Virgo Potens

Behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Luke 1:48 The Month of the Holy Rosary October 1st

Having enclosed ourselves, dear Subscribers, in the garden of Mary’s sorrows with Fr. Faber for the month of September, beginning tomorrow, on October 1st, we will be exploring the mysteries of both the Angels and the Holy Rosary. How much we have learned, and how much more there is to learn about the greatness of our Lady’s sorrows! One month has not been nearly enough to explore this garden, and we will return to visit again. In the meantime, please continue to visit Virgo Potens for a new post each day. Also, please explore our sister channel Defende nos in proelio where we post Traditional Catholic prayers daily. God bless you!

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) So, by her dolors, He has hung about her a complete revelation of the great mystery of suffering. He has illuminated in her that pregnant doctrine, that suffering is the only true conclusion to be drawn from love, where divine things are concerned. She had no sin of her own for which to suffer. She had no penalty to pay for the fall of Eve. She was not included in the law of sin. She was, in the order of heaven’s purposes, foreseen before the decree permitting sin. She also had no world to redeem. All her dear blood, the sweet fountain and well-head of the Precious Blood, could not have washed away one venial sin, nor saved the soul of one new-born babe who had no actual sin at all to expiate. She was simply immersed in an unspeakable sea of love, and therefore the deluge of sorrow passed over her soul, and into it, by right, just as the great turbulent rivers run down unquestioned into the sea. Her sufferings close the mouth of complaint forever. With sweet constraint and unanswerable persuasiveness they impose silence on all the suffering children of our heavenly Father. The saints can doubt no longer that suffering is the one grand similitude of Christ. We too in our extreme lowness, whose patience is of so thin a texture that it was threadbare almost when it was new, learn, not to be silent only, but to bear with gentleness, and even wistfully to think the time may come when we shall actually love, that suffering which seems to be the golden coin in which love repays our love. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Re-posted due to missing text. ACT of Consecration to ST. MICHAEL the ARCHANGEL O most noble Prince of the Angelic Hierarchies, valorous warrior of Almighty God and zealous lover of His glory, terror of the rebellious angels, and love and delight of all the just angels, my beloved Archangel SAINT MICHAEL, desiring to be numbered among thy devoted servants, I, today offer and consecrate myself to thee, and place myself, my family, and all I possess under thy most powerful protection. I entreat thee not to look at how little, I, as thy servant have to offer, being only a wretched sinner, but to gaze, rather, with favorable eye at the heartfelt affection with which this offering is made, and remember that if from this day onward I am under thy patronage, thou must during all my life assist me, and procure for me the pardon of my many grievous offenses, and sins, the grace to love with all my heart my God, my dear Savior Jesus, and my Sweet Mother Mary, and to obtain for me all the help necessary to arrive to my crown of glory. Defend me always from my spiritual enemies, particularly in the last moments of my life. Come then, o Glorious Prince, and succor me in my last struggle, and with thy powerful weapon cast far from me into the infernal abysses that prevaricator and proud angel that one day thou prostrated in the celestial battle. Saint Michael, defend us in our daily battle so that we may not perish in the last Judgment. Amen. St. Michael, the Archangel, pray for us.

ACT of Consecration to ST. MICHAEL the ARCHANGEL O most noble Prince of the Angelic Hierarchies, valorous warrior of Almighty God and zealous lover of His glory, terror of the rebellious angels, and love and delight of all the just angels, my beloved Archangel SAINT MICHAEL, desiring to be numbered among thy devoted servants, I, today offer and consecrate myself to thee, and place myself, my family, and all I possess under thy most powerful protection. I entreat thee not to look at how little, I, as thy servant have to offer, being only a wretched sinner, but to gaze, rather, with favorable eye at the heartfelt affection with which this offering is made, and remember that if from this day onward I am under thy patronage, thou must during all my life assist me, and procure for me the pardon of my many grievous offenses, and sins, the grace to love with all my heart my God, my dear Savior Jesus, and my Sweet Mother Mary, and to obtain for me all the help necessary to arrive to my crown of glory. Defend me always from my spiritual enemies, particularly in the last moments of my life. Come then, o Glorious Prince, and succor me in my last struggle, and with thy powerful weapon cast far from me into the infernal abysses that prevaricator and proud angel that one day thou prostrated in the celestial battle.  Amen. St. Michael, the Archangel, pray for us.

PRAYER O Glorious Prince of the heavenly host, St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle and in the terrible warfare that we are waging against the principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the evil spirits. Come to the aid of man, whom Almighty God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of Satan. Fight this day the battle of the Lord, together with the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in Heaven. That cruel, ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels. Behold, this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage. Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay and cast into eternal perdition souls destined for the crown of eternal glory. This wicked dragon pours out, as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity. These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where the See of Holy Peter and the Chair of Truth has been set up as the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered. Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious power of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly find mercy in the sight of the Lord; and vanquishing the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations. Amen. ℣. Behold the Cross of the Lord; be scattered ye hostile powers. ℟. The Lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered, the root of David. ℣. Let Thy mercies be upon us, O Lord. ℟. As we have hoped in Thee. ℣. O Lord, hear my prayer. ℟. And let my cry come unto Thee. Let us pray. O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as supplicants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin Immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious St. Michael the Archangel, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all the other unclean spirits who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of souls. Amen. An indulgence of 500 days (Leo XIII, Motu Proprio, September 25, 1888; S. P. Ap., May 4, 1934). (The Raccolta, 1943)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) There is yet another reason which we may dare to suggest for the permission of her sorrows. As the Bible is a spoken revelation, so in a certain sense Mary is an emblematical revelation. God uses her as an instrument whereby to make many things plain which would otherwise have rested in obscurity. It is a line of thought familiar to theologians, which regards her as a kind of image to the Most Holy Trinity. As the Daughter of the Father, the Mother of the Son, and the Spouse of the Holy Ghost, she shadows forth in herself, faintly of course because she is a creature, but nevertheless truly, the relations of the Three Divine Persons. She is as it were a still translucent lake in whose bosom wonderful attributes of God, and far-distant heavenly heights, are mirrored with faithful distinctness. We know more of God's mercy, of His condescension, of His intimacy with His creatures, of His characteristic ways, because of the light which He has made to shine on Mary, than we should else have known, and we have come also to understand better what we either knew or might have known in other ways. Thus God’s perfection in Himself, His dealings with His creatures, and the fashion of His redeeming grace, the possibilities of holiness, the inventiveness of divine love, His training of the saints, His guidance of the Church, His inward walk with the souls that seek Him,—all these things are written upon Mary like hieroglyphical inscriptions, easily to be deciphered by the light of faith and the intelligent surmises of devotion. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Sorrow is more or less the characteristic of all human life; and it is one which, while it contains within itself special capabilities of union with God, also deranges and perturbs our relations with Him more than any thing else. It assaults our confidence in Him, and confidence is the only true worship. It engenders temptations against the faith, or finds something congenial in them when they come. It leads to a certain kind of peevishness and petulance with God, which comes from the very depths of our nature, from the same depths as love and adoration, and which, while it is secretly alien to both of these, often succeeds in destroying both, and usurping their vacant places. That this petulance is a true phenomenon of the creature's nature is shown by the surprising manner in which God justifies the petulance of Job, and finds sin that needed expiation in the criticism of his friends upon him, while He, the Searcher of hearts, discerns in Job's bold querulousness nothing that damages the integrity of his patience, and much that is in harmony both with reverence and love. The endurance of sorrow is perhaps the highest and most arduous work we have to do, and it is for the most part God's ordinance that the amount of sorrow to be endured should increase with the amount of holiness enabling us to bear it. We must bear it naturally even while we are bearing it supernaturally. There is no sanctity in unfeelingness, or in the blunting of the soul, even when religious interests have blunted it by a superior engrossment and a higher abstraction. Spirituality no doubt hinders us from feeling many sorrows, and no one will say that such indifference is not in many ways a privilege. But it must not be confounded with an heroic endurance of sorrow. To be heroic in this matter, the heart must feel to the quick, and divine love must barb the more cruelly, and drive the deeper in, the shafts with which we are wounded. Now, in all this, Mary is our example, and a purely human example, an example moreover which has as a matter of fact produced such results of exceeding sanctity and supernatural gracefulness in the Church, that we may safely venture the conjecture that it was one of the reasons for which God permitted her surpassing martyrdom. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Our Blessed Lord was at once our atonement and our example. He redeemed the world solely by His Precious Blood. By His merits alone are we saved. His prerogatives as our Redeemer are simply unshared by anyone. His Mother had to be redeemed as well as the rest of us, though in a different and far higher way, by prevention, not by restoration, by the unmated grace of the Immaculate Conception, not by regeneration from a fallen state. Yet it was His will that His Mother, her office, her consent, her graces, her sufferings, should be so mixed up with the scheme of redemption that we cannot separate them from it. It was His ordinance that her Compassion should lie close by His Passion, and that His Passion without her Compassion would be a different Passion from what it actually was. Thus He seems to draw her almost within the same law of expiation which surrounded Himself, so that it should be true that there are many senses in which she may be said to have taken part in the redemption of the world. But if this is true of Christ as our atonement, where the union of the Divine Nature with the Human was needful to the infinite satisfaction of the work, much more is it true of Christ as our example. This was an office which she was more nearly competent, through His own grace, to share with Him; and one which the fact of her being simply a creature, and altogether human, would bring more touchingly home to us. Thus we may perhaps venture to suppose that God permitted the dolors of Mary, in order that she might be all the more excellently our example. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) She is not at once created mother of the afflicted, as by a sudden patent of nobility. She does not become the consolation of mourners by a mere appointment emanating from the will of the Divine Majesty. It might have been so, but it is not so. Her office of our Mother is a long and painful conclusion worked out from her Divine Maternity. She has toiled for it, suffered for it, borne herculean burdens of sorrow in order to merit it, and has mastered it at last on Calvary. Not that she could strictly merit such an office, as Jesus merited the salvation of the world; nay, rather her motherly office to us was part of the salvation which He merited. Yet, nevertheless, according to a creature's capacity, she came nigh to meriting it, and met God’s gratuitous advances to her on the way. How needful then was it for us that God should permit her dolors! What would the sea of human sorrows be without Mary’s moonlight on it? The ocean, with the dark, heavy, overspread clouds lowering upon it, does not differ more widely from the silvery plain of green and whitely flashing waters, exulting in the sunlight, than the weary expanse of life’s successive cares, without the softening and almost alluring light which falls upon it from Mary’s love, differs from life as it now lies before us beneath her maternal throne. How many a tear has she not already wiped away from our eyes! How many bitter tears has she not made sweet in the shedding! And there is age, and the yearly narrowing circle of those we love, and sickness,and death, all yet to come; and to what amount may we not have to draw upon the treasure of consolations in her sinless heart? Oh, it was well for us, and it was most entirely to her heart's content, that God permitted her dolors, that she might be so much the more really the mother of the afflicted; for the heaviness of her sorrows is daily the lightening of ours; and how little it is that we can bear, and how great the load which she could bear, and how royally she bore it! ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) We too make our appearance in the matter. She must suffer for our sakes as well as for His. For is she not to be the mother of consolation, the comfort of the afflicted? And for this end she must go down into the depths of every sorrow which the human heart can feel. As far as a simple creature can do so, she must fathom them all, and experience them in her own self, without even excepting sorrow for sin, though it cannot be for sin of her own, but in fact for ours. She must know the weight of our burdens, and the kind of misery which each brings along with it. It must be a science to her to be sure of the measure of consolation which our weak hearts require in their various trials, and what soothes and alleviates our suffering in all its manifold, unequal, and dissimilar circumstances. Our Blessed Lord did not save us from our sins by a golden apparition in the heavens, by a transient vision of the Cross shown in the far-seen glory from the green dome of Tabor, or by an absolution once for all pronounced over the outspread west from seaward-looking Carmel. It was not His will that redemption should have the facility of creation, facility to Him at least, for to us the facilities are wonderful enough. He accomplished our salvation in long years, with infinite toilsome sufferings, out of abysses of shame, with the shedding of His Blood, and with unutterable bitterness of soul. He earned it, merited it, struggled for it, and only mastered it by the prodigies of His Passion. All this need not have been so. A word, a tear, a look, might have done it, nay, an act of will, with or without an Incarnation. But it was not His good pleasure that it should be so. In His infinite wisdom He chose not to lean on His infinite power alone, but took another way. So is it with Mary. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) There is always a look of cruelty in high destinies. Fortune drags its favorites through drawn swords. Mary's high destiny is not without this look of cruelty; and that which seems so cruel is the Divine Nature of her Son. It is the result of the infinite perfection of God that He must necessarily seek Himself, and be His own end. It is thus that He is the last end of all creatures, and that there is no true end in the world but Himself. Hence it is part of His magnificence, part of His deep love, that all things were made for Him, and that His glory is paramount over all things else. His greatest mercy to His creatures is to allow them to contribute to His glory, and to permit them to do it intelligently and voluntarily. Rightly considered, the creature can have no blessedness so great as that of increasing the glory of his Creator. It is the only true satisfaction both of his understanding and his will, the only thing which can be to him an everlasting rest. Here then is another reason for the divine permission of our Lady’s dolors. They were permitted in order that God might receive from her more glory than from any other creature whatsoever, or from all creatures taken together, always excepting the created nature of our Blessed Lord. They were permitted that she might have the surpassing privilege of being equal to the whole creation in herself, nay, absolutely and transcendently surpassing it, in the praise and worship, the glory and adoration, which she paid to the Creator. Terrible as the heights were which she had to climb, far removed beyond all sympathy and intelligence of the saints, deep as were the torrents of blood and tears through whose rocky channels she had to make her way, exacting as were the mighty graces which claimed so wonderful a correspondence, there was not a gift that Jesus ever gave her which she prized so highly as her stern Compassion. Oh, not for worlds would she have been excused one least exaggerating circumstance of her sorrow! In the very excess of the most intolerable of her afflictions, she enjoyed in the spirit of deep worship the inexorable sovereignty of God. It was God who hung upon the Cross. Her Son was God. It was the Crucified, pale and faint and feeble and bleeding, whose glory was more illimitable than the world-girdling ocean, and was feeding itself with unimaginable complacence on the streams of supernatural beauty and consummate holiness, which the deeply piercing swords of her grief were drawing from the caverns of her immaculate heart. She as it were supplied for all that the saints owed Him for His Passion but could never pay. At the foot of the Cross she was the world’s worship; for what else in the world was worshipping Him in His abasement at that hour? And all this cruelty of God’s avaricious glory, this insatiableness of His thirst for creatures, was to her the perfection of delight, the supremest exercise of her royalty, while it was on the part of her Divine Son by far the most inconceivable outpouring of His love which she had received since the midnight of the Incarnation. The Church would be a different thing from what it is, if the sea of Mary's worship in her dolors were not part of its beauty, its treasures, and its powers before God. We can think less uneasily, less despondingly, of the unrequited Passion of our dearest Lord, when we remember the sorrow, like no other sorrow but His own, with which His Mother worshipped Him. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)