What Our Lady’s perpetual virginity has done for the Church – and for marriage
The fruits of her example are evident to anyone with eyes to see.
The fruits of her example are evident to anyone with eyes to see.
Editor’s Notes
Merry Christmas from Father Coleridge Reader and The WM Review!
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How Suarez adds that Mary’s perpetual virginity established the perfect example for those who remain virgins for the sake of the Kingdom
That this truth sustains the Church’s elevation of chastity against worldly sensuality and Hell’s rage
Why virginity’s honour protects marriage’s sanctity and enables all Christian works of devoted charity
He shows us that Mary’s perpetual virginity is not merely a Marian privilege but the foundation of Christian society’s regeneration and the consecration enabling both celibacy and holy matrimony.
You can hear an abridged and adapted version of parts of this chapter here, which featured as part of The WM Review’s series Preparing for Total Consecration to the Blessed Virgin According to the Method of St Louis de Montfort:
The Nativity of Our Lord
The Thirty Years
Chapter I
St. Luke i. 6, 7; Vita Vitæ Nostræ, § 8.
Burns and Oates, 1915
(For Christmas)
What happened at the first Christmas? Did Our Lady suffer the pangs of childbirth?
Here’s why Our Lady’s perpetual virginity is a necessary Christmas truth
What Our Lady’s perpetual virginity has done for the Church – and for marriage
Teaching of Suarez
These are the reasons given by the Angelical Doctor for the truth [of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady] which, as has been seen, rests primarily on the words of Sacred Scripture and on the tenderest and noblest instincts of the Christian heart, as expressed in the tradition of the Church.
The great commentator Suarez adds another of his own, to the value of which every age of the history of the Kingdom of our Lord bears witness. Suarez says that it was becoming that the counsel of virginity should be most perfectly observed, not only by our Lord, but by His Mother, that she might be the perfect example of that heavenly virtue to all the virgins of the Gospel.
Something of this sort has been already touched on in the former volume, in which the prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin have been spoken of. The history of the Christian age bears abundant witness to the truth, that one of the most precious achievements of the Church upon earth has been the raising, so to say, of the standard of holy Virginity.
It is an achievement against which the world, the sensuality of man, and the hatred of Hell to all that specially honours God and benefits mankind, rage most furiously. It cost the Church the labour of centuries to establish in the world around her the honour of woman and the Divine principle of the unity and indissolubility of marriage.
Example of our Blessed Lady
The Catholic Church accomplished this victory mainly by setting on high in honour the principle of chastity, continence, virginity.
It is this principle that has furnished her altars and sanctuaries with the holy line of her priests, which has filled her cloisters and sent forth her armies of devoted souls to labour in the vast field of charity to their neighbour or of missionary work among the heathen. All the great works which she has initiated and established, all that has been so marvellously fruitful of glory to God and of blessing to men in the way of works of piety, self-sacrifice, learning, zeal, and the like, has been the work of the “chaste generation” of which the Catholic Church has been so prolific.
But on no single point of the history of the Incarnation can we fasten more securely as being the point from which all these blessings and glories flow, the fact in which their principle and essence are embodied, as on the perpetual Virginity of the Mother of God. It is this that makes the doctrine of which we are speaking so important, not simply for the honour of our Lord and His Blessed Mother, but for the regeneration and elevation of human society.
It is most true, as Suarez implies, that this holy principle is found in its perfection in the life of our Lord Himself. No one without deliberate blasphemy could think of Him otherwise than as the purest of the pure. But the Sacred Humanity, united to the Divine Person of the Eternal Son of God, might be thought to be too far above us to be the model of our imitation in this respect. It might have been thought that the following of Him in His Virginity was at least held out only to those who share His Priesthood, administer at His altars, who preach His Word, and are the Pastors of His flock.
But the example of Mary has opened this beautiful path of holy Virginity to the weaker sex as well as to the stronger, and to the whole Christian people as well as to the priests of the Church. The food of virgins is the Sacred Humanity itself, taken from the most pure flesh of Mary, and imparted to all in Holy Communion. Her Virginity is the natural condition, it may also be said, of the execution of the Incarnation, but it has moreover lit up the whole world which the Incarnation has created anew and elevated to Heaven.
If we could imagine it otherwise, if the Helvidian account were true, it would be difficult to see how the fruits of the Incarnation could have been what they have been in the regeneration of the society of men.
Importance of the truth
There is thus more than meets the mind at first sight, in this reason for the truth of which we are speaking which has been added by Suarez.
It is easy also to understand how this truth has been made the constant object of assault by the powers of Hell, especially when they have been labouring to subvert the influence of the Church and of our Lord in the world. It is clear enough that if the statements which occur in the New Testament concerning this subject are fairly and impartially examined, they must serve to vindicate the truth before us, although the truth was too well known and too axiomatic, in the days of the earliest Christian writers, to have been founded on any such examination.
Notwithstanding the plain witness of the New Testament, there has seldom been wanting, especially since the rise of Protestantism and the consequent progress of the restoration of Paganism in the world, abundance of critics who have exerted all their ingenuity to persuade themselves and others that this truth is an invention of mistaken piety and reverence, and to support their foregone conclusion by arguments which are contradictory to the simplest canons of their own art.
For the craving of man for sensual indulgence is invincible. It may be conquered by the truth and graces of the Gospel Kingdom in one generation after another, but it is always rooted in the degenerate mind and heart, always ready to put forth new shoots, and to claim again its ancient dominion over the world. Never has it been more active in its efforts to sway legislation in its own favour than in the times in which we live, in which we have seen the licence of divorce and the abolition of the sacredness of the state of matrimony introduced into more than one land calling itself not only Christian but Catholic.
A divorce law once passed, and it takes but a few years to familiarize the people with the old Pagan view of the marriage tie. In the system of the Church, it is the religious consecration of purity which supports the sanctity of marriage, and secures the existence of the Christian home. It is the honour of virginity that makes marriage honourable, and holy, and indissoluble, not simply by the command of God, but by the enlightened, intelligent, and purified feelings of men, and of this consecration the one great model, and pattern, and mother, and defender, is the Immaculate Mother of God, ever a Virgin.
You can find an abridged and adapted recording of this chapter here, which featured as part of The WM Review’s series Preparing for Total Consecration to the Blessed Virgin According to the Method of St Louis de Montfort:
The Nativity of Our Lord
What happened at the first Christmas? Did Our Lady suffer the pangs of childbirth?
Here’s why Our Lady’s perpetual virginity is a necessary Christmas truth
What Our Lady’s perpetual virginity has done for the Church – and for marriage
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