In what sense and in what way does consecration to Mary have Christian civilization as its fruit? To consecrate is, by definition, to subordinate man and society to God.75 The term “Reign of Mary” expresses that ideal of the sacralization of the temporal order through the intercession of Mary, which is none other than the Christian civilization always indicated by the Pontiffs as a goal. Christian civilization, which subjects itself completely to God and recognizes the supreme royalty of Jesus Christ and of Mary, is in this sense “sacral” and hierarchically ordered.
The Reign of Mary will be a sacral civilization because it is fundamentally ordered in God. The law that governs relations with God and among men will be that of dependence, that will find its highest expression in “slavery of love” to the Most Holy Virgin.
The human mediation of Marian slavery shows analogies with the Medieval feudal relationship: this in fact expressed a Christian concept of dependence that did not exclude, but rather enhanced, the freedom and responsibility of the subjects. Feudal society was a society of freemen, founded on a bilateral relation of mutual loyalty.76 Slavery is certainly immoral if it is considered as total subjection of one man to another, in the sense of denying him his natural inalienable rights. Dependence on another man is not however immoral if these rights are acknowledged, and if it is freely chosen, as happens in the religious orders and as happened in Medieval Christendom.77
“What the Middle Ages felt and expressed was that every man had a superior. This superior was his lord, his king, who, in turn, had a lord, a king. This society offered a view of what Augustin Thierry magnificently defined as ‘a great chain of duties’.”78
In this sense the Reign of Mary will be similar to the Middle Ages, the sacral and Christian age par excellence, but it will bear in mind the errors that led to its decadence:
“The order born of the Counter-Revolution will have to shine even more than that of the Middle Ages in the three principal points in which the latter was wounded by the Revolution:
“1) A profound respect for the rights of the Church and of the Papacy, and a sacralization, to the utmost possible extent, of the values of temporal life, all of this out of opposition to secularism, interconfessionalism, atheism, and pantheism, as well as their respective consequences.
“2) A spirit of hierarchy marking all aspects of society and State, of culture and life, out of opposition to the egalitarian metaphysics of the Revolution.
“3) A diligence in detecting and combating evil in its embryonic or veiled forms, in fulminating it with execration and a note of infamy, and in punishing it with unbreakable firmness in all its manifestations, particularly in those that offend against orthodoxy and purity of customs, in opposition to the liberal metaphysics of the Revolution and its tendency to give free rein and protection to evil.”79
Will the Reign of Mary be a return to the past, or will it open a new and unforeseeable future? “To both questions” according to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira “the answer should be in
the affirmative. Human nature has its constants, which are invariable for all times and for all places. The basic principles of Christian civilization are also unchangeable. Therefore, certainly, this new order of things, this new Christian civilization will be profoundly similar, or better identical, to the old one in its essential lines. And it will be, please God, in the twenty-first century the same as that of the thirteenth century. But on the other hand the technical and material conditions of life have undergone profound transformations, and there would be nothing more inorganic than to disregard these modifications. On this specific point it is necessary not to make many plans. The founders of the Christian civilization in the Late Middle Ages did not have in mind the thirteenth century as it was. They simply had the general intention to make a Catholic world. Therefore every generation solved with a depth of views and Catholic sense the problems within its reach. And as regards the others, they did not waste time in conjectures.
“Let us do likewise. Generally speaking, we know all the formulas from history and from the Magisterium of the Church. As for the particulars, we will advance step by step, without purely theoretical plans, elaborated at the table: ‘sufficit diei malitia sua’.”80
“The admirers of the Middle Ages” he wrote again “express themselves poorly when they uphold that the world attained its greatest development at that time. There was still further to go along the lines medieval civilization was following. The grandiose and delicate charm of the Middle Ages does not come so much from what it accomplished, but from the sparkling truth and profound harmony of the principles upon which it was built. No other possessed such a profound knowledge of the natural order of things; no other had the lively sense of the insufficiency of the natural — even when developed to the plenitude of its own order — and the necessity of the supernatural; no other shone under the sun of supernatural influence with such purity and in the candour of an even greater sincerity.”81
In the family of souls that acknowledges the spiritual paternity of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, trust in the Reign of Mary is not a secondary and accessory element.
Scepticism toward this perspective is typical of those who wish to deny every true progress in the spiritual and civil life of individuals and of peoples. During the nineteenth century, a suspicion of this kind grew up around the concept of the Kingship of Christ and the great devotion that was intimately linked to it, that of the Sacred Heart. A similarly profound connection today unites the concept of the Reign of Mary to the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin which was confirmed in the apparitions of 1917 in Fatima.82 But the concept of the Royalty of Christ is in its turn bound to that of the Royalty of Mary, just as the devotions to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary are closely linked one to the other. The Kingdom of Christ in souls and in society is not different from the Reign of Mary, and the devotion to the two Sacred Hearts prepares for the coming of the same triumph.
“For all the faithful, the ‘slavery of love’ is therefore the angelic and supreme freedom with which Our Lady awaits them on the threshold of the twenty-first century: smiling and attractive, she invites them into her Kingdom, according to her promise in Fatima: ‘In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph’.”83
Notes:
75. St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib. 10, c. 6; the entry Consacrare of S. de Fiores S.M.M., in Nuovo Dizionario di Mariologia, edited by S. De Fiores e Salvatore Meo, (Milan, Paoline, 1985), pp. 394-417 and that of J. de Finance, Consécration.
76. Cf. François-Louis Ganshof, Qu’est-ce que la féodalité, Paris, Tallandier, 1982; Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, Paris, Aubier, 1968 (1959); Joseph Calmette, La société feudale, 6th edn., Paris, Colin, 1947; Marc Bloch, La société féodale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989.
77. Cf. P. Allard, Les origines du servage en France, 2nd edn., Paris, J. Gabalda, 1913; Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 2 vols., Brugge, De Tempel, 1955 – Gent 1977; Francesco Michelini, Schiavitù, religioni antiche e cristianesimo primitivo, Manduria, Lacaita, 1963.
78. Bertrand de Jouvenel, De la souveraineté, ( Paris, Genin, 1955), p. 218.
79. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 76.
80. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A sociedade cristã e organica e a sociedade mecanica e pagã”, Catolicismo, no. 11, November 1951. On this point cf. also ID., A réplica da autenticidade, pp. 233-7.
81. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, A grande experiença de 10 anos de luta.
82. Péricles Capanema, “Fátima e Paray-le-Monial: uma visão de conjunto”, Catolicismo, no. 522, June 1994. It was St John Eudes, in 1643, who began among his religious the liturgical feast of the Heart of Mary that Pius XII, in 1944, extended to the whole Church. Pius XII himself on 31 October 1942, in reply to the entreaties of the Portuguese Episcopate, solemnly consecrated the Church and all mankind to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
83. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Obedecer para ser livre, p. 16.