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Saint Josemaría’s devotion to our Lady
Bishop Alvaro del Portillo
“We have to love the Blessed Virgin Mary more. We will never love her enough. Love her a lot!” is Saint Josemaría’s advice at The Forge, n. 527. Msgr. Alvaro del Portillo recounts some of his memories of Saint Josemaría’s devotion to our Lady in the following extract from Immersed in God.
His Marian devotion was distinguished by the profundity of its theological content. By this I mean that it was based not so much on “reasons of the heart” as on faith – faith, that is, in the prerogatives given by God to our Lady and in her role in our redemption.
To give you some idea – when St. Teresa of Avila, to whom he had a great devotion, was proclaimed a doctor of the Church, the Father pointed out that “she is not the first woman doctor of the Church. The first doctor, even though she does not have the title, is our Lady, because nobody else ever has had or could have such close dealings with God our Lord as she had and will always have. She must have been given, like nobody else, light from the Holy Spirit. She it is that knows most about God. She is the one with the greatest knowledge of God.”
Our founder habitually concluded his homilies and meditations with an invocation to our Lady. In his book Holy Rosary, he has left very moving expressions of his contemplation of the principal mysteries of the lives of Jesus and Mary; his other books as well, beginning with The Way, are imbued with Marian devotion. Every chapter of Furrow and The Forge ends with a thought about Mary.
He established the custom of placing in each room of each Opus Dei center a simple and artistically tasteful image of our Lady. He taught us to direct a glance towards it, and to give our Blessed Mother an affectionate interior prayer of greeting, whenever we enter or leave a room.
He visited countless Marian shrines. His pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is of particular historical importance. He made this pilgrimage in May 1970, for the intention of asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to be mindful of the needs of the Church and to bring to completion the canonical journey of Opus Dei.
In December 1973, referring to his travels from one Marian shrine to another, he said emphatically, “I’m doing nothing but light candles, and I’m going to keep on doing that as long as I’ve got matches.”
His love for the Blessed Virgin Mary impelled him to keep a close eye on everything connected with devotion for her. For example, whenever he commissioned a painting or statue of our Lady with the baby Jesus, or a picture of the holy women at the foot of the cross, he recommended that the artist try, as much as possible, to make Jesus look like his mother. Christ must, after all, have looked a lot like Mary, since his conception in her womb did not involve a man, but came about through direct intervention by the Holy Spirit; but only a soul very much in love would have placed so much importance on this detail.
To give you some idea – when St. Teresa of Avila, to whom he had a great devotion, was proclaimed a doctor of the Church, the Father pointed out that “she is not the first woman doctor of the Church. The first doctor, even though she does not have the title, is our Lady, because nobody else ever has had or could have such close dealings with God our Lord as she had and will always have. She must have been given, like nobody else, light from the Holy Spirit. She it is that knows most about God. She is the one with the greatest knowledge of God.”
Our founder habitually concluded his homilies and meditations with an invocation to our Lady. In his book Holy Rosary, he has left very moving expressions of his contemplation of the principal mysteries of the lives of Jesus and Mary; his other books as well, beginning with The Way, are imbued with Marian devotion. Every chapter of Furrow and The Forge ends with a thought about Mary.
He established the custom of placing in each room of each Opus Dei center a simple and artistically tasteful image of our Lady. He taught us to direct a glance towards it, and to give our Blessed Mother an affectionate interior prayer of greeting, whenever we enter or leave a room.
He visited countless Marian shrines. His pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is of particular historical importance. He made this pilgrimage in May 1970, for the intention of asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to be mindful of the needs of the Church and to bring to completion the canonical journey of Opus Dei.
In December 1973, referring to his travels from one Marian shrine to another, he said emphatically, “I’m doing nothing but light candles, and I’m going to keep on doing that as long as I’ve got matches.”
His love for the Blessed Virgin Mary impelled him to keep a close eye on everything connected with devotion for her. For example, whenever he commissioned a painting or statue of our Lady with the baby Jesus, or a picture of the holy women at the foot of the cross, he recommended that the artist try, as much as possible, to make Jesus look like his mother. Christ must, after all, have looked a lot like Mary, since his conception in her womb did not involve a man, but came about through direct intervention by the Holy Spirit; but only a soul very much in love would have placed so much importance on this detail.
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