invites you and me today. 

Saint Joseph, pray that like you, we receive the courage to say “yes” to His invitation and take Mary, as you did, to our own hearts (Mt 1:20-24) For like you, we want to share in her immaculate heart’s complete consecration to Jesus. “Blessed are the pure [or ‘immaculate] in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8).

 

Adapted from The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).