Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed

Today is the feast day of my patron, St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori (1696-1787), Doctor of the Church and renowned moral theologian and Mariologist. This after the yesterday's (July 31) memorial of another great saint, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuits.

Both had a great love for the Virgin Mary, as all Catholics should aspire to.

The glory of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is this: that Almighty God took the form of human flesh and blood through a young virgin, and just as He first entered His creation through this virgin, so He also decided to channel all of His mercy and grace to the human race through this virgin, and very deliberately kept her hidden from her own beneficiaries!

Mary is the most exalted of all creatures, because it is exclusively through her that the eternal mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is unveiled to the Host of Heaven.

Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed.

Everything that any sincere soul comes to know about Christ will inexorably point that soul to the conclusion that He is a Savior of boundless mercy, whose compassion always overrules His anger. And, any and every personal experience of this unfathomable Divine Mercy of Jesus is a most sublime invitation to get to know the wellspring of tenderness from whose form He received His own - Mary.

The blessed soul who takes Mary for her mother and comes to know her will then find that she is a sheer abyss - a sea, or "Maria", as she is so fittingly named in the Latin tongues - of adoring contemplation of the two holiest mysteries of Christ's redemption, namely the Incarnation and the Passion. This is the pearl of greatest price! For the aim of the Christian life is, in the words of St. Paul, "to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified." Mary is both the gateway to this magnificent discovery and the discovery in itself!

She is so completely and perfectly united with her Divine Son that, even though few Christians are aware of it in this life, in Heaven the fullness of revelation will be none other than the fact that she is both the source and summit of our glorification, because that glorification is precisely our mystical bond to the Body and Blood of her Son - the fruit of her womb.