The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
The honor paid to St. Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, goes back to the earliest days of the Church. Two Gospels tell of the manner of Christ’s birth, and the familiar Christmas story testifies to the Church’s conviction that He was born of a virgin. Mary was the person closest to Jesus in His most impressionable years, and the words of the Magnificat, as well as her humble acceptance of the divine will, bear more than an accidental resemblance to the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Later devotion has claimed many things for St. Mary which cannot be proved from Holy Scripture. What we can believe is that one who stood in so intimate a relationship with the incarnate Son of God on earth must, of all the human race, have the place of highest honor in the eternal life of God. A paraphrase of an ancient Greek hymn expresses this belief in very familiar words: O higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim, lead their praises, alleluia (Lesser Feats and Fasts, p. 294).
