The Communion of Mary, Pt. 1, Ch. 11

The Communion of Mary

Part 1, Chapter 11

Of the high capacity of the Blessed Virgin for Communion.

Of all those who have participated in the table of the Lord, and who have been found worthy to be admitted to it, Mary is the one of them who had both more capacity and more dignity. What innocence! What purity! What sublime intelligence in order to conceive all the grandeurs of the Eucharist! What lively fervor of her heart in order to love all the goodness of it!

God, having created Mary for so high a destiny as to be the mother of the Son of God, and the tabernacle where He was to come and dwell through Holy Communion, had to give her the natural and the supernatural capacity for them, both in body and soul. Her body, before being the subject which must give birth to Jesus Christ in the Incarnation as her Son, and her mouth, before receiving Him as food in Communion, her soul, then, had to be enriched with all the heavenly gifts in order to receive Him worthily.

Duomo (Spoleto)

But Mary, of herself, cannot give herself these two natural and supernatural capacities: they depend on a more powerful principle. God, whose conduct towards Mary is full of sweetness, came to her aid. He forms for her the most pure and the best shaped of all bodies; He gives her the noblest of all souls and the brightest of all minds in order to penetrate into the designs of the mysteries that had to be worked in her or before her eyes. Of all wills, He gives her the best disposed to love, and of all hearts, the most susceptible of the movements of holy love. He adds all the supernatural gifts to this natural capacity. He places in her understanding the most luminous faith, which enlightens her, in her heart the most ardent charity which inflames her, and in her soul, the most privileged graces which sanctify her.

According to St. Albert the Great, the Blessed Virgin has this common privilege with her Son, that is, the same principle which operated in the conception of the one contributed to the formation of the other. The Son and the Mother came out of the hands of God as masterpieces of His wisdom and power. “Mary,” St. Denis of Alexandria said excellently, “is a tabernacle built, not by the industry of a mortal hand, but by the very hands of the Holy Spirit.”

The Virgin Mary, being destined for the most glorious end to which God could raise a creature, is as much the work of the divine power as of His wisdom. Everything in her bears the traits of the wisdom and power of the divine Worker who formed her. Everything which is seen in Mary was so well ordered and so wisely disposed for the end to which she was destined, that we recognized in her the hand of the divine Wisdom.

Among all those who have received Holy Communion, Mary is therefore the one who has had the greatest natural and supernatural capacity for participating in the divine table of the Lord.

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