Christ Unborn—THE pro-life devotion
Devotion to the unborn Christ, living in the womb of Our Lady, is a timely practice for the pro-life movement and our day.
Devotion to the unborn Christ, living in the womb of Our Lady, is a timely practice for the pro-life movement and our day.
In this chapter, Fr Coleridge tells us…
What the Incarnation added to God’s extrinsic glory
How Christ teaches us much about the Christian life through his time in the womb
Why devotion to our unborn Saviour provides a fitting and powerful devotion on Christ our Lord.
It should also be obvious that an affirmation on the humanity and dignity of Christ in Our Lady’s blessed womb is an important witness against the evils of our day.
See also Fr Coleridge’s 48 (!) heads of meditation on Our Lord in the womb.
See also:
Devotion to Christ Unborn
From
The Nine Months: The Life of Our Lord in the Womb
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1885, Preface, pp ix-xix
The place of the nine months in Our Lord’s life
The present volume, like that which preceded it, is so far complete in itself, that it embraces a distinct and separate stage in the history of the Incarnation.
Our Lord’s Life in the womb of His Blessed Mother is a part of His Infinite condescension which has more than one characteristic of its own, and which calls for a corresponding and particular devotion on our part. As the present volume reaches from the Annunciation itself to the Eve of the Nativity, it covers the whole of this unborn Life of our Lord.
It is enough for devout Christians that there exists this separate portion of our Lord’s human existence, the period of His greatest humiliation and self-abasement. It is only natural that this should at once attract our adoring homage, and that those who give themselves to the special devotion which it suggests should find themselves consoled and assisted in a wonderful degree by the practices and contemplations which belong to that devotion.
Reasons for devotion to the Christ Unborn
There are many reasons which may be assigned as special incentives to this devotion, besides the simple truths that our faith teaches us concerning it.
In the first place, it sets before us the complete interior picture of the Sacred Humanity itself, the immense treasures which constitute that fulness of grace of which we all receive, and the intense activity of the Heart and Mind of our Lord at the time of all others when no other activity was possible to Him, in the arrangements of Providence.
It was a Life almost entirely addressed to God, and the object of His infinite complacency and delight.
Moreover, it was the true foundation of all that followed afterwards, and on this account we find those Christians who entirely ignore it very generally wanting in an intelligence of the simplest truths of faith concerning the Incarnate Son of God. The Babe of Bethlehem is like any other child to them, as He was to the people of Bethlehem itself, or even to the Egyptians among whom He dwelt for a time.
The misconception leads on to others and extends to an inadequate idea of the whole Life, office, and work of our Lord, Who He is, and what He came to do.
A time wholly directed to God the Father
Again, our Lord’s Life in itself, at this time, reveals the work and office which He at once gave Himself to discharge towards His Father.
The created existence which began at the moment of the Incarnation was the greatest of the works of God. It may be considered as the crown and completion of the former great work of the creation of the universe, with all its marvellous orders of natures in various degrees of elevation and perfection in their reflection of the attributes of God. Holy Scripture speaks of our Lord as the Head and consummation of the whole creation.
He was sent indeed on earth for the redemption of mankind, and for their instruction in the manner of serving God perfectly, but as it is implied, His presence as Man added the crowning dignity to the creation as it was originally left.
Only through Him could there be that perfect intelligent and worthy service to the Creator, which no one could give to Him but a Divine Person. God’s greatness and goodness and power and beauty and majesty, as displayed in the Creation, required as their correlatives, so to speak, the most perfect intelligence, appreciation, gratitude, and praise, and these had never been rendered to Him adequately, nor could they ever be so rendered, until the moment of the Incarnation.
The Life which then began paid this homage and tribute to the immense glory of God from the very beginning, in a thousand acts of adoration and self-abasement, oblation, and thanksgiving.
The Soul of Jesus Christ was a living mirror which gave back to God the perfect representation of His glories and wonders and benefits, in an adoration of reverence, joy, and delight and gratitude which was of infinite merit and worth, because it was the homage of a Divine Person. In this consisted the gain to the glory of God which came about at the moment of the Incarnation.
Advance in the glory given to God
We may represent this truth to ourselves in this way.
Let us suppose that, in the original creation, there had been no orders of spiritual beings superior to man in intelligence, nobility, and capacity. Let us suppose that then, at a certain moment in the history of creation and the world, God had created the Holy Angels with their wonderful nature and gifts, and that they had burst suddenly into existence to give Him homage, glory, service, and gratitude, such as had been impossible for Him to receive from our feebler and narrower intelligences, our less powerful wills and duller affections.
That would have been a wonderful change, and an advance in the glory received by God from His Creation, to which nothing else could compare in its history.
But it is plain that the difference between the spiritual creation of God, with or without the whole innumerable host of the Angels in all their various ranks and hierarchies, would have been as nothing in comparison to the difference between the Creation of God without the Incarnation and the same Creation after our Lord had become a Creature.
And the difference would come to this, that now at length God could be understood and worshipped, and thanked and honoured in an ineffably adequate manner, by a created intelligence and will united to a Divine Person, and that thus at last He could have from His Creation a worship worthy of Himself.
Our faith teaches us that it was this that was brought about by the Incarnation, and that this work was complete from the very first instant of the Divine Union. This was the occupation and Life of our Lord during these nine months, when He did not begin as yet to redeem, or to atone, or to teach, in the ordinary way, as He did afterwards, but when He began from the very first moment to devote Himself to honouring and glorifying His Father by the most intense acts of love and adoration.
The eye of faith can see, in the circumstances of this stage of His Life, many holy and tender lessons of humility, obedience, silence, recollection, dependence, and other virtues. We may gather also that at the first moment of this adorable Life was made the great oblation of Himself, of which the Scripture speaks, to undergo all that had been decreed for Him to suffer in order to repair the sins of all the world before the justice of God.
But the occupation of the Sacred Heart during these long months, an occupation never since intermitted and never to cease for all eternity, was the employment of all His faculties of intelligence and affection upon the greatness and loveliness and majesty of God.
Similarities between the nine months, and the tabernacle
These nine months are the time in our Lord’s Life which seems most entirely given up to this employment. God was all in all.
Out of this life in the womb, which had no external manifestation at all, there sprang all the beauties and charities of the after stages of the Holy Infancy, the Childhood, the Hidden Life at Nazareth, the Public Ministry, the Passion, the Risen and Sacramental and Glorious Life.
It is this Life which continues now in Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God, and, in order that earth may not be without this continual and most perfect worship, He remains among us on the altar, not only to be the food and consolation of the devout souls who receive Him and live by Him, but also that from Him may rise up, day after day and night after night, as long as the world lasts, His own most loving adoration, most powerful intercession, and most intelligent praise.
In the Blessed Sacrament He lives indeed for us, but His Life there is a return to His former existence in this stage of His Infancy, only that He has added to it, in His infinite tenderness and most ingenious and long-suffering love, the marvellous communication of Himself which embodies all the choicest fruits of His Life and Passion.
We may understand in this sense also the words of our Lord in His last prayer to His Father before the Passion:
“I have glorified Thee upon earth, I have accomplished the work which Thou gavest Me to do, and now glorify Me, O Father, with Thyself with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”1
… that is, give to My Humanity the glory which belongs to Me as Thy Only-Begotten Son.
For the perfect glorification of the Father, of which our Lord speaks, must certainly include the utter self-abasement with which He began, humbling Himself even to the condition of a babe in the womb of a woman, the nearest approach to utter annihilation of self that can be conceived, as well as all the other service and homage and obedience and praise and worship of which His life was made up as it advanced.
Our Lord as the Second Adam
Thus, our Lord as the second Adam was able to humble Himself before His Creator even more than was possible to the first Adam, who came into the world a full-grown man and had no mother or father.
It would not have seemed to us strange if it had been recorded of Adam that when he first woke up into consciousness and found himself in the presence of his Creator and all the wonderful works in which his Creator chose to reflect His own greatness and power and goodness, he had been entranced in ecstatic contemplation of the marvellous world before him, and of God as revealed thereby, for the intelligence of all which he had been so wonderfully armed by the special gifts of grace with which he was endowed.
It would not have been wonderful if long days had passed before he had been able to think of anything but God, to do anything but give Him homage and glory. The intelligence and affections of the second Adam were far keener and intenser than anything that could have had place in the first father of mankind. And moreover, His soul had, from the first moment, the fulness of the Beatific Vision.
It cannot surprise us that He should have found an intense delight in this noblest occupation of His created faculties, before proceeding, when the appointed time came, to make Himself visible to mankind as the Child of Bethlehem. What but the union with a Divine Person could have been the foundation of such intensity of intellectual and affectionate contemplation?
What devotion to Christ Unborn shows us about Our Lady
Another and very momentous fruit of an intelligent devotion to this part of the Sacred Infancy is to be found in the light which it throws on the position of the Blessed Mother of our Lord in the Kingdom of her divine Son, His dependence on her and union with her in the natural order, the immensity of her graces and the supreme perfection of her virtues.
His dependence on her as her child was different from that which is ordinary, on account of His full consciousness and perfect possession and use of all His faculties of intelligence and will. It is during this period of the Nine Months that He was hers and hers alone, and that she fulfilled, if not entirely alone, at least in a supreme degree which no one could approach, the duties of the whole human race in regard of the honour and service due to Him.
St. Joseph and St. John Baptist share this office in some measure. But it is now that the preeminent greatness of the Mother of God seems to dwarf the magnificent perfections even of the highest of other saints, on account, in the first instance, of her unapproachable nearness to our Lord, her incomparable dignity as His Mother, and her unexampled faithfulness to the graces which she received, while all the time she is almost as hidden and silent as our Lord Himself.
Again, the devotion which is fed on the contemplations which belong to this stage of the history involves a constant exercise of the highest faith and is rewarded by a great increase and deepening of that most precious virtue.
Christ Unborn and Our Lady’s Magnificat
I trust that no one will blame me for having given so large a part of the present volume to an attempt to unfold the meaning of the two first Evangelical Canticles, especially the Canticle of our Blessed Lady.
This may be considered as, in one sense, the first utterance of our Lord Himself, as well as a revelation of the thoughts and affections of His Blessed Mother, which has no parallel at all in the rest of Sacred Scripture.
A great part of the commentary, in an earlier chapter, on the privileges of our Blessed Lady, will not be new to those who are acquainted with the treasures of Marian devotion to be found in the writings of St. Antonine and the Blessed Albert the Great, which contain stores of this kind that are not sufficiently resorted to in our own time.
The other chief subject contained in the present volume is the Preparation of St. Joseph for his high and peculiar office in the accomplishment of the decree of the Incarnation and all that followed on it. It has always seemed to me that the careful consideration of the scope and object of the first Evangelist in his short narrative was quite sufficient to explain whatever appears obscure in the Scriptural statement on this great subject.
Promise of meditations to advance this devotion
In order to help somewhat to the increase of devotion to our Lord while yet unborn, I have added as an Appendix a number of very short heads of meditation on His Life in the Womb, which may perhaps serve for the use of persons who are in the habit of developing for themselves subjects set before them in this concise way.
I would gladly have made these longer and more complete, but I was anxious that this volume should be in the hands of the public before the beginning of the nine weeks before Christmas, which are often devoted to these considerations by way of preparation for the better celebration of the great Feast. They are abridged from the meditations of Father Spinola, a writer who is remarkable, among others of his class, for the fulness of his meditations on the Holy Infancy in general.
For the same reason, I have anticipated the publication of this volume, which was originally intended to appear simultaneously with the third and last part of this work on the Infancy. That is now passing through the press and will, I hope, be published before the Advent season of the present year is over. May the Blessed Child of Mary vouchsafe to accept this most imperfect offering in His honour and in that of His Immaculate Mother!
H. J. C.
31, Farm Street, Berkeley Square:
Feast of St. Michael, Archangel, 1885.
From Fr Henry James Coleridge, The Nine Months
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St. John xvii.