(2) May 18
Mary is the "Vas Insigne Devotionis," The Most Devout Virgin
TO be devout is to be devoted. We know what is meant by a
devoted wife or daughter. It is one whose thoughts centre in the person so
deeply loved, so tenderly cherished. She follows him about with her eyes; she
is ever seeking some means of serving him; and, if her services are very small
in their character, that only shows how intimate they are, and how incessant.
And especially if the object of her love be weak, or in pain, or near to die,
still more intensely does she live in his life, and know nothing but him.
This intense devotion towards our Lord, forgetting self in
love for Him, is instanced in St. Paul, who says. "I know nothing but
Jesus Christ and Him crucified." And again, "I live, [yet] now not I,
but Christ liveth in me; and [the life] that I now live in the flesh, I live in
the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself for me."
"Vivo autem, jam non ego: vivit
vero in me Christus. Quod autem nunc vivo in carne: in fide vivo Filii Dei, qui
dilexit me, et tradidit semetipsum pro me." (Gal. ii. 20.)
But great as was St. Paul's devotion to our Lord, much
greater was that of the Blessed Virgin; because she was His Mother, and because
she had Him and all His sufferings actually before her eyes, and because she
had the long intimacy of thirty years with Him, and because she was from her
special sanctity so ineffably near to Him in spirit. When, then, He was mocked,
bruised, scourged, and nailed to the Cross, she felt as keenly as if every
indignity and torture inflicted on Him was struck at herself. She could have
cried out in agony at every pang of His.
This is called her compassion, or her suffering with her
Son, and it arose from this that she was the "Vas insigne
devotionis."
