Mary, Mother of God.

Humility, her greatest virtue

The Immaculata comes into this world without the slightest stain of sin. She is the masterpiece, come from God’s hands, full of grace. God in the Most Holy Trinity looked upon her lowliness, for humility is the touchstone of all her virtues. She is his handmaiden and he ‘does great things’ for her, for ‘He is great and mighty’. God, Almighty, the Father, gives her his Son for her own. God the Son enters her womb, and God the Holy Spirit forms the Body of Christ within the Most Pure Virgin. And thus the Word was made flesh. The Immaculata becomes the Mother of God. The fruit of the love of the Triune God and the Immaculate Virgin Mary is Christ, the God-Man.

Who are you, O Lady?

Who are you, O Lady? Who are you, O Immaculata? I cannot fathom what it is to be a creature of God. It surpasses my strength to comprehend what it means to be an adopted child of God. And you, Immaculata, who are you? You are not only a creature, not only an adopted child, but the Mother of God, and not just an adopted Mother, but indeed the Mother of God.

And this is not merely a supposition, a probability, but a certainty, a complete certainty, a dogma of Faith.

And are you still the Mother of God? The title of Mother does not change. Forever God will say to you: ‘My Mother’. The Lawgiver who handed down the fourth commandment will honour you for all eternity.

And he, the Saviour, God Incarnate, liked to call himself the Son of Man. But people did not understand it. And even today how few souls, and how imperfectly, perceive its meaning.

Dogma of the Faith

Human words are incapable of telling us who is she that became the true Mother of God. Of herself, she is a creature, but because she is of God, she is a person so exalted that it would be necessary to conceive who God is, in order to comprehend who the Mother of God is.

And she is the true Mother of God. This is a dogma of Faith. One is not called a mother, and is not a mother of a portion of her child, nor the father the father of a portion of a child, but father and mother are parents of the whole child. So our Blessed Mother is Mother of the whole Jesus, the God-Man, hence, she is Mother of God.

Although the dignity of her divine motherhood is the chief reason for all her privileges, still her first grace, received from God alone, is the Immaculate Conception, that freedom from all stain, including Original Sin, from the very first moment of her existence.

(From Will to Love: Reflections for Daily Living by St. Maximilian Kolbe, ‘Prophet of the Civilization of Love’)