Karlo Broussard, Catholic Answers apologist, addresses the misconception that consecrating oneself to Mary is a form of idolatry. He clarifies that consecration is an act of entrusting oneself to Mary’s care as our spiritual mother, not worshiping her as God.
Transcript:
I guess I need a new definition for worship. And the reason why is I was talking to the Protestants, and I was saying, you know, what you guys do is not worship, you just listen to someone giving a sermon. And so they go, well, Mr. Roman Catholic,do you consider when you give yourself your entire life and your soul to Jesus that that’s worship, and you’re sacrificing your earthly desires to follow Jesus? And I go, yeah, exactly, sacrifice. That’s what worship is. And they go, oh, well, Roman Catholic, you are worshiping Mary. Now you may say you’re worshiping Jesus through Mary, but you’re worshiping Mary. I go, what? And they go, well, look at your prayer. And they go on the EWTN website, when you guys consecrate yourself to Mary, this is what it says, we consecrate to thee our very being our whole life, all that we have, all that we love, all that we are to thee, we give our bodies, our hearts and our souls. To thee we give our homes, our families, our country. So Mr. Roman Catholic, you are indeed worshiping Mary.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. I would first of all recommend an article that I wrote, and it’s entitled “Consecration to Mary, It’s Not Idolatry.” So that would be a resource that you can look to as a quick read. And basically what I point out in that article, Tony, is that consecration generally is just used to express the idea that something is given over to God in the service of God, right? And so this is why some would think that, well, when we consecrate ourselves to Mary, we’re kind of giving ourselves over to Mary as if she were God, but that’s not what’s going on.
Pope St. John Paul II expressed this idea with the term entrustment. Like just as Jesus entrusted John into the care of Mary, the foot of the cross, when he said, “Behold your mother.” So too, we’re entrusting ourselves into Mary’s care and look to her as our mother. And after all, she is the queen of Jesus’s new and transfigured Davidic kingdom, which is the church. And that makes her our spiritual mother for us who are citizens within the kingdom. And that maps on with Revelation 12, 17, where the woman Mary described in the heavenly vision as having offspring and those offspring being those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus, that is Christians. So whenever we consecrate ourselves to Mary, we are entrusting ourselves to Mary, that is true. But here’s the key, Tony, we recognize that when we do that, we are not entrusting ourselves to her as the source of all goodness and of our being, which such an entrustment belongs to God alone. Rather, it’s an entrustment of ourselves as spiritual children to our spiritual mother and looking to our mother for help, for guidance and saying, “Mary, our mother, I’m entrusting my whole life into your care, recognizing that in this order of providence, Jesus, the source of all of my blessings wills to give me those blessings through your motherly care.”
And so by way of analogy, Tony, it would be like a son or a daughter making an act of entrustment to their earthly mother and father, earthly parents and saying, “I’m relying on you to help me within my life as a son or a daughter of you who are my parents.” And that’s the lens through which we need to look in order to see how we’re “entrusting” or “consecrating ourselves” to Mary. The key is within the intention of the wheel and the mind to recognize the type or the kind of entrustment. Is it an entrustment to her as the source of all being and goodness? The answer is no. If it were, that would be idolatry. But our entrustment to Mary is not an entrustment of our lives to her as if she is the source of all blessing and goodness, rather is an entrustment to her as our spiritual mother through whom God wills to give us the blessings and the goodness that he wants to give us in our lives. And so that would be sort of an approach to how we begin to see our consecration to Mary as not involving idolatry or not involving worship, and thereby it being idolatry, but rather it being a legitimate form of honor that can be given to her as our queen mother, as our spiritual mother within the kingdom of Jesus. I’m gonna come back to you, Tony, and see if you think that’d be helpful to you. Oh yeah, so well, I just imagine the Protestant then is going to say, “Well, then it’s not really true what you’ve told me that you’re just praying to her for intercession, you’re actually leaning on her for her to act in your life and to give you something from heaven. So you’re not really just praying for intercession.” I see that that might be a big deal for some of my Protestant friends.
Yeah, well, that would be no different than a son or a daughter relying on the help and the assistance of their mother or father here on earth. A reliance that’s justified because God has given children, their mothers and their fathers here on earth to help them out, although God could do that stuff by himself. He doesn’t need a mom and a dad to take care of his children here on earth, but yet he wills to do so through their help. So to spiritually, we believe as Catholics that God wills to provide for us help spiritually speaking and even in temporal matters through the intercessory prayer of our mother Mary. So it is wrapped up in our reliance on her help in this life is an expression of her intercession, right? Because we recognize that through her prayers, obviously she’s not like helping me out physically, like my physical mother might help me out physically. And so the implication is that we recognize help will be administered to us through her prayers. And so there you have the intercession of Mary at the heart and the center of consecrating ourselves to Mary and trusting our lives to her, the implication being that Mary, through your prayers, we’re asking for you to intercede for us to bring about these blessings in our lives in accordance with the divine will. And so that’s the meaning of the consecration. Again, as Pope St. John Paul II put it, an entrustment to our Queen Mother as our mother, not as the source of all being and goodness which belongs to God alone.
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