Yesterday in the Catholic Church, we ended the liturgical year by celebrating the great Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe – otherwise known as the Solemnity of Christ the King (Cristo Rey in Spanish). So if Jesus Christ is the King; then is Mary (His Mother) the Queen? It’s no doubt an interesting question and one that I have answered before in previous posts.

As Catholics, we affectionately know Mary as our Mother. She is our Blessed Mother for she was Immaculately Conceived (next weeks “MWM”). The Fifth Glorious Mystery we pray is the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth. We read in Luke 1:43 – Elizabeth says, “the mother of my LORD.” There is a royalty motif that exists in the statement by Elizabeth. In Revelation 12, we read about a woman with a crown on her head that gives birth to a male child that will rule all the nations. Throughout the Old Testament we also see many Scriptures reveal the importance of royalty and Queenship that points to Mary in the New Testament.

So with Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition (the Deposit of Faith) revealing what it does for us – where does the Queenship of Mary originate, where do we see this in the New Testament, and what does it mean for not only the Catholic Church, but for all of humanity?? I give you three “Mondays with Mary” posts regarding these topics over the past months – The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, The Magnificat, and The Queenship of Mary. These posts answer the questions and then some.

In regards to Mary as queen and mother, I leave you with the words of thirty-third Doctor of the Church, who says in her Novissima Verba – The Last Confidences of the St. Therese of the Child Jesus,

“Mary, then, is queen, but queen in the way of a mother, serving all her children, guiding them in their most personal and intimate life, not so much by law and precept as by kindly prompting and persuasion, with an affectionate smile on her countenance as she goes about bestowing a mother’s tender care on all her children, on the lowliest no less than on the more fortunate. In fact, the more humble and lowly her children, the more mother she is to them. And the more we put ourselves in Mary’s guiding care, the more quickly she leads us up to God.

In union with Christ, Mary guides the entire Church militant on the road to the City of God. But Mary’s rule is marked, above all, by the supreme grace of her motherhood. She rules and directs souls with the power of a mother’s smile and the irresistible attraction of a mother’s sweetness. With a mother’s intuition she is ever alert, one might say, to yield to the supremely sovereign and kingly action of her son, keeping herself in the background, for even in her own sovereign rule over the universe Mary is “more mother than queen.”