The Blessed Virgin Mary.
Mother of God.
Illustration: ALCHETRON
Text is from The Saint Andrew Daily Missal and
has an Indulgence of 300 days each time recited.
A Plenary Indulgence once a month, subject to the usual conditions, if recited every day of the month.
(Pope Leo XIII, 1884).
Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help,
or sought thy intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto thee,
O Virgin of Virgins,
my Mother.
To thee I come;
before thee I stand,
a sorrowful sinner.
O Mother of The Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but graciously hear and answer me.
Amen.
As Zephyrinus no doubt knows, this is one of the most popular and easily memorizable Catholic prayers in the English and French languages, because of its brief, direct, warmly devotional, and simply focused structure.
ReplyDeleteThis reader had to go back and check on the origins of the prayer: allegedly ”mis-attributed” to S. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153)— although some of the prayers in the hymns in S. Bernard’s writings suggest very similar Marian devotional wordings and themes— it is generally believed that the prayer was composed by Fr. Claude Bernard, a tirelessly apostolic French priest (1588-1641) who worked among condemned prisoners and had hundreds of thousands of leaflets distributed with this prayer on each one.
Bp. Richard Challoner (1691-1781) while a student at the English College at Douai, France, became acquainted with the French version of Bernard’s prayer and, when he was appointed apostolic vicar to London in 1758, embarked on a number of pamphlet and book publishing projects to help his still-mostly suppressed English Catholics learn devotions of their faith. This prayer appeared in his “The Garden of the Soul,” a collection of Catholic prayers which went through multiple printings and found its way to the English-speaking Americas. In fact, the Challoner manual is still widely published and available in the US and continues to be popular and well-known among traditional Catholics. (All of us who were in Catholic schools in the second half of the 20th century learned and memorized this prayer at that time; in fact, it was required to be recited before, and after [American] football and other athletic contests together by the whole team. ).
At any rate, it is a fascinating journey of this prayer from the dark prisons of the French ancien regime to the contemporary age— where perhaps today minds are more mass-imprisoned in such fables as man-made “climate change,” gender theory, and World Economic Forum prosperity than ever.
But nonetheless one hopes this prayer will unlock to a new generation of those who earnestly seek it the opposite that they will discover the Truth. -Note by Dante Peregrinus
Thank you, Dante Peregrinus, for this outstanding contribution. Much of the history mentioned in this contribution was not known by Zephyrinus. So, many thanks, indeed. During this month of May (Mary's month), this Prayer would be a wonderful offering to Mary.
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