St. Margarite, of Hungary, said an Ave kneeling before every image of the Virgin she met in her way--St. Catharine, of Sienna, repeated as many Aves as she went up steps to her house.
Fasting on Saturday, in honour of the Virgin, is looked upon as a treasure of indulgences and delights, and as an excellent preservative against eternal damnation.
Various festivals are instituted to commemorate her, such as the Purification, the Annunciation, the Visitation, and others.
The fifth of August is the festival of our Lady of the Snow. We are informed that the solemnization of it was owing to a miracle. When Liberius was pontiff, a patrician, or Roman nobleman, finding himself old and childless, resolved, with his wife's approbation, to make the blessed Virgin his sole heiress. The vow being made with great devotion, their principal concern, in the next place, was to employ their inheritance conformably to our Lady's will: and accordingly they applied themselves to fasting, praying, giving alms to the poor, and visiting the sick, to know her pleasure.
The Virgin at length appeared to each of them in a dream, and told them "it was her and her Son's will, that they should employ their effects in erecting a church for her on a particular part of the Mons Esquilinus, which they should find covered with snow." The pious husband first communicated the revelation to his wife, who told him, with great surprise, that she had had the same revelation that very night. But, supposing the two dreams had not proved alike, an excess of zeal would have been sufficient to have given them all the conformity that was requisite; These two devotees went immediately and declared their dreams to the pope, who perceived that he was a third man in the revelation; for his holiness had been favoured with the same vision. It was no longer questioned, but that heaven was engaged in this affair. The pontiff assembled the clergy together, and there was a solemn procession to Mount Esquiline, on purpose to find out whether the miracle were real or not; when the place specified in the dream was found covered with snow. The ground was exactly of a suitable extent to erect a church upon, which was afterward called Liberius's Basilica, and St. Mary ad præcepe, (because the manger, which was used as a cradle for our Lady, was brought thither from Bethlehem,) and is now called St. Mary Major. Every festival day, the commemoration of this miracle is revived, by letting fall white jessamine leaves, after so artificial a manner, as to imitate the falling of snow upon the ground. [[24]]
It has even been asserted, that the apostle Peter consecrated a chapel to the Virgin, a story which accords perfectly well with other absurdities. The Spaniards attribute a similar act of devotion to James at Saragossa; and some add, that the angels were the architects of the chapel. It is decorated in the most costly manner with silver angels, lamps, and other furniture, with the Virgin magnificently dressed on a marble pillar. The walls are hung with feet, arms, hands, and other parts of the human body, as grateful oblations to the Virgin, for the miraculous cures she is supposed to have performed upon these members.
At Madrid, our lady of Atocha resides in a chapel which blazes with a hundred lamps made of gold and silver, and is celebrated for as many miracles as at Loretto and other places. The history of her first settlement at Liesse, in Picardy, is thus related. During the crusades, an Egyptian princess resolving to have an image of the Virgin, addressed herself to three gentlemen of Picardy, who were prisoners at Cairo, one of whom made an attempt to paint her, though ignorant of the art. Having failed, he and his companions presented earnest supplications to the Virgin, after which they fell asleep. As soon as they awoke, they found an image of our Lady, accurately performed, which they transmitted to the princess; who, in return, set them at liberty. She was, of course, converted to the Christian faith by this image; and the three gentlemen miraculously escaped out of Egypt, and on a sudden found themselves, by a continuation of the miracle, in Picardy, on the very spot where the church of our Lady of Liesse is now erected.
Her devotees carry representations of the Virgin about them, deck her images with flowers, dress them in silks or other costly ornaments, burn tapers before them, kiss and look upon them with a languishing eye, touch them with their chaplets, rub their handkerchiefs upon them, and salute them with the profoundest veneration.
Her relics are innumerable--such as her wedding ring, handkerchiefs, combs, slippers and goods of every description, as kitchen furniture, toilette, earthenware, lamps; and even, as it is pretended, her gloves, bed, chair, head-clothes, with other rarities.
"Surely," says archbishop Tillotson, "if this blessed among women, the mother of our Lord, (for I keep to the titles which the Scripture gives her,) have any sense of what we do here below, she cannot but look down with the greatest disdain upon that sacrilegious and idolatrous worship which is paid to her, to the high dishonour of the great God and our Saviour, and the infinite scandal of his religion. How can she, without indignation, behold how they play the fool in the church of Rome about her; what an idol they make of her image, and with what sottishness they give divine honour to it; how they place her in their idolatrous pictures in equal rank with the blessed Trinity, and turn the salutation of the angel, Ave Maria, hail Mary, full of grace, into a kind of prayer; and, in their bead-roll of devotion, repeat it ten times, for once that they say the Lord's prayer, as of greater virtue and efficacy? And, indeed, they almost justle out the devotion due to Almighty God and our blessed Saviour, by their endless idolatry to her.