Why is May Mary’s Month?
“What is spring?” asks the admirable Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. He answers: “Growth in every thing… All things rising.” Then he adds, beautifully: “Mary sees, sympathizing / With that world of good, / Nature’s motherhood.”
This is Father Hopkins’ answer to the question of why the Church dedicates the month of May to Our Lady. In his poem “The May Magnificat,” he notes that in this most beautiful time of year we see all creatures, both animal and vegetable, stirring under the warm sunlight which has now fully dispelled the winter cold. As they burst forth from dormancy into joyful bloom and nesting, their growth and fecundity remind us that Our Lady, the common Mother of all the faithful, brought forth supernatural Light and Life to our spiritually barren world.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her [stead]
Magnify the Lord.
Father Hopkins’ answer is undoubtedly correct, for in its essence it has been the common judgment of mankind from at least the beginnings of Western civilization. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized the affinity of Nature to motherhood, and annually celebrated Nature’s beauty and fertility in a springtime “Floralia” festival. No less today, the almost worldwide custom of celebrating Mother’s Day at this same time of year draws on the ubiquitous fecundity of the spring months as an emblem of life and motherhood itself.
The Church likewise fittingly honors our Blessed Mother throughout the entire month of May, ascribing all the true and lasting Good that we have in this world to Her unique spiritual fecundity, which has overflowed to enliven the whole world for all generations to come. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes, She is our most excellent and nurturing Mother, the Mediatrix of All Graces:
“The Lord has placed in Mary the fullness of all good, so that if there is anything of hope in us, if anything of grace, if anything of salvation, we may rest assured it has overflowed into us from Her. With every fiber of our being, every feeling of our hearts, with all affections of our minds, and with all the ardor of our souls let us honor Mary because this is the will of God, Who would have us obtain everything through Her hands.”[1]
Dom Gueranger, in his classic 15-volume work, The Liturgical Year,[2] gives further insight in the fittingness of devoting the month of May to the Blessed Virgin, the joyful Mother of the Risen Savior. As this month coincides almost entirely with the Easter Season, during which time Our Lord must have made frequent visits to His Mother before His Ascension, there can be no more fitting time to celebrate Her maternal joy. It is also a time when our own joy in the Resurrection of Christ moves us to greater intimacy with this Immaculate Mother, to share in Her joy. Too, the springtime air itself, he says, is “all Marian,” full of blossoms and new life, naturally suiting the month of May to be hailed “Mary’s Month.” Thus, he insists, it is no mere human invention but a heavenly inspiration which led the Church to dedicate this month to Our Lady.
Roots of the Church’s Tradition
That inspiration, historical records show, was already taking shape in the 13th Century with specific days in May being devoted to Our Lady’s honor, and (particularly among monastic communities) many prayers and hymns being composed for their celebration. At the same time, there arose the custom of devoting thirty days to Our Lady (called Tricesimum, or “Lady Month”), though it was held as a sequel to the Feast of Her Assumption, from August 15th to September 14th. More than just an honorary dedication, this 30-day celebration included daily prayers and spiritual exercises directed to Our Lady.
In the 17th Century, these two devotional trends began to be joined together in Italy, where the entire month of May was consecrated to the Blessed Virgin with special daily observances. This practice spread and developed rapidly, such that by 1813, May devotions to Our Lady are known to have been held in at least twenty churches in Rome. All along, their popularity had been spontaneous and immense: “Around 1739, witnesses speak of a particular form of Marian devotion in May in Grezzano near Verona. In 1747, the Archbishop of Genoa recommended the May devotions as well suited for the home. Specific prayers for them were promulgated in Rome in 1838.”[3]
This custom of organizing daily devotions to Our Lady throughout the month of May, observing it as Mary’s month, was spread in large measure through the Society of Jesus, whose educational influence was at its peak following the Council of Trent. Today’s well-known tradition of constructing a “May Altar” in our homes and churches on which a statue of Our Lady is decorated with flowers comes to us from this time, having been established by the Jesuits of Rome. It was their especially fervent resolve to consecrate their studies and their works of education under the patronage of Our Lady as Queen of Purity. By 1700, the practice of dedicating the month of May to Our Lady was firmly established in their Roman College (now known as the Pontifical Gregorian University), and within a short time these devotions were likewise being publicly celebrated in the Society’s mother church, the Church of the Gesù in Rome.
Particular credit for the Order’s confluence of devotion to Our Lady as Queen of the May is given to the Jesuit Father Latomia, a professor in the Roman College in the late 18th Century whose original impetus it was to devote the month to Mary. To combat dangers against purity and faith among the house’s members, he asked his students to join him in making a vow to devote the month of May to Our Lady.[4] This beautiful annual custom spread first to other Jesuit colleges and then (beginning with France, especially during the 19th Century) to churches and homes throughout the Western world. May devotions are known to have been popular in Belgium, at least domestically, as early as 1803. By the middle of the 19th Century, the Raccolta was replete with private Marian devotions recommended for use in the month of May. Finally, in about 1840, the practice of honoring Our Lady in a month-long May devotion made its way from the continent to England, just in time to have inspired the childhood memories of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) if he had been given a Catholic upbringing. As it was, he made a dramatic and heroic conversion to the Faith as a young man, being received into the Church by John Henry Newman in 1866. He wrote “The May Magnificat” at Stonyhurst College in 1878, the year after his ordination as a Jesuit priest.
The practice of crowning a statue of Our Lady took a separate route into our present May traditions through the acts of two Popes. In the late 16th Century, Pope Clement VIII affixed two crowns to the ancient Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child called Salus Populi Romani in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome. Those crowns were eventually displaced and lost, but on the Feast of the Assumption in 1837, Pope Gregory XVI solemnly replaced them in a manner which was quickly popularized and became the basis for today’s common “rite” of using flowers to adorn statues of Mary in the precious tradition of a May Crowning (often associated with First Holy Communions).
Popes have also been instrumental in encouraging May devotions to Our Lady. In 1815, Pope Pius VII granted indulgences to the practice of honoring Mary with special prayers and other acts of virtue or homage during May, whether in public or in private, “in order to animate all Christian people to the practice of a devotion so tender and agreeable to the most blessed Virgin, and calculated to be of such great spiritual benefit to themselves.”[5] In 1859, Pope Pius IX made this indulgence plenary.
Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII likewise endorsed and encouraged devotions to Our Lady in May, associating them with peace in the world and the well-being of the Church. Pius XII in particular did much to advance this beautiful devotion, making frequent references to Our Lady’s Month. In his 1947 Encyclical on the Sacred Liturgy, Mediator Dei, he described this devotion as one of “other exercises of piety which although not strictly belonging to the Sacred Liturgy, are nevertheless of special import and dignity, and may be considered in a certain way to be an addition to the liturgical cult, having been approved and praised over and over again by the Apostolic See and by the Bishops.” In 1954, he further solidified the tradition of May devotions by establishing the Feast of the Queenship of Mary on May 31st. As recently as 1965, Pope Paul VI, in his Cold War-era encyclical Mense Maio (On Prayers During May for Preservation of Peace), encouraged the faithful to increase their devotion to Our Lady in the grace-filled opportunity of the month of May:
“May is a month which the piety of the faithful has long dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. Our heart rejoices at the thought of the moving tribute of faith and love which will soon be paid to the Queen of Heaven in every corner of the earth. For this is the month during which Christians, in their churches and their homes, offer the Virgin Mother more fervent and loving acts of homage and veneration; and it is the month in which a greater abundance of God’s merciful gifts comes down to us from our Mother’s throne … because our petitions more readily find access to Her compassionate Heart during it.”
To be continued and concluded tomorrow…
End notes
[1] Sermon 6: For the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
[2] Cf. May 24, Feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians.
[3] Wikipedia, “May Devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” citing Kurt Küppers, Marienlexikon, Vol. 4, p. 244-246, Augsburg, and Margaret Miles, Maiden and Mother: Prayers, Hymns, Devotions, 2001, ISBN 0-86012-305-7, page 87.
[4] Cf. Fr. Frederick Holweck, “Special Devotions for Months,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911.
[5] Rescript of the Segretaria of the Memorials, March 21, 1815.