And so, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Her and explained it all to Her, Mary was ready. When it was revealed to Her that there is a Trinity in God; that the Son of the Most High wanted to be Her Son; and when, at Her request, it was explained to Her that this would be the work of the Third Person in the adorable Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Mary obeyed. She not only allowed the Son of God to take His human Body from Hers, but, understanding His ardent desire to be united with the human race as its Head, She also provided Him in Her own existence with the beginning of that other Body, His Mystical Body, in order that He could do what had been predestined and hidden in God from all ages: to save the human race as the Head of a corporate Body, His Church.
Thus it was that a future Vicar of this Eternal Head of that Church could truthfully declare in one of his encyclicals: “that already in Mary’s womb, Christ was the Head of His Church”. For He had not only been fitted with a Body that made Him human, but also with a Body that made Him Head.
The greatness of Mary is not only found in this that She, fully aware from Sacred Scripture that the Mystical Body She was asked to provide for the Son of God from Her own existence, would have to suffer as much as His Human Body, nevertheless submitted to the Eternal Decree on behalf of Herself. Her greatness came to perfection when She also dared to accept on behalf of Her children, Her other seed, who in time would extend this Suffering Body to the four corners of the globe, and so share in Her glory. This way She became not only the beginning of this Church, but also its Mother and Model. For, at one distinct moment in time, She was that Church, standing in for all of us, in union with Her Head.
From that moment on no church could claim to be the true Body of Christ in dissociation from Her, i.e. not modelled on Her, as is the case with all the Protestant churches. And that will also be the flaw in the modern, ecumenical church of darkness. For, no matter how hard the Modernists and Teilhardians work to make their church of darkness “look like the Lamb”: not being created in the image and likeness of the Lamb’s Holy Mother, it will always “speak like the Dragon”.
From that one moment in history onwards, when She stood proxy for all of us, no ‘church’ can supplement (not even its social teaching) by borrowing from Communism and claim to be the Catholic Church. For, if the fulness of the true Church was found at one stage in the Union between the New Adam and the New Eve, then we can only, as children, live from that fulness. We can neither augment it nor pretend that it is lacking in essentials!
It is thanks to Mary that now every Christian can repeat what Christ said coming into this world: “A Body thou hast fitted Me ...” God has fitted us with a human body and He has prepared for us the Mystical Body. And with the prayers and good works and sufferings in our own bodies, offered up in every Mass in union with Christ’s Mystical Body, we can extend the benefits of that Other Body to the ends of the earth.
Thus Mary’s meditations on Sacred Scripture led Her to the fulness of Faith in the Incarnation and to the understanding of God’s inscrutable Decree of how Redemption and the fulness of Grace in the Head Jesus were to be passed by His Body, the other seed of the Woman of Genesis, to the rest of the whole human race. For just as human beings possess the faculty of passing on Adam’s Sin, the Sin of the head of the human race, by sexual propagation, so do the members of the Mystical Body of Christ have the power to pass on Grace from the Head of the New Creation. And for the Holy Church Our Blessed Lady is the Key to the full understanding of how this is done. For in Her we see how we must show our own union to the Head in much suffering and praying; in obedience and victimhood; in superabundance of love and good works for our fellow men. And in standing in for others until they too understand, as was once done for us by our Holy Mother Mary and by the Church.
“Scripture has locked everything under Sin” [Gal. 3:221. But Christ has unlocked for us this great “Mystery of Iniquity”, [2 Thes.2:7], and has shown us how His Grace and forgiveness are passed on from Him, the Head, through His Mystical Body to the members of that Body first, and so flowing out to the whole human race to undo the ravages of Original Sin. It is at all times the prerogative of the head of the body to do the thinking. It is the privilege of the body to put the results of this thinking into practice in union with the head.
And the Key used by Christ to reveal to us the inestimable privilege of carrying out His thinking in the Mystical Body is the One whose work was so common with His, that at the Incarnation She fused with Him into the one Mystical Body by the one and the same Decree of Predestination for us, Her children. To create for the Head a virginal Church, pure and undefiled, “without spot or wrinkle”, [Eph. 5:27], no matter how stained and defiled we Her children would ever be ...
It was necessary to trace the origins of Victimhood to Our Blessed Lady ahead to that of Her Son because chronologically speaking, it was understood and accepted by Our Heavenly Mother first, before Her Son made His appearance on earth. In fact it was Her understanding of Victimhood and Her acceptance of it that finally brought Him down here with us in the first place! For only in Her Victimhood could the Obedience be found necessary for the Incarnation.
But of course, all Victimhood, including that of Our Blessed Lady, can only fuse with the divine example of it, given us by the Son of God Himself. He could only inspire in His Heavenly Mother what had already been decreed - and accepted - from all eternity by God: that the human race was to be redeemed by a suffering Human Body as well as by a Suffering Mystical Body ... both to be provided for the Son of God by His own Mother, and from Her own substance, and both to be passed on to the One True Church, i.e. the Church created in the image and likeness of Mary: the Marian Church.
What does all this mean for us in the circumstances of our Catholic family lives at the end of the Second Millennium since all the foregoing had taken place? What is our reaction to Our Blessed Lady’s Victimhood, embraced for us with so much love?
There is really no escape for us: the Head of the Mystical Body, the Church, is a crucified Man; and the beginning of that Church is a Virgin Mother, whose soul was pierced with a sword.
If, contemplating the vastness of it all and the implications it holds for us, we have difficulty in coming to grips with it, we may better understand the command God gave to Noah at the time of the great Flood: “Build thee an Ark ...”. We must build ourselves an Ark to float always on top of the deluge of sin that has again engulfed the whole world in order never to go under. And that Ark can only be a great love for Our Lady who will see to it that we remain in Communion with God and with His Church, that is, with each other. It will mean many privations of all the things that a lost world holds so dear: good health, wealth, comfort, popularity, esteem, a good name, all the things Noah did not have in the eyes of his mocking world, things he could not take with him in his ark, things we cannot take with us into our Ark.
In our state of victimhood, we are reminded of what Our Blessed Lord held up with such insistence to His Apostles:
“...because, I tell you, these words of Scripture must be fulfilled in Me: ‘He let Himself be taken for a criminal’.” [Lk. 22:37]
“Blessed are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you, denounce your name as criminal on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice when that day comes and dance for joy, for then your reward will be great in heaven”. [Lk. 6:22-23]
“Now keep this carefully in mind: you are not to prepare your defence, because I Myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict.” [Lk. 21:15]
In the safety of our Ark, a great love for Our Lady, we can even dispense with the expense on our own behalf of engaging the services of drowning lawyers and barristers ...
But, although on divine command, even these professionals cannot take care of us here on earth, where everything nowadays is geared to consensus, there are of course very effective means in existence within the shelter of our Ark, by which we can take care of the eternal salvation of opponents and lawyers alike.
These means are spelled out in two of my recent books:
The Catholic Mass, and The Divine Art of Praying.