Mary is the mother of the King of Kings, so today we celebrate the Queenship of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth one week after we celebrated her Assumption into Heaven Body and Soul. Pope Pius XII established the feast of the Queenship of Mary in 1954. Like most doctrine and dogma declared about Mary, the faithful for centuries had been believing this before it was officially declared so by the Church.
Isaiah boldly proclaims: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” For us Christians, we see Christ as that light shining in the darkness. We see Mary doing all she can through her motherly love for us to guide us to that light.
In the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary with a greeting of Good News: Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you! That Lord was with Mary in a special way as she consented to his will to be the Mother of our Lord. Spurred on by our faith, we see how special Mary was in the eyes of God for this task. We as Mary’s adopted sons and daughters honor her today as our Queen.
But does it really signify for us to call Mary our Queen, since perhaps queenship is a bit foreign to us in the United States, since we do not have a king or a queen. Throughout Church history, different Church fathers and theologians called Mary “Queen.” St Ephram called Mary “Lady” and “Queen” in the 4th century. St Alphonsus Liguori stated: “Because the virgin Mary was raised to such a lofty dignity as to be the mother of the King of kings, it is deservedly and by every right that the Church has honored her with the title of Queen.” Perhaps it is important for us to see today’s feast of Mary’s queenship in the context of the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary that we celebrated last week. In his 1954 encyclical To the Queen of Heaven, Pius XII noted that Mary deserves the title of Queen because she is Mother of God, because she is closely associated as the New Eve in the context of the redemption we receive through her son, and because of her power to intercede for us.
Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, pray for us.
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