Marie de Nazareth
To Jesus, through Mary
Portrait of Cardinal de Bérulle by Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575 -1629) was the leading exponent of the French School of Spirituality and founder of the Oratory Society. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort said that he played an important role in the development of Marian devotion in France. In his Life of Jesus, he compares the Virgin Mary to the dawn, which precedes the sun, and speaks of her birth "with a murmur".
"Mary, that holy and divine soul, is to the Church what the dawn is to the firmament; she immediately precedes the sun. But she is more than the dawn: for she not only precedes it, she must bear it and give birth to it, give Life, Salvation and Light to the universe, and produce there an Eastern Sun, a rising Sun, of which the one that enlightens us is only the shadow and figure. The earth, which ignores God, also ignores this work of God in the earth.
Mary is born quietly, without the world speaking about it and without Israel even thinking about it, even though she is the flower of Israel and the most eminent of the earth. But if the earth does not think of her, heaven looks upon her and reveres her as the one whom God caused to be born for such a great purpose, and to render such a great service to his own person, that is to say, to clothe him one day with a new nature.
And this very God who wants to be born of her loves her and looks upon her in this capacity. His gaze is not then on the great ones, on the monarchs whom the earth adores; but the first and sweetest gaze of God on earth is towards this humble Virgin whom the world does not know."
Source:
- Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, Vie de Jésus, ch. 5, Paris: Grasset 1961, p. 54-55.
- on the birth of Maryin the Marian Encyclopaedia
- on Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629, cardinal)in the Marian Encyclopaedia
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