by Joannie Watson | August 22, 2025 1:01 am
Having Mary as our queen does nothing to threaten her Son—I’m sure he’s happy to have us love his Mother as he does. Calling Mary our Queen does not put her on the same level as Jesus, either. The reason Mary is our Queen is because she is the Mother of our King.
Today we celebrate the Queenship of Mary, a feast established on this day after Pope Pius declared the dogma of the Assumption and set this day to end the Octave of the Assumption. He writes in Ad Caeli Reginam[1],
“We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. We are convinced that this feast will help to preserve, strengthen and prolong that peace among nations which daily is almost destroyed by recurring crises. Is she not a rainbow in the clouds reaching towards God, the pledge of a covenant of peace?”
It is fitting that Pope Leo XIV has called for today to be a day of prayer and fasting for the end of war and violence in Ukraine and the Middle East.
When Pope Pius XII declared Mary to be our queen, he was careful to point out that he was not proposing anything new. He wrote, “In this matter We do not wish to propose a new truth to be believed by Christians, since the title and the arguments on which Mary’s queenly dignity is based have already been clearly set forth, and are to be found in ancient documents of the Church and in the books of the sacred liturgy.”
He then sets forth, in his encyclical, to cite multiple Scriptural references and numerous writings of the earliest Church fathers and saints, as well as walk through the theological reasons for to reverence Mary as our Queen.
Having Mary as our queen does nothing to threaten her Son—I’m sure he’s happy to have us love his Mother as he does. Calling Mary our Queen does not put her on the same level as Jesus, either. The reason Mary is our Queen is because she is the Mother of our King.
After the king himself, the most influential person in the Davidic court was not the king’s wife (after all, there were often several…) but his mother. When you read 1 and 2 Kings, you’ll see that almost every time a geneaology introduces a new monarch in the kingdom of Judah, it mentions his mother, indicating the mother’s intimate involvement in her royal son’s reign.
In fact, when Micah and Isaiah talk of the Messiah being born of a woman, perhaps that doesn’t seem odd to you (isn’t everyone born of a woman?). But it was at the time, in documents in the Near East, you never spoke of genealogy in terms of a woman, but in terms of his father. When you have genealogies in the Old Testament, you do not have women present…with one exception. The Davidic genealogies of 1 and 2 Kings list the Queen Mothers alongside their royal sons (1 Kings 11:26; 14:21; 15:2).
This Queen Mother stood at his right hand, had a throne next to her son, and was intercessor of the people. It didn’t mean the people always got what they wanted (see 1 Kings 2:19), but she was their best bet.
Likewise, Jesus had a Queen Mother. And guess what? We see at the wedding feast of Cana that she took seriously her role as intercessor.
Perhaps an image that might be helpful in understanding devotion to our Lady is the image of the peasant who wants to approach the King. He knows the King is loving and merciful and he has nothing to fear. At the same time, he has a very small, humble gift to give and a very big request. Think of the queen who sees that little peasant in the parade of people. She takes him aside and arranges his little gift, making it look just how she knows her son likes it to look.
That’s Mary.
Pope Pius ended his encyclical pleading that he was “Earnestly desiring that the Queen and Mother of Christendom may hear these Our prayers, and by her peace make happy a world shaken by hate, and may, after this exile show unto us all Jesus, Who will be our eternal peace and joy.” Today, on this day of prayer and penance, let us turn to Mary, Queen of Peace, and beg for her motherly intercession.
Image credit: “Coronation of the Virgin” | Gleb Simonov[2], CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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