John Zmirak on the Blessed Virgin Mary

 Amici,

John Zmirak, one of my favorite commentators, has a piece out trashing the ideologues at the Atlantic magazine for asserting the Rosary is an extremist weapon. After scalding them post flaying their skin off and salting what remained (the only way to do it :), he discusses the B.V.M. for a few lines.

Excerpt:

Prayers from the Bible

The Rosary, for those of you not familiar with it, consists of a series of prayers and meditations, virtually all of them taken from scripture. We pray the Our Father (which Jesus taught us), the Hail Mary (which quotes the angel Gabriel), and the Trinitarian prayer “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.” We meditate on key events in the life of Jesus. The purpose of it? To focus us on the story of our salvation, the need for holiness, and the love of God.

For this reason, the Rosary has indeed been a powerful weapon in the hands of Christians, historically. Its use played a major role in defeating the crazy, gnostic Albigensian heresy. A Europe-wide “rosary crusade” decreed by a pope preceded the almost miraculous victory of the Christians over the Muslims at Lepanto. To mark that, the pope placed the Feast of Our Lady of Victory on the anniversary of that battle. (To mark it, I myself bought for my personal handgun a Beretta, made by the same Venetian company that forged the cannons we used at that battle.)

On the Feast of the Assumption in 1920, Christendom was menaced again, by a threat worse than the Mongols: the armies of Bolshevik Russia, invading the infant nation of Poland, to spread its godless revolution to Germany, then all of Europe. The outmanned, outgunned Polish armies crushed the Bolsheviks outside of Warsaw, after thousands of soldiers reported seeing the Virgin Mary appear to them in the sky, urging them to victory. Poles still call that battle “the Miracle of the Vistula.”

This is one dangerous lady, if you’re on the side of the demons. Nothing lukewarm about her. She’s fanatically orthodox, doctrinally rigid, and not even winsome. She had the temerity to tell people, when Jesus spoke, “Do whatever He tells you.” That has no place in the America of the Former Joe Biden, or The Atlantic.

I have an idea for The Atlantic. It ought to rename itself not for a vast, adventurous ocean but a stagnant, polluted man-made strait in New York City. I can see it now, as I wait for my root canal: The Gowanus: Turgid, Full of Garbage, and Only Relevant in Brooklyn.™

AnP again:

• N.B. Some Austrians credit the B.V.M. and the Rosary for Austria remaining neutral after World War II. Apparently, they offered a Rosary Crusade and Austria was neither absorbed into NATO nor the Warsaw Pact.

Among the myriad, profound reasons for not letting imbecile hacks like Bergoglio and Andrea Grillo – or pustulent charlatans like Bishop Barron, whom Zmirak shreds in grand style here at Is Robert Barron a Bishop of Baal? – drive me back to the Standing Stones of Lugh Lámhfhada Samildhánach, is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even Luther was devoted to her. Protestantism since Luther is clueless about her, except for exceptional figures like the great composer Morten Lauridsen. Listen to his Ave, Dulcissima Maria for a Heavenly eight minutes of grace.

As the brilliant Medieval theologian St. Anselm (1033/4–1109) wrote in part of her (Italics mine):

To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary.

God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Savior of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s son, nothing could be redeemed.

If there's any Christian insight more profound than the truth in these two short paragraphs, I don't know what it is.

   An Préachán

Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:

Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.