This is an excerpt from a homily given by Fr Henry Whisenant last Sunday at the Latin Mass chaplaincy in Withermarsh Green. The occasion was the May Crowning of Our Lady which took place after Mass.
What we do in crowning Mary our Queen today is more English even than the crowning of Charles yesterday as our king. The great myth of the Reformation is that devotion to Mary is something foreign, something continental, something alien to this land. But nothing could be further from the truth. Before the Reformation, no country in Europe had a more lively love of Our Lady, and this is something I was reminded of recently in a talk I listened to on England's Catholic history.
For instance, England was one of the first countries in the West to celebrate Our Lady's feasts in the liturgy. When the Normans came at the Conquest in 1066, they found that the English Church was already honouring the Immaculate Conception, and because this was not yet a custom in Normandy, the invaders ironically began to suppress this devotion.
This country was the first to honour the Mother of Our lady, St Anne. It is the first country in which we find evidence of the Little Office of Our Lady, a series of daily prayers used even to this day by religious and lay faithful.
This land had the greatest concentration of churches dedicated to Our Lady of anywhere in Europe. How many times do we travel through a sleepy countryside village with a medieval church and find that the church is called St Mary the Virgin?
More than this, England boasted, in Walsingham, the greatest Marian shrine in medieval Europe, and one of the four great international shrines of that era, after Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela.
And from earliest times this land was known as Dos Mariae, Our Lady's Dowry. In old English common law, a dowry was a portion given, not by the bride's family to her husband, but by the husband to his bride, in the event that he should leave her a widow, so that she should have some property in her own name by which she could sustain herself.
In like manner, England was considered to be a nation given by Christ to His mother Mary as her own dowry, her own property, to govern as she pleased. This claim was a source of great pride in this land in earlier ages. In 1399, The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote:
“The contemplation of the great mystery of the Incarnation
has drawn all Christian nations to venerate her from whom
came the first beginnings of our redemption, but we
English, being the servants of her special inheritance and
her own Dowry, as we are commonly called, ought to
surpass others in the fervour of our praise and devotion.”
And yet, is not this devotion to Our Lady in England a mere shadow now of what it once was? One of the greatest wounds of the Reformation was the turning of Christians against their own mother. One of the greatest tragedies was that the people of this land, under their rebelling rulers, not only made themselves prodigals from their Father's House – the Catholic Church – but strangers to their mother's love. They made themselves not only exiles but orphans.
The only way for this land to become Christian once again is through Mary, through recognising her whom Christ gave to us as our Mother and our Queen. Just as the magi coming to the stable in Bethlehem did not find Christ on His own, but with His Mother. Just as the soldiers at the foot of the Cross did not see Christ on His own, but in the company of His Mother.
Finally, to crown Mary today is not to take anything away from God, for to crown Mary is to praise God in His work. It is He Who made her, Who preserved her from sin, and Who chose her to be His Mother, and the spiritual mother of the human race. Without Him she would be nothing. What she is, she is through Him.
St Thomas Aquinas says, “Nothing is included in our faith except in relation to God.” In other words, there is nothing we believe about Mary that does not in some way relate to God. When we profess her purity, we say something about the uncreated holiness and purity of God. When we praise her beauty, the beauty of the chiefest of God's creatures, we say something about the uncreated beauty of God. When we give honour to the creature, we give thanks to her Creator; when we crown the Mother, we pay homage to the Son.