Totus Tuus

Saint Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary has proven an instrumental guide toward holiness. Its wisdom keeps revealing itself, and every time I return to De Montfort's consecration instructions, I learn more about the profound relationship that Jesus intends for us to have with his mother, the gateway to heaven, the mystical channel, the holy city of God, the humble Virgin Mary. According to De Montfort's Marian consecration, Mary is the "safest, easiest, shortest and most perfect way of approaching Jesus" (para. 55). De Montfort writes:

Mary is the earthly paradise of Jesus Christ the new Adam, where he became man by the power of the Holy Spirit, in order to accomplish in her wonders beyond our understanding. She is the vast and divine world of God where unutterable marvels and beauties are to be found. She is the magnificence of the Almighty where he hid his only Son, as in his own bosom, and with him everything that is most excellent and precious. (para. 6)

Jesus's special relationship with his mother is one we all ought to emulate, and yet, it is this devotion to Mary that causes so many non-Catholics to shiver with perturbance. Why would we offer a special reverence to Mary when Jesus is the one true conduit to heaven? Besides the scriptural answer---that Mary is Jesus's supra-abundant gift to us and final command from the Cross when he says, "Behold thy mother" (John 19:27)---there are also many other graces that Mary offers to those who revere her and follow her humble example. De Montfort acknowledges these fears of Marian devotion when he writes, "Not that Mary is greater than Jesus, or even equal to him---that would be an intolerable heresy. But in order to bless Jesus more perfectly we should first bless Mary" as scripture affirms when Elizabeth offers a venerating exclamation: "O Mary, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus" (para. 95) [see Luke 1:28; Luke 1:42].

As a mother myself, I have developed a special admiration for and kinship with Mary. I have experienced the kind of silencing and marginalization that the world offers to mothers---what silly women to dedicate themselves to children! How capricious, juvenile, and unfocused these women become when they spend so much time with little children locked in their houses all day long! What a waste of a college degree to give your life over to the raising of children! Stupid, silly, inconsequential, worthless, foolish mothers! I've heard it all, and it is so hurtful. But these snide, sneering, dismissive accusations are similar to the way that the vast Christian world treats Jesus's mother. Her image has been defaced and/or removed from Christian houses of worship. The scripture passages that esteem Mary are glossed over and forgotten. Her role as a mother to Jesus is excised as something incidental, inconsequential, and irrelevant to Jesus's ministry.

How many mothers feel similarly dismissed and underrated in our culture today? The role of the mother has been demoted to inferior status, and yet, the work of a mother is the most formative and consequential work there is in the development of the human person, in the development of a soul, in the path of a child toward holiness and sainthood. Mothers are called to be nurturers, and this nurturing occurs in the privacy of the home, removed and separated from the public arena. There is no external glory in the work of a mother; her work remains concealed and hidden. But her work is fruitful no less. As St. Louis de Montfort articulates, "Jesus gave more glory to God his Father by submitting to his Mother for thirty years than he would have given him had he converted the whole world by working the greatest miracles. How highly then do we glorify God when to please him we submit ourselves to Mary, taking Jesus as our sole model" (para. 18).

St. Louis de Montfort offers harsh condemnation for those who have so blatantly and carelessly disregarded the role of the mother: "An infallible and unmistakable sign by which we can distinguish a heretic, a man of false doctrine, an enemy of God, from one of God's true friends is that the heretic and the hardened sinner show nothing but contempt and indifference for our Lady. He endeavors by word and example, openly or insidiously---sometimes under specious pretexts---to belittle the love and veneration shown to her" (para. 30). The devil has a specific purpose in inciting the world toward a hatred of Mary---she is the most potent threat to his demonic schemes; Mary, the gentle mother, always points to Christ---she will never lead us astray---she will always gently guide us toward her Son when she says in the Gospel of John, "Do exactly as He tells you" (John 2:5). In the words of De Montfort: "God has established only one enmity---but it is an irreconcilable one---which will last and even go on increasing to the end of time. That enmity is between Mary, his worthy Mother, and the devil, between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and followers of Lucifer" (para. 52). Given the central role of Mary in salvation history, it follows that satan and his minions would seek to estrange humans from the powerful protectress of Jesus's mother who mightily protects anyone who seeks her intercession. Mary is the New Covenantal woman, the New Eve, the woman who crushes the head of satan through her unwavering and perfect fidelity to her son. "What Lucifer lost by pride Mary won by humility. What Eve ruined and lost by disobedience Mary saved by obedience. By obeying the serpent, Eve ruined her children as well as herself and delivered them up to him. Mary by her perfect fidelity to God saved her children with herself and consecrated them to his divine majesty" (para. 53).

De Montfort outlines five principles of devotion to Mary. (1) Christ must be the ultimate end of all devotions. (2) We belong to Jesus and Mary as their slaves. (3) We must rid ourselves of what is evil in us. (4) It is more humble to have an intermediary [in Mary] with Christ. (5) It is difficult to keep the graces received from God.

Any gift, offering, petition, or prayer that I offer to God cannot help but be tainted by my human sinfulness. The effects of sin stain, soil, and sour even my most earnest of efforts. But, when I make offerings to God through the intercession of Mary, she purifies my intentions and thereby offers them to God in purity. "Our best actions are usually tainted and spoiled by the evil that is rooted in us. When pure, clear water is poured into a foul-smelling jug, or wine into an unwashed cask that previously contained another wine, the clear water and the good wine are tainted and readily acquire an unpleasant odor....Our actions, even those of the highest virtue, show the effects of it" (para. 78). Mary's hands "purify everything they touch" (para. 146); and she increases our good works and good intentions "by adorning them with her own merits and virtues" (ibid.).

St. Louis de Montfort's description of Mary serves as a paragon for all Christian mothers. Would that we all were conformed to this model of human motherhood:

She is kind, she is tender, and there is nothing harsh or forbidding about her, nothing too sublime or too brilliant. When we see her, we see our own human nature at its purest. She is not the sun, dazzling our weak sight by the brightness of its rays. Rather, she is fair and gentle as the moon, which receives its light from the sun and softens it and adapts it to our limited perception. She is so full of love that no one who asks for her intercession is rejected no matter how sinful he may be. (para. 89)

Her ten principal virtues are: deep humility, lively faith, blind obedience, unceasing prayer, constant self-denial, surpassing purity, ardent love, heroic patience, angelic kindness, and heavenly wisdom. (para. 108) 

Authentic devotion to Our Lady bears good fruit. True devotion is "interior, trustful, holy, constant, and disinterested" (para. 105). It gives us courage to oppose the injustices of the world; it gives us the courage to be mocked, ridiculed, ostracized, and persecuted in the name of Jesus through Mary. "It gives us the courage to oppose the fashions and maxims of the world, the vexations and unruly inclinations of the flesh and the temptations of the devil" (48). And when a person consecrated to Mary sins, she or he is able to reach out to Mother Mary who will guide her daughter or her son gently, lovingly, and mercifully back to the source of love and mercy, Jesus Christ.

A person consecrated to Mary can expect "hard battles to fight and serious obstacles to overcome" (para. 152), to which De Montfort asks, "Why is it...that devoted servants of this good Mother are called upon to suffer much more than those who serve her less generously? They are opposed, persecuted, slandered, and treated with intolerance..." (para. 153)  De Montfort replies, "[I]t is quite true that the most faithful servants of the Blessed Virgin, being her greatest favorites, receive from her the best graces and favors from heaven, which are crosses" (para. 153). But in her goodness, Mary will cover these crosses with the "honey of her maternal sweetness and the unction of pure love" (para. 154). As such, we must always think of Mary, ponder her compassion, emulate her motherly example, strive toward her holiness, and humble ourselves to her perfect will toward Christ fully expecting burdens and hardships, but with Mary, these crosses will be lighter to carry. "Where Mary is present, the evil one is absent" (para. 166).

Not only is Mary the New Eve; but she is also the New Eden as her womb was pure and fertile enough to harbor and nurture Jesus, the real Tree and Fruit of Life. Like Jesus who humbly and willingly enclosed himself into her paradisiacal womb, we too ought to seek Mary's fruitful protection.

In this divine place [i.e., in Mary] there are trees planted by the hand of God and watered by his divine unction which have borne and continue to bear fruit that is pleasing to him. There are flower-beds studded with a variety of beautiful flowers of virtue, diffusing a fragrance which delights even the angels....In this place [i.e., in Mary], the air is perfectly pure....There the river of humility gushes forth from the soil, divides into four branches and irrigates the whole of this enchanted place. These branches are the four cardinal virtues [i.e., prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice]." (para. 261)

"Mary is enclosed. Mary is sealed. The unfortunate children of Adam and Eve driven from the earthly paradise, can enter this new paradise only by a special grace of the Holy Spirit which they have to merit" (para. 263). This merit comes to us through total consecration to Jesus through Mary. "Through her, Jesus came to us; through her we should go to him" (para. 85). St. Louis de Montfort's Total Consecration urges us to do "everything through Mary, with Mary, in Mary, and for Mary, in order to do it more perfectly through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus, and for Jesus" (para. 257). Amen.