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Show HONOR TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN, f Salt Lake City. Utah. Nov. 10, 190S. Intermountahi Catholic: Will you kindly tell me when first de- F votion was shown and prayers said to the Blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus? I Can this be proven by history? Please answer in j'our valued paper, and f oblige, A FAITHFUL READER. C? In the litany ascribed to St. James. f Mary is commemorated as "our most I holy, immaculate, must glorious lady, f Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary." In the Maronite Ritual she is invoked I as "our most holy, praiseworthy, and immaculate lady." fc In the Alexandrian liturgy of St. i Basil, who was born in 330, she is ad- dressed as "most holy, most glorious, immaculate." 5 In the catacombs of Rome are many evidences of the veneration paid to the Blessed Virgin. These catacombs on the Via Appia a short distance from Rome whither the early Christians the first 300 years resorted, possess many testimonies bearing on present-day Catholic worship such as the primacy of St. Peter, the various orders of hierarchy, hie-rarchy, the sacrament of baptism, the forgiveness of sins, the Blessed Eucharist, Eu-charist, supplication for the departed, veneration for the saints and the Mother Moth-er of God, etc. Many of the early writers wri-ters of the Catholic church of the second, sec-ond, third and fourth centuries referred to the veneration of the Mother of God. In 1854 the Immortal Piux IX solemnly solemn-ly defined and proclaimed the immaculate immacu-late conception as a dogma of belief, and as Catholics are bound to accept the pope's spiritual conimandents, the same as we would St. Peter's himself if he were alive, this would be sufficient suffi-cient for our honoring the Blessed Virgin, Vir-gin, but it was affirmed in 1854, because it had been publicly attacked. The fact that Christopher Columbus named the first ship in which he sailed to discover the New World, Mary of the Conception, Concep-tion, proves that this doctrine was held by Catholic Europe in the fifteenth century. cen-tury. We are compelled, if we believe in Christ as God, to honor His works because they are His works and show-forth show-forth His omnipotent power. His saints are His Mightiest works, and as Mary, His Mother, is greater in purity and perfection than any of the saints. Jewish Jew-ish and Christian, she is consequently the greatest of His works. For a fuller account of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin and other Catholic Cath-olic doctrines we take pleasure in recommending rec-ommending to you for a delightful hour's reading Cardinal Gibbons' "Faith of Our Fathers." |
