[DungeonMaster]

You’ve become a devotee?

He really shows what is going on with the adoration of Mary in the Catholic Church. Sure most don't know about him. To me the Catholic Church saying it doesn't push Mary worship is like Obama saying he is not a Muslim. Obama praises and protects Islam while criticizing Christianity. Obama persecutes Israel while protecting Muslim countries but his words are always the same. He denies being a Muslim.

The RCC denies Mary worship every step of the way but then there is:

8. Every day, from one end of the earth to the other, in the highest heaven and in the lowest abyss, all things preach, all things proclaim the wondrous Virgin Mary. The nine choirs of angels, men and women of every age, rank and religion, both good and evil, even the very devils themselves are compelled by the force of truth, willingly or unwillingly, to call her blessed.

According to St. Bonaventure, all the angels in heaven unceasingly call out to her: "Holy, holy, holy Mary, Virgin Mother of God." They greet her countless times each day with the angelic greeting, "Hail, Mary", while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests. According to St. Augustine, even St. Michael, though prince of all the heavenly court, is the most eager of all the angels to honour her and lead others to honour her. At all times he awaits the privilege of going at her word to the aid of one of her servants.

[Mrs. Don-o]

This is not Catholic doctrine, though --- it's the theological opinions and devotional thoughts of St. Louis Marie de Montfort. Nobody ever said it was de fide, and nobody every said saints are infallible.

Consider the style of this poetic genre. It is ardent and courtly -- effusive love, not a manual of doctrine --- and it follows the literary form comparable to 19th century romanticism, as in Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
....
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Devotion comprising all "depth and breadth and height" must refer to God the infinite, not man the finite; and "the ends of being and ideal grace" are terms divine, not human.

Yet I'm fairly confident that Miss Barrett did not think Mr. Browning was actually Almighty God. That's the way people wrote in letters to each other! Everyone, even casually, signed off as the other's "Obedient and humble servant" and pledged their "ne'er dying devotion!"

And not just 19th century Romantics. You even have the greatest of Calvinist Puritan poetesses, Anne Bradstreet, to her husband Simon who was far absent from her:

My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,
My joy, my magazine of earthly store,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
.....
My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;
Return; return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn.

"My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life"?

She calls him a pagan sun god, "Sol"?

Doesn't she owe this to Jesus, not Simon Bradstreet?

But who would criticize her poem for that? I would imagine only people whose wimples were a little too starchy, and whose eyes were a little too close to their noses. None of the Puritans criticized her--- because even they, starchy as they were, had some grasp of the extravagances found in the genre of devotion.

And check out how this same Anne Bradstreet wrote of Queen Elizabeth I:

Here lies the pride of Queens, pattern of Kings:
So blaze it fame, here’s feathers for thy wings.
Here lies the envy’d, yet unparallel’d Prince,
Whose living virtues speak (though dead long since).
If many worlds, as that fantastic framed,
In every one, be her great glory famed.

Another on Queen Elizabeth I:

Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,
And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time.
So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence,
The sound thereof raps every human sense
That men account it no impiety
To say thou wert a fleshly Deity.

Now. Do you honestly think this 17th century New England Puritan thought that Elizabeth I was the "pattern of Kings," and that if there were "many worlds" she would be famed in all of them?

Or that she, a daughter and matron of the radical Reformation, really thought it were "no impiety" to say Queen Elizabeth I was "a fleshly deity"?

So we're dealing with a fervent, florid devotional style that people offered to sovereigns and spouses. Similarly over-the-top--- to us --- are the extravagant hyperboles and obsequies found in Shakespeare and Michelangelo's sonnets. They strike the modern ear as embellishment in the Liberace range--- overheated flourish: but this was the devotional style of the courtly and the romantic age.

The Louis Marie de Montfort style of Marian prayer is never used liturgically (official public prayer); it is never a source of doctrine; and no, it is not part of my personal prayer life --- though I do love the Litany of Loreto.

However, keep in mind that pious Christian people were motivated to reach heights of devotional rhetoric which would exceed what people were shoveling on the jeweled head of Elizabeth I of England. They felt strongly that whatever was highest of the high in human honor should go, not to that "red-haired Welsh harridan," Queen Elizabeth presiding in Westminster, but to Christ's fair and humble mother, the maid of Nazareth.

Many today may not read this with sympathy or even comprehension. But so few in our age have any comprehension of the language love and devotion of ages past, no culture beyond the Kardashians.

Now, doctrine is a separate thing, and we will surely have plenty of straightforward disagreements there. That's OK by me. But I am simply advising you that an antique style seems excessive because, by our dim cultural lights, they are like a ton and a half of winky-twinklers on a 10-pound Christmas tree. But to the authors of Marian devotionals, it pertained to the honor of Christ that His sweet mother should be more greatly magnified than any proud Bess in London or any Empress of Byzantium.