An excellent article here with a keen theological perspective on Our Lady’s exalted and necessary role in both the Incarnation and the Redemption on the Cross. The feast of the Incarnation (March 25) when it falls on Good Friday is celebrated on the first Monday of April. Mary is seen today in this feast as she truly is at both ends of the Church’s Incarnation liturgy, inaugurating it with her Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, and completing it with her silent fiat beneath the Cross. She is our Co-Redemptrix, cooperating with her Son in His Passion, and offering Him to His Father in her Name as His Mother. To His Church, in the person of Saint John, Jesus commands us to Behold our Mother.
Crisis Magazine, Regis Martin: Well, there are two points that need to be made, both bearing upon the Mystery in which our lives are set. The first is the fact that all salvation turns on Mary, because it comes through Mary. If the success of her Son’s saving mission requires the prior consent of the mother, then it follows that her co-operation is crucial to the plan of God. Perhaps that is why the single most important four-letter word in the language is fiat, even if it isn’t an English word. May all this, says Mary in reply to the astonishing invitation issued by the angel, “be done unto me according to thy (meaning God’s) word.” She does not withhold the freedom of her will, but rather surrenders it perfectly to God. And, second, whatever correlative understanding we come to concerning Christ, and the redemption wrought by his bloody sacrifice, it must likewise derive from her, from she who became, in the happy phrase coined by the poet Wordsworth, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Full article is here.
