St. Louis de Montfort on the Hail Mary (True Devotion #249-253)
In the preface to the French edition of St. Louis de Montfort’s classic work, “True Devotion to Mary,” Father Faber says of Montfort:
He had been drawn from his earliest infancy, in quite a particular fashion, to the love of this Queen of Angels;
His choice to describe Mary as “this Queen of Angels” is not random or metaphorical but clarifies how Montfort’s devotion works in practice.
Montfort himself claims in paragraph #8 of this classic work:
St. Bonaventure tells us that all the Angels in heaven cry out incessantly to her, Sancta, sancta, sancta Maria, Dei Genitrix et Virgo “Holy, holy, holy Mary, Mother of God and Virgin’ and that they offer to her millions and millions of times a day the Angelical Salutation, Ave Maria, “Hail Mary”; prostrating themselves before her, and begging of her, in her graciousness, to honor them with some of her commands.
St. Michael, as St. Augustine says, although the prince of all the heavenly court, is the most zealous in honoring her and causing her to be honored, while he waits always in expectation that he may have the honor to go, at her bidding, to render service to some one of her servants.
In paragraph #28 he speaks this truth clearly:
Mary commands in the heavens the Angels and the Blessed.
This next passage from True Devotion #158, however, obscures for some, Montfort’s teaching on Mary and the Angels:
Make for me, if you will, a new road to go to Jesus, and pave it with all the merits of the Blessed, adorn it with all their heroic virtues, illuminate and embellish it with all the lights and beauties of the Angels, and let all the Angels and Saints be there themselves to escort, defend, and sustain those who are ready to walk there; and yet in truth, in simple truth, I say boldly, and I repeat that I say truly, I would prefer to take this new perfect path, the immaculate way of Mary.
It can mistakenly be read as placing the way of Angels and Saints in opposition to the “immaculate way of Mary.” However, this is not his meaning here. What he is saying is that if you made a way to Jesus that excluded Mary but included all the Angels and Saints, it would not surpass the “immaculate way of Mary.” How so? Because Mary is “so intimately united” with Jesus, as Monfort writes in #63, that it would be easier to separate from Jesus:
all the Angels and the Saints than the divine Mary, because she loves [Him] more ardently, and glorifies [Him] more perfectly, than all other creatures put together.
In actuality, when you take the “immaculate way of Mary,” you get all the Angels and Saints with her! For as we read above, she commands them!
In #204, Montfort claims Mary:
gives her clients good counsels…If it is not by herself that she gives these counsels, it is by the ministry of the Angels, who have no greater honor or pleasure than to descend to earth to obey any of her commandments, and to succor any of her servants.
And in #210 he goes on to say:
This good Mother and powerful princess of the heavens would rather dispatch battalions of millions of angels to succor one of her servants than that it should ever be said that a faithful servant of Mary, who trusted in her, had to succumb to the malice, the number, and the vehemence of his enemies.
This may be hyperbole, but Montfort’s point is clear. Mary uses the Holy Angels in her ordinary dealings with her children when she is not attending to them herself.
O prodigy of… Mary! you cannot help but do prodigies of grace in souls that wish to lose themselves altogether in you!
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