Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We are helped, I think, if we substitute the parallel word honour for worship in the places of its use. We meet in the Church to honour God, and we offer the Blessed Sacrifice as the act of supreme honour which is due to Him alone; but in connection with the supreme honour offered to God we also honour the saints of God by the observance of their anniversaries with special services including the Holy Sacrifice. The word honour does not sound so ill to ears unaccustomed to a certain type of Catholic expression as the word worship: but the meaning is untouched.

Let us go on then to the analysis of the notion of worship. In the writings of theologians we find an analysis of the notion of worship into three degrees. There is, first of all, that supreme degree of worship which is called latria and which is the worship due to God alone. If we ask what essentially it is that differentiates latria from all other degrees of worship or honour we find that it is the element of sacrifice that it contains. Sacrifice is the supreme act of self-surrender to another, of utter self-immolation, and it can have no other legitimate object than God Himself. The central notion of sacrifice is the surrender of self. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant were of value because they were the representatives of the nation and of the individuals who offered them; because of the self-identification of nation or individual with the thing offered, which must therefore be in some sense the offerer's, must, so to say, contain him: must be that in which he merges himself. So the one Sacrifice of the New Covenant gets its essential value in that it is the surrender of the Son to the will of the Father. "I am come to do Thy will, O God." Christ's sacrifice is self-sacrifice: the voluntary surrender of the whole life to the divine purpose.

And when we actually worship God, worship Him with the worship of latria, our act must be of the same essential nature; it must be an act of sacrifice, of self-giving; the offering of ourselves to the will of the Father. So it is in our participation in the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice. The full meaning of our joining in that act is that we are uniting ourselves with our Lord's offering of Himself, and as members of His Body share in the sacrifice of the Body which is the supreme act of worship. And our other acts of worship lay hold on and proceed from this which is the ground of their efficacy. All our subordinate acts of worship, so to call them, have their character and vitality as Christian acts of the worship of God because of the relation of the worshipper to God as a member of the Body of His Son. They are offered through the Son and derive their potency from their association with Him and His sacrifice. They reach God through the sacrifice of the One Mediator.

Worship, then, in this complete sense, is due to God alone; and it is separated by a whole heaven from any worship, that is, honour, which can be offered to any creature, however exalted. No instructed person would for a moment imagine that the prayers which we address to the saints are in any degree such worship as is offered to God; but in as much as those who are unfamiliar with the forms of the Catholic Religion in its devotional expression may easily be led astray, it seems needful to stress this fact of the difference between simple petition and such acts and prayers as involve the highest degree of worship.

One of the chief sources of confusion in this matter is the failure to distinguish between the nature of the act of worship, which is determined by the person to whom it is directed, and the mere adjuncts of the act. But an act of latria is not constituted such by the fact that it is aided in its expression by such circumstances as banners, lights, incense and so on. These are quite appropriate to any act of honour, and have been customarily so used in relation to human beings. There was a certain hesitation in the Church for some time in the matter of incense which under the older Covenant had been especially appropriated to God, because in the experience of the early Church it was demanded, and necessarily refused, as an acknowledgment of the divinity of the Emperor. But with the passing of the pagan empire incense as the universal symbol of prayer came into use in all manner of services wherein intercession was a part.

Such adjuncts therefore are not foreign to those subordinate acts of worship or honour which are technically known as dulia. Dulia--this word means service--is such honour as may be rightly rendered to creatures without at all encroaching upon the majesty of God. It is that degree of worship that we have in mind when we speak of the worship of the saints. That dulia of the saints is expressed when we ask for the intercession of this or that saint, and is not essentially different from the asking for the prayers of any other human beings. We commonly ask for one another's prayers and feel that in doing so we are exercising our brotherhood in the Body of Christ in calling into action its mutual love and sympathy. We should be beyond measure astonished if we were told that such requests for the prayers of our brethren were encroachments upon the honour of God and the sin of idolatry! But if in this case our surprise is justified, it is difficult to see how the case is at all altered by the fact that the fellow members of the Body whose prayers we are asking happen to be dead, that is, as we believe and imply in our request for their intercession, have passed into a new and closer relation to our Blessed Lord. Nor, again, does the case seem to be at all altered, if the brother whose prayers we ask has been dead a long time, and has, by the common consent of Catholic Christendom, been received into the number of the saints. The ways in which the human mind works under the influence of prejudice are always interesting. There are many devout persons who feel that it is a valuable element in their religion to have the privilege of following the Kalendar of the Church and to keep the saints' days therein indicated by attendance at divine service; who yet would be horrified if it were suggested that a prayer should be offered to the saint whose day is being observed, and that the saint should be made the object of an act of worship. But what essentially is the keeping of a saint's day, with a celebration of the Holy Communion with special collect, epistle and gospel, but an act of worship (dulia) of the saint? The nature of the act would be in no way changed if in addition to our accustomed collects there were added one which plainly asked for the prayers of the saint in whose honour we are keeping the feast.

In the worship of the Church of God a place apart is assigned to the honour to be paid to the blessed Mother of our Lord. As the highest of all creatures, as highly favoured above all, as she whom God chose to be the Mother of His Son, the devout thought of generations of Christians has felt that their recognition of her relation to God in the Incarnation called for a special degree of honour rightly to express it. The thought of the faithful lingers about all that was in any degree associated with the coming of God in the flesh: so great was the deliverance thereby wrought for man that man's gratitude ever seeks new means of expression and ever finds the means inadequate to his love. Many of the expressions that are found in devotional writers associated with the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary are an outcome of this attitude of mind. To those who are unused to them they seem exaggerated; in the vast mass of the devotional writings of Catholic Christendom there is no difficulty in finding expressions which are exaggerated; but it is well to remember when thinking of this that the exaggeration is the exaggeration of love. The tendency of love is to exaggerate the forms of its expression. It is, however, we feel on reflection, an error to judge by the exaggeration rather than by the love. It is perhaps well to ask ourselves whether we are saved from exaggeration by greater sanity or by lesser love.

But exaggeration apart, this feeling of the unique position of the blessed Mother in relation to the Incarnate Son, as calling forth a special honour for her is embodied in the designation of the honour to be rendered her as hyperdulia--a specially devoted service. It is hardly necessary after what has been said to point out that even here in the highest honour rendered to any saint there is no passing of the infinite gulf which separates Creator from creature, any infringement upon the honour of God. No Catholic could dream that blessed Mary would be in any wise honoured by the attribution to her of what belongs to her Son. These are no doubt commonplaces, but it is better to be commonplace than to be misunderstood. The intercession that is asked of the blessed Mother is the intercession of one who by God's election is more closely associated with God than any other human being is or can be. Her power of prayer is felt to proceed from the depth of her sanctity; from, in other words, the perfection of her relation to her blessed Son Who is the only Mediator and the Saviour of us all.

Let me say in conclusion that this giving of honour to our Lord, and to all His saints as united to Him, and the celebration of their days according to the Church's year, and the asking of the help of their intercession in all the needs of our lives, is not simply a thing to be tolerated in those who are inclined to it, is not simply a privilege which we are entitled to if we care for it, but is a duty which all Christians ought to fulfil because otherwise they are failing to make real to them a very important article of the Christian Creed. The Communion of Saints, like all other articles of the Creed, needs to be put into active use, and will be when we believe it as distinguished from assent to it. When we believe that all who live unto God in the Body of His dear Son are inspired with active love one toward another, we shall ourselves feel the impulse of that love, and be compelled both to seek an outlet for it toward all other members of the Body, and also will equally feel compelled to seek our own share in the action of that love by asking for the prayers of the saints for ourselves and for all in whom we are interested. Then will we find in the "worship of the saints" one great means whereby we can worship the God of the saints by the devout recognition of the greatness of His work in them, May God be praised and glorified in all His saints.

O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Lowly, and higher than all creatures raised,
Term by eternal council fixed upon,
Thou art she who didst ennoble man,
That even He who had created him
To be Himself His creature disdained not.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love,
By virtue of whose heat this flower thus
Is blossoming in the eternal peace.
Here thou art unto us a noon-day torch
Of charity, and among mortal men
Below, thou art a living fount of hope.
Lady, thou art so great and so prevailest,
That who seeks grace without recourse to thee,
Would have his wish fly upward without wings.
Thy loving-kindness succors not alone
Him who is seeking it, but many times
Freely anticipates the very prayer.
In thee is mercy, pity is in thee,
In thee magnificence, whatever good
Is in created being joins in thee.
Dante, Par. XXXIII, 1-21. (Trans. H. Johnson.)