Why Do We pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary?

Catholics are known for the honor we pay to Mary, the mother of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.  We have built shrines to her in Lourdes, France; Fatima, Portugal; Guadalupe, Mexico; Czestochowa, Poland; and other places around the world where appearances of our Blessed Mother have been reported. 

Our musicians have composed many beautiful hymns about her, and the Roman Catholic Church has made two Marian dogmas part of our official beliefs: her freedom from sin (her Immaculate Conception) and her being taken up body and soul into heaven (her Assumption).  We pray to her through the rosary, the chaplet of divine mercy and many other prayers.  

During the Protestant Reformation, some of the denominations who split off from the Catholic Church rejected many Marian devotions, but we Catholics have faithfully clung to them.  Why?  

The “why” of such historic devotion to Mary, mother of our human and divine savior, is explained by the fact that she has had an active role in our redemption throughout the history of Christianity.  It was predicted in the Old Testament she would become the new sign of God’s presence among us, the Ark of the New Convenent.  

While carrying Jesus in her womb she predicted the way of the new life her son would offer us.  And in sharing his bodily existence in heaven she became a sign of our future destiny.  All this is in sacred Scripture, if “you have eyes that see, ears that hear and lips that pray” with Mary and her son’s church.

Mary is the Ark of the New Convenent.   The building of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris began in 1163.  It took more than 100 years to complete.  It was dedicated to Our Lady and a statue of her adorns the left portal on the front entrance of the cathedral.  Above her head is a sculpture of the Ark of the Covenant.  The symbolism is obvious and meaningful.  The Ark was a sign of God’s presence with his chosen people.  It contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai together with a pot containing some of the manna sent by God from which the Jews wondering in the desert made bread.  

At God’s command, Moses constructed a tent to be a tabernacle for the Ark.  Over this tabernacle God sent a cloud at each place they camped in the desert.  Thus the Ark was a sign of his presence with his people and his will to feed them and to give them a holy way of life and eventually a homeland.  That was God’s covenant promise.

Before that Ark Moses prayed and received God’s instructions at critical moments of their journey.  The Jews for their part of the covenant were to follow Moses and keep God’s commandments.   The Old Testament is the story of how well they did and didn’t keep their part of the covenant.  But God never abandoned his people and he finally prepared a more perfect covenant and a more perfect tabernacle and Ark with the womb of a young Jewish maiden, Mary of Nazareth, to whom he sent his only begotten son, Jesus.  As Isaiah prophesied, “... the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall call him Emmanuel (God is with us).”  

Mary predicted the new way of life Jesus would offer us. Three weeks ago, the Gospel for Sunday was for the feast of the Assumption.  It told us what Mary did right after she accepted God’s gift of motherhood by the power of his Holy Spirit. She hurried to visit her elderly cousin Elizabeth in the hill country west of Jerusalem. Mary had learned from the angel that Elizabeth, though past child-bearing age, was also strangely six months pregnant with her first child, St. John the Baptist, “for nothing is impossible with God.”  Elizabeth recognized Mary as “the mother of my Lord,” noting the child in her own womb had leapt for joy.

One thousand years before, King David had recovered the Ark of the Covenant in that same hill country after the Philistines had taken it in battle.  He danced it into Jerusalem, leaping for joy.  Now Mary responds to Elizabeth with a hymn that we today call the Magnificat.  She thanks God for blessing her, a lowly servant.  She proclaims him as a God who lifts up the lowly while he casts down the mighty.  He feeds the hungry while the wealthy and powerful often feel empty and miss God’s presence in their lives.  Her message will be preached and expanded by her divine son, Jesus.  He will promise us, his followers, to be with us always until the end of time.

Mary, assumed body and soul into heaven, is a sign and a promise that we too will be with her and with her son in heaven.  Preaching on the feast of the Assumption, Bishop Robert Barron, whom I watched on YouTube, said that being assumed into heaven does not mean that Mary went “up, up, and away.” She is in heaven united to her son and to the Trinity but is only a prayer away from the people of his church on earth. And all of us who die with faith and hope in Christ will share like Mary a different state of being, united with Jesus our savior and with her and all the saints whom we have asked to pray for us. But of them all, Mary seems to have the most clout.  

Hail Mary full of grace ... pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].