As we prepare to celebrate the Queenship of Mary on August 22, we do well to ponder the significance of the feast. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Our Lord speaks of “a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”1 Regarding this feast, the Church acts like this householder. On the one hand, revering Mary as a queen is not a new idea. In his encyclical Ad Cæli Reginam, Pope Pius XII emphasizes that she has been venerated as Queen of Heaven “from the earliest ages.”2 Nonetheless, with that letter, the Pope was putting the feast on the liturgical calendar for the first time in 1954. Decidedly, there is something ancient here, and yet something newer still.
Ancient is the teaching that “the royal dignity of Mary rests [on] her Divine Motherhood.”3 In fact, providentially, in the times when the Chosen People had kings, the queen was never the king’s wife, as in modern royal families. In those days kings had many wives, hence the queen was always his mother! This historical reality prepared the way perfectly for Jesus. He would have no wife, but He did have a mother, who was Queen by right. As St. Alphonsus Liguori said: “Because the virgin Mary was raised to such a lofty dignity as to be the mother of the King of kings, it is deservedly and by every right that the Church has honored her with the title of Queen.”4
Pope Pius XII gives another, equally ancient motive for Mary’s queenly dignity: she has an acquired right, won by conquest in her close association with the work of salvation. Christ bought us at the price of His Precious Blood,5 so we owe allegiance to Him and to His mother, as well. She is still capable of achieving victories: “She obtains what she seeks and cannot be refused.“6 A marvelous combination: “wielding royal power, [she] is on fire with a mother’s love.”7
Indeed, the honor which we owe to Our Lady cannot be overdone and calling her “Queen” expresses her exalted place. In the words of Pope Pius IX: “she is so beautiful and perfect, and possesses such fullness of innocence and holiness, that under God a greater could not be dreamed, and only God can comprehend the marvel.”8
If the Christian people have always honored and served Mary as Queen, then why the new feast? It seems that Pope Pius XII perceived a need in modern times that had not existed before. Her queenship had been proclaimed to Christians but not to the whole world. In the 20th century, the world had already grown small in as much as explorers and missionaries had reached to the ends of the earth. Instant communication was becoming ever more possible. The whole human race had been entrusted by Christ on Calvary to Mary, as their heavenly mother, and so all men should serve her as queen. It is noteworthy that the Pontiff requested that each year on her feast day the consecration of the human race to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin should be renewed.
In similar manner, Christ had been viewed as a King from the earliest days. After all, He had come to establish His Kingdom on Earth. The mysterious earthly locus of that Kingdom is the Catholic Church, which has “the mission of announcing and inaugurating [the Kingdom] among all peoples.”9
Nonetheless, the Solemnity of Christ the King was not placed on the liturgical calendar until 1925. With the dawn of modernity, it is more natural to think of the human race as a unity, and so to remind all men that they have one Father in Heaven who sent His one Son to gather all people into one Kingdom.
At the same time, modernity has rebelled against God and against the Church in a massive and hostile way. When Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King, the Soviet Union had begun to impose its lethal, atheistic regime on large swaths of the planet. In the West, secularism was gaining steam after the unsettling ravages of the Great War. Modern evils like divorce, eugenics, and contraception were beginning to spread. The Holy Father surely wished to remind mankind that advances in technology and prosperity were no reason to seek independence from God and the Church.
Twenty-five years earlier, Pope Leo XIII had hesitated to consecrate the human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because he wondered whether it was proper to include in the consecration all those peoples who either rejected Christ or had at least not accepted Him. He decided that the whole lot, good and bad, could be included with the idea of imploring the grace of conversion for those who needed it.
Half a century later, we find Pope Pius XII following the same logic and complementing the work of his predecessors with the Feast of the Queenship of Mary and the consecration of the human race to her Immaculate Heart. He did this “cherishing the hope that through such a consecration a new era may begin, joyous in Christian peace and in the triumph of religion.”10
Finally, Heaven itself seemed to indicate that modernity needed a new focus and greater dependence on the Blessed Virgin. Pope Pius XII notes in his letter that he writes on the centenary of the declaration of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and four years after the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption. In between, she had deigned to appear at Lourdes and even more dramatically at Fatima. Although she did not appear with a crown, the piety of the faithful has placed one on her statue at Fatima since the 1940s. There seems to be no doubt that the world needs to honor Our Lady as Queen more now than ever, for we need her royal power on our side in these turbulent times.
