It is one thing to have the supernatural virtue of faith as it is instilled in us at baptism: the virtue by which we firmly believe all those truths God has revealed. It is another thing to have the personal convictions that enable us to live our daily lives in accordance with that faith. Conviction is to faith, what confidence is to hope. It is faith galvanized. Just for the record — we cannot do that for our loved ones. We have a hard enough time acting according to Christian principles in our own lives. The devil is constantly tricking us into compromising a little here, justifying ourselves there, slipping into this, going soft on that. Who is going to protect us from our own weakness and inconsistency if not Mary?

In “How Not to Be Orcs,” we talked about the importance of knowing our mission; in “Wielding the Holy Saber of Love,” we talked about the supernatural charity as an excellent offensive weapon in our battle for souls. It is now time to talk about defensive strategies. We need those, too. Big time. Lest in preaching True Religion to others, we ourselves should become cast away. I have seen it happen. I have see whole families — beautiful, traditional Catholic families with seven or eight children lose the Faith. It is heartbreaking! What happened? They dropped their defenses, which, for purposes of this article, we will call “ramparts.”

The Shield of Faith

Ramparts: those things that protect us from the enemy. St. Paul names a few in his classic run-down of the spiritual get-up of a Christian soldier (cf. Eph. 6:14-17): the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, and — my favorite — the shield of faith.
Not only is faith the ultimate rampart, protecting everything else in our spiritual life, but Bl. Dom Columba Marmion says — and this is amazing — to the extent that we live by faith, we become invulnerable to temptation. Wow. Can you imagine being invulnerable to temptation? But how, pray tell, do we get a faith so strong so that our virtue becomes virtually unassailable?

Mary.

Please pardon the lengthy quotation, but it simply will not do to paraphrase St. Louis Marie de Montfort. This incredible Marian apostle assures us in True Devotion to Mary:

The more you gain the favor of that august Princess and faithful Virgin, the more will you go by pure faith in all your conduct; a pure faith which will make you hardly care at all about the sensible and the extraordinary; a lively faith animated by charity, which will enable you to perform all your actions from the motive of pure love; a faith firm and immovable as a rock, through which you will rest quiet and constant in the midst of storms and hurricanes. A courageous faith, which will enable you to undertake and carry out without hesitation great things for God and for the salvation of souls; lastly, a faith which will be your blazing torch, your divine life, your hidden treasure of divine wisdom, and your omnipotent arm, which you will use to enlighten those who are in the darkness of the shadow of death, to inflame those who are lukewarm and who have need of the heated gold of charity, to give life to those who are dead in sin, to teach and overthrow, by your meek and powerful words, the hearts of marble and the cedars of Lebanon; and finally, to resist the devil and all the enemies of salvation.

Bl. Teresita Quevedo

Mary will galvanize our faith just as She did that of Bl. Teresa Quevedo. Have you heard of her? She was a beautiful Spanish girl, literally movie-star gorgeous. She entered a convent at sixteen and died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of twenty-four. Her biography is called Mary Was Her Life.

There is a great anecdote in that book from when Teresita was a teenager, and the captain of the swim team tried to convince her to join a diving competition. They were at some kind of public pool, and he was watching her swim around like a mermaid, thinking to himself what a feather in his cap it would be if he could recruit her for the team. So he went over to her, never having met a girl who was not flattered by his attentions. But Teresita was not interested in winning any diving contests. After a little back and forth, he tried this tactic: “But, Miss Quevedo, think what honor it would bring to your father.” (Her father was a well known and highly respected physician in Madrid.)

To which she replied, “And will my trophies bring honor to the Blessed Virgin Mary?”

He was completely caught off guard and faltered out something lame like, “Oh, let’s leave the Blessed Virgin out of this, shall we?”

Her response was a very amiable: “Fine, Juan, if that is what you wish. And I will stay with Our Lady.”

Despising the World

I like that story not because it is oh-so-relevant to the vast number of my readership who are no doubt regularly being recruited to participate in swimming contests. I like it because the offer Teresita turned down was not evil; it was just worldly. Her convictions were such that she knew to despise the world. As Fr. Matthias Joseph Scheeben says in Glories of Divine Grace, “We should despise the world. It cannot help us, and cannot hurt us.” (It cannot hurt us, that is, if we, through grace, shun its wiles.) Teresita also despised invitations to go to movies with her friends if those movies were rated anything less than perfectly clean. She kept her ramparts in good repair.
May Our Lady help us do the same.