Part II : The Crown of Power : Chapter 14 : § 1.2-4

Chapter 14 : How all these reasons oblige us to love, to honour and to serve the MOTHER OF GOD

Continuing our translation of the 1845 reprint of Fr François Poiré’s Triple Crown of the Mother of God (1643 French edition).

Notre Dame des Grâces, Cotignac (Poggi, 2020)

§ 1. The reasons we have for loving her

 2    I sometimes imagine that we are not unlike those sons born into families with rich and well furnished households, surrounded by every sort of convenience, accustomed to eating well and having fine clothes. Because they do not know what privation is, they cannot truly appreciate their good fortune, having never experienced the want or hardship their forebears had to undergo when amassing the wealth which they are now enjoying without having worked for it. 

In the same way, I think that living in a fully fledged Christian culture surrounded by an abundance of spiritual goods, we are scarcely able to appreciate how blessed we are compared with those who came before us in the faith and who once were crying out in hunger and considered themselves happy to be able to gather the crumbs[1] falling from the table of the children of the Church.

Footnotes

[1] Matt. xv.27 & Mark vii.28; Luke xvi. 21.

 3    If the Holy Patriarch Jacob who died In the expectation of God’s Saviour[1]; if the worthy old man Tobias, who said as he was dying[2] that he would consider it a great favour if instead of himself one of his descendants would live to see the glory and brightness of Jerusalem when God came to visit it; if the great prophet Isaiah who, amidst many sighs, implored God[3] to rend the Heavens and suffer not the world to languish any longer; if all those hearts ablaze with love, of whom Saint Paul speaks[4], who received the promises of God without seeing their fulfilment, having to be content with greeting from afar those blessings which we presently enjoy – if all these could now find themselves like us in full possession of the joy that they had longed for so ardently, how delighted they would be and how indebted they would feel towards the word Incarnate and to her whom He had so honoured as to be the flesh of her flesh, bone of her bones, and blood of her blood[5]! They would be better able than us to judge the difference which is found between our Sacraments and theirs, between our blessings and those granted to them, between what they wished for and what we possess in abundance.

Footnotes

[1] Gen. xlix. 10.

[2] Happy shall I be if there shall remain of my seed, to see the glory of Jerusalem.  Tob. xiii. 20.

[3] Isaiah lxiv. 1 et seq.

[4] All these died according to faith, not having received the promises, but beholding them afar off, and saluting them, and confessing that they are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. Hebr. xi. 13.

[5] Cf. Gen. ii. 23.

 4    Let us not, however, cease to have the highest esteem that we can for the blessed age in which we find ourselves and for all the good things that heaven pours without measure upon us, always remembering by whose mediation we possess them; for it was always the opinion of the Great Fathers of the Church that we are obliged for all these blessings, after God Himself, to His most worthy and most beloved Mother.

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The Virgin of Tenderness. >12th century.

SUB tuum præsidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genitrix. Nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta. Amen. 

 

Totus tuus ego sum

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:

Ad Jesum per Mariam.

© Peter Bloor 2025