QUEEN OF THE SERAPHIC ORDER

Day 217: December 15

Queen of the Seraphic Order



A few days after the Immaculate Conception, another beautiful Marian feast is being celebrated today throughout the Church. The Blessed Virgin is honored with the title of Queen! It was Pope Pius XII who instituted the liturgical feast in 1955. With this title, in reality, Our Lady had already been venerated for centuries in Christianity and in the Franciscan Order; St Francis himself designated it in one of his prayers. The Poverello (the little one) of Assisi, an authentic "knight of the Great King", as he sometimes liked to call himself, loved the Virgin with a most tender love and always poured out the most tender devotion to his Queen. St Anthony, like St Francis, was a passionate lover of Mary. In his Sermons he has beautiful words of praise for the Mother of the Lord when he often calls her: "Our Lady, our hope". St Bonaventure would say that "the Name of Mary cannot be named without the one who names it receiving some Grace".

A Franciscan, therefore, is not such if he does not love and venerate Our Lady in a very special way. In our time, an extraordinary witness to this was Fr Maximilian Kolbe, the Friar Minor Conventual, martyred in Auschwitz who entrusted his entire life to the Immaculate; he was responsible for the foundation of the "Militia of the Immaculate" (with other Conventual friars) and of the famous magazine "The Knight of the Immaculate", two works that also reveal in the terminology the total "chivalrous" trust that distinguished Fr Kolbe towards his "Queen".


St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"For every act of our spiritual life, we have the Virgin with us in a perpetual visitation, carrying out her motherly function."

(365 Days with St Justin Russolillo, comp. Shiju Chittattukara & Anil Akkara, Blessed Justin Vocationary, Florham Park, 2021, p. 118)

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