The same Augustine whom you would like to pretend rejected devotion to Mary wrote the following prayer:
Blessed Virgin Mary, who can worthily repay you with praise and thanks for having rescued a fallen world by your generous consent! Receive our gratitude, and by your prayers obtain the pardon of our sins. Take our prayers into the sanctuary of heaven and enable them to make our peace with God. Holy Mary, help the miserable, strengthen the discouraged, comfort the sorrowful, pray for your people, plead for the clergy, intercede for all women consecrated to God. May all who venerate you feel now your help and protection. Be ready to help us when we pray, and bring back to us the answers to our prayers. Make it your continual concern to pray for the people of God, for you were blessed by God and were made worthy to bear the Redeemer of the world, who lives and reigns forever. Amen
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
LOL
Augustine didn’t write it:
“Written by Bishop Fulbert of Chartres (ca 951-ca 1029), it appears in his Sermo IX, De Annuntiatione Dominica. The prayer is sometimes attributed to St. Augustine, Book 10, Sermon 18, de Sanctis, since Bishop Fulbert’s sermon appeared in the collected works of St. Augustine at one time. However, it is now known that the sermon is not Augustine’s, but Bishop Fulbert’s.”
http://www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/BVM/OBeataVM.html
Boom Shakalaka
Blessed Virgin Mary, who can worthily repay you with praise and thanks for having rescued a fallen world by your generous consent! Receive our gratitude, and by your prayers obtain the pardon of our sins. Take our prayers into the sanctuary of heaven and enable them to make our peace with God. Holy Mary, help the miserable, strengthen the discouraged, comfort the sorrowful, pray for your people, plead for the clergy, intercede for all women consecrated to God. May all who venerate you feel now your help and protection. Be ready to help us when we pray, and bring back to us the answers to our prayers. Make it your continual concern to pray for the people of God, for you were blessed by God and were made worthy to bear the Redeemer of the world, who lives and reigns forever. Amen
“Wherefore when the Lord appeared wonderful in the midst of the crowd, working signs and wonders, and showing what was hidden in the flesh, certain persons admiring, said, Blessed is the womb that bare thee. But he answered, Verily blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it. That is to say, My mother, whom thou hast called blessed, is thence blessed because she keeps the word of God, not because the Word was made flesh within her.”
— Tenth treatise on the second chap of John’s Gospel
Quite a contradiction in thought there...How do you account for that???