QUEENSHIP OF MARY

Day 104: August 22

Queenship of Mary



The queenship of Mary, mother of the King of Kings, is a concept with both spiritual and political meaning. “Especially in time of crisis,” as Pius XII wrote, believers take comfort in the faith that Mary “reigns with a mother’s solicitude over the entire world.”

And intermittently throughout the Christian era, leaders have claimed an alliance with the Queen of Heaven to bolster their spiritual or secular power.   

As early as the 500s, a fresco in the Roman church of Santa Maria Antiqua depicted Mary as a crowned Byzantine ruler.

During his brief papacy from 705-707, John VII added several images of Queen Mary to Roman churches. By the 1000's, devotion to Mary as Queen had spread through Europe. The hymn “Salve Regina,” attributed to Bl. Hermann of Reichenau (d. 1054), became the anthem of the Crusaders and is still sung often in Catholic services: Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, our hope. 

In the 1100's, images of the coronation of Mary in heaven began to appear in Catholic churches and manuscripts. On the portal of Senlis cathedral, Mary is seated at Christ’s right, already crowned. Echoing ancient devotions to pagan Queens of Heaven, popular devotion to the Virgin as Queen strengthened in Europe as feudal fiefdoms ceded to royal realms with the rise of European monarchy, persisting through the Reformation and the decline of monarchy. In 1636, the Vatican began to authorize canonical coronation of Marian images such as the painting of the Madonna of Miracles in Rome, crowned in 1646. 

Inspired by the dramatic cure of a Roman woman with severe tuberculosis, Maria Morbidelli, at Lourdes during the Holy Year of 1933, Servite priest Gabriele Roschini spearheaded a movement to urge the Church to establish a liturgical feast of Mary the Queen, as it had for Christ the King during the Holy Year of 1925.

The group Pro Regalitate Mariae (For Mary’s Queenship) spread from Rome through Italy and around the world, pushing especially for Vatican action in the Jubilee Year of 1950. In 1954, which he declared a Marian Year, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical “Ad Coeli Reginam,” authorizing the feast of the Queenship of Mary on May 31.

After Vatican II, in 1969, Pope Paul VI changed the feast to an optional memorial on August 22 to improve the liturgical order of Marian feast days. The Feast of the Visitation was moved from July 2 to May 31, closer to the Annunciation, while the Feast of Mary’s Queenship was moved to the octave of the Assumption, consonant with the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, in which the final mystery, Mary’s crowning, follows that of her rising to heaven.


St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"We salute you, O full of Grace, because of your Holy Birth; we honor your Immaculate Infancy and we accompany you, O heavenly little girl, in your Presentation in the Temple."

(Spirit of Prayer, trans. Louis Caputo, New Jersey, Vocationist Fathers, 1996, p. 156)

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