What mother, what husband or wife, what youth or maiden in love, but says a thousand foolish things, in the way of endearment, which the speaker would be sorry for strangers to hear yet they are not on that account unwelcome to the parties to whom they are addressed. Blessed John Henry Newman, a comparatively-stuffy Englishman, points this out brilliantly:Īnd of all passions love is the most unmanageable nay more, I would not give much for that love which is never extravagant, which always observes the proprieties, and can move about in perfect good taste, under all emergencies. It’s not a coincidence that the most schmaltzy or exaggerated-seeming statements about Mary tend to come from Romantic Romance-language speakers (the Italians, French, and Spanish, especially).īut even more than that, these kind of lines come from devotional writings, meaning that they’re more like love letters to the Virgin Mary than they are like carefully-worded theological treatises. Part of the answer is cultural and rhetorical. Take the Salve Regina, for example: it calls Mary “Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our Hope.” How is that kind of effusive flattery theologically defensible? After all, Our Life and our Hope is Jesus Christ. A lot of Catholics find other Catholics, including great Saints like Alphonsus Liguori and Louis de Montfort, to be a little “much” when talking about the Virgin Mary. Protestants aren’t the only ones who find Catholic devotion to Mary a bit over-the-top sometimes. A Marian procession in San Cataldo, Sicily, for the Feast of the Assumption.
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