On the Most Excellent Devotion to Our Blessed Lady, or the Perfect Consecration to Jesus by Mary.

From St. Louis de Montfort, A Treatise on the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, tr. F. W. Faber (London: Burns and Lambert, 1863). Wording reflects its time. Public domain; the text is given word for word as printed.

There are several interior practices of true devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Here are the principal of them stated compendiously. (1) To honour her as the worthy Mother of God, with the worship of hyperdulia; that is to say, to esteem her and honour her above all the other Saints, as the masterpiece of grace, and the first after Jesus Christ, true God and true Man; (2) to meditate her virtues, her privileges, and her actions; (3) to contemplate her grandeurs; (4) to make to her acts of love, of praise, of gratitude; (5) to invoke her cordially; (6) to offer ourselves to her, and unite ourselves with her; (7) to do all our actions with the view of pleasing her; (8) to begin, to continue, and to finish all our actions by her, in her, and with her, in order that we may do them by Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ our Last End. We will presently explain this last practice.

True devotion to our Lady has also several exterior practices, of which the following are the chief:—(1) to enrol ourselves in her confraternities, and enter her congregations; (2) to join the religious orders instituted in her honour; (3) to publish her praises; (4) to give alms, to fast, and to undergo outward and inward mortifications in her honour; (5) to wear her liveries, such as the rosary, the scapular, or the little chain; (6) to recite with attention, devotion, and modesty, the holy Rosary, composed of fifteen decades of Hail Marys in honour of the fifteen principal mysteries of Jesus Christ, or five decades, which is the third of the Rosary, either in honour of the five Joyous Mysteries, which are the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity of Jesus Christ, the Purification, and the Finding of our Lord in the Temple; or in honour of the five Sorrowful Mysteries, which are the Agony of our Lord in the Garden of Olives, His Scourging, His Crowning with Thorns, His Carrying of the Cross, and His Crucifixion; or in honour of the five Glorious Mysteries, which are the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, the Assumption of our Blessed Lady body and soul into Heaven, and her Coronation by the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. We may also say a Chaplet of six or seven decades in honour of the years which we believe our Lady lived on earth; or the little Corona of the Blessed Virgin, composed of three Our Fathers and twelve Hail Marys, in honour of her crown of twelve stars, or privileges; or the Office of our Lady, so universally received and recited in the Church; or the Little Psalter of the holy Virgin, which St. Bonaventure has composed in her honour, and which is so tender and so devout that one cannot say it without being melted by it; or fourteen Our Fathers and Hail Marys in honour of her fourteen joys; or some other prayers, hymns, and canticles of the Church, such as the Salve Regina, the Alma, the Ave Regina cœlorum, or the Regina cœli, according to the different seasons; or the Ave Maris stella, the O gloriosa Domina, the Magnificat, or some other practices of devotion of which books are full; (7) to sing or have sung spiritual canticles in her honour; (8) to make her a number of genuflexions or reverences, while saying, for example, every morning, sixty or a hundred times Ave Maria, Virgo fidelis, to obtain from God the grace by her to be faithful to the graces of God during the day; and then again in the evening, Ave Maria, Mater misericordiæ, to ask pardon of God by her for the sins that we have committed during the day; (9) to take care of her confraternities, to adorn her altars, to crown and ornament her images; (10) to carry her images, or to have them carried, in procession, and to carry a picture or image of her about our own persons, as a mighty arm against the evil spirit; (11) to have her images or her name carved, and placed in churches, or in houses, or on the gates and entrances into cities, churches, and houses; (12) to consecrate ourselves to her in a special and solemn manner.

There are a quantity of other practices of true devotion towards the Blessed Virgin which the Holy Ghost has inspired into saintly souls, and which are very sanctifying; they can be read at length in the Paradise opened of Fr. Barry, the Jesuit, where he has collected a great number of devotions which the Saints have practised in honour of our Lady, devotions which serve marvellously to sanctify souls, provided they are performed as they ought to be; that is to say, (1) with a good and pure intention to please God only, to unite ourselves to Jesus Christ as to our Last End, and to edify our neighbour; (2) with attention, and without voluntary distraction; (3) with devotion, equally avoiding precipitation or negligence; (4) with modesty, and a respectful and edifying care of the postures of the body.

But after all, I loudly protest that, having read nearly all the books which profess to treat of devotion to our Lady, and having conversed familiarly and holily with the best and wisest of men of these latter times, I have never known nor heard of any practice of devotion towards her at all equal to the one which I wish now to unfold; exacting from the soul as it does more sacrifices for God, emptying the soul more of itself and of its self-love, keeping it more faithfully in grace, and grace more faithfully in it, uniting it more perfectly and more easily to Jesus Christ; and finally, being more glorious to God, more sanctifying to the soul, and more useful to our neighbour, than any other of the devotions to her.

As the essential of this devotion consists in the interior which it ought to form, it will not be equally comprehended by every body. Some will stop at what is exterior in it, and will go no further, and these will be the greatest number. Some, in small number, will enter into its inward spirit; but they will only mount but one step. Who will mount to the second step? Who will get as far as the third? Lastly, who will so advance as to make this devotion his habitual state? He alone to whom the spirit of Jesus Christ shall have revealed the secret, the faultlessly faithful soul, whom He shall conduct there Himself, to advance from virtue to virtue, from grace to grace, from light to light, until he arrives at the transformation of himself into Jesus Christ, and to the plentitude of His age on earth, and of His glory in heaven.

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