The Royal Mother and the Little Queen
Today on the Feast of the Queenship of Mary, I am reminded of a quote from my favorite Saint. On August 21, 1897, a day prior to this great feast we celebrate today, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, just over a month before she died, bedridden and in pain, said of Our Lady: “We know very well that the Blessed Virgin is Queen of heaven and earth, but she is more Mother than Queen” (St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations, p. 161). In no way was Saint Thérèse diminishing or slighting the great reality of Mary’s Queenship; she knew well the love involved when being called by that royal title, as her father had nicknamed her his “Little Queen.” Rather, Saint Thérèse was speaking from her experience, her lived relationship with Our Lady, who Jesus Himself instructed us to call “Mother” (see John 19:27).
The Wisdom of a Saint
To fully understand this quote we must not separate it from the sentences Saint Thérèse spoke right before this: “For a sermon on the Blessed Virgin to please me and do me any good, I must see her real life, not her imagined life. I’m sure that her real life was very simple. They show her to us as unapproachable, but that she lived by faith just like ourselves” (Last Conversations, p. 161.) Saint Thérèse knew that Mary is our Mother, knowing our hardships, our sufferings, and our trials. Saint Thérèse knew that Mary isn’t in a faraway castle; rather, she is with us, and desires to be with us, in our simple, everyday lives.
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In Her Height of Agony
Let us go back to when these words were spoken by Saint Thérèse. We have become numb to words, even someone’s fatal diagnosis of tuberculosis, and we tend to read them without much further thought. Often we hear stories about how the Saints died and we don’t pause to contemplate the horrific suffering so many of them experienced within their final moments. When we truly contemplate the suffering, both physical and the spiritual—the hemoptysis, the applications of painful vesicatory treatments that blistered her body, the “mere thought of [which] made her shudder” (Last Conversations, p. 35), the immobility, the swollen limbs, the intestinal pains that made her feel like she was sitting on “iron spikes,” (Last Conversations, p. 162), the unbearable agony of every breath as her lungs collapsed, her suffocation, her dark night of the soul during the height of her torturous death—that is when we realize the profundity of her words. That is when we can realize why Saint Thérèse was reaching out not only for her Queen, but for her Mother.
The Intercession of A Mother
Though most of us are not experiencing the great sufferings that Saint Thérèse experienced, each of us knows what suffering is and each of us has our own cross. Saint Thérèse teaches us that no matter the degree of our pain, we have a Mother beside us who loves us, who intercedes for us, who loves us. In turn, our great Mother Mary teaches us that the proper response to suffering is to gaze upon her Son, to enter into His own suffering. At the Cross, amidst the greatest suffering the world has ever known and will ever know, we do not find a woman who is angry or bitter at the death of her Son. Rather we find a woman, clothed in the beauty of love, with one mission: to gaze upon and share in the suffering of her Son and intercede for those who inflicted the suffering. Mary’s response is always love. Whenever we cry out to her for help, Mary brings us to Christ, the Beautiful One. And that is what makes her the greatest of Queens.
Claire Couche is a wife, etiquette instructor, blogger, homeschooling mother, and registered nurse. She is passionate about sharing content that helps her community live a beautiful and virtuous life. Using her degrees in theology and history, Claire shares about the Catholic faith often on her IG account @findingphilothea and her website, Finding Philothea. You can often find her reading a good book in a beautiful dress! Learn more about Claire and all things etiquette here.
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