The Roman Breviary has done many things for our Blessed Lady - among them, it has fixed once for all the wording of the 'Hail Mary,' and it keeps before our eyes the fact that Saturday is the Church's constant Lady-day - but now at last it is made to reach beyond its formal scope, and to furnish forth the material for one thing more. Only one of the Blessed Virgin's many feasts is kept in May - unless, in this time of lambs and of His lambs too, we celebrate, on the first Sunday of the month, the feast of the Mother of the Good Shepherd - and this is the festival of Our Lady, Help of Christians; but here, from the Church's daily manual of prayer and spiritual reading, has been compiled what may be called a liturgical Month of Mary. Indeed, every word of this book's component parts comes to us with the Church's explicit and actual authority, not to mention the many implicit sanctions of its origins. Most of the more than twenty authors quoted were bishops - and it is bishops, and not mere pious writers, or even theologians, as such, who, in their time and place, constitute the body of the Teaching Church; more than half the number are Doctors of the Church, among them our own Venerable Bede, the latest to be declared of that high company; and all of them, of course, are canonized saints, except Pope Pius IX, of holy and happy memory, who - one cannot but remark it in this year of the golden jubilee of his infallible definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception - speaks with a surer inspiration than any other of them all.
Some compromise has been found necessary between the chronological order of our authors and the historical sequence of the events of our Blessed Lady's life, so that - and these are its extreme instances - the Pope of the Immaculate Conception is quoted near the beginning of the book, while Saint John Damascene, who lived and died about eleven centuries before him - being the Doctor of the Assumption - is quoted towards the end. If we leave Saint Irenaeus alone, in the second century, in all the glory of his primacy in praise, these writers fall historically into three groups. The first group, gathered from East and West, and comprising Saint Ambrose, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Epiphanius, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint Peter Chrysologus, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, and the Pope, Saint Leo the Great - all but one Doctors of the Church - belong to the hundred years beginning with A.D. 350. The second, also Greek and Latin writers, and consisting of Saint Sophronius, Saint Idephonsus, Saint German, Saint Bede, Saint John Damascene, and Saint Tharasius, lived between the years 600 and 800. The third, who are all of the Western Church, gather round Saint Bernard, 'the devout chaplain of Mary,' and the last of the Fathers, who lived in the twelfth century - Saint Peter Damian being his forerunner, and his followers, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Bernardine of Siena, and Saint Thomas of Villanova. And the whole series is brought down to our own day by Pope Pius IX, who calls to Saint Irenaeus, with the same voice of faith as that in which Saint Irenaeus calls to him, across the Christian centuries.
The reading for each day of the month consists usually of the three lessons of either the second or the third nocturn of Matins; but on the feast of Our Lady, 'Help of Christians,' both nocturns have been given, and all the more readily that they are both taken from one and the same saint. Two nocturns from Saint Epiphanius have also been put together, and likewise two from Saint Augustine, and, from different days in the octave of the Assumption, two from Saint John Damascene. A lesson from Saint Peter Chrysologus has been taken from its place to complete two others from the same source, and the two by Saint Ambrose, from which it has been dissociated, have had added to them a third from their own author. Saint Jerome, however, has been left with only two. And in two cases words of Saint Bernard have supplemented words of his, in the place of what had been written by casual pens on occasion of the feast which the Church was actually celebrating. As will be seen, Saint Bernard has been quoted from much more largely than others; but, after all, his share in this book is much smaller in proportion than the part he takes in Our Lady's praise in the Breviary.
As to the prayers, it will be enough to say that, besides those which are common to every day of the month, such as the Magnificat - which the Church repeats in her vesper praise every day of her life on earth, in union with Mary, who is still singing it in heaven - a special Oremus has been provided for every day's especial need.
No attempt has been made to go behind the text of the Breviary, and no change has been made in that text. Even one or two phrases which sound too absolute, and which could have been counterbalanced in a note by other words of the Breviary, and even from the same author, have been left to the good sense of the English reader as they stand in the Latin. One short sentence has been omitted from Saint Ambrose's words on the Visitation, as the counsel it gives is rather curious, and is contained in the more general moral which he draws. Two or three sentences in the readings or the prayers, which are quite occasional, have been put into square brackets, being left where they occur only for the sake of the integrity of the text. The quotations from Holy Writ have been marked as such, and references have been added to them. In one or two instances the passage of Scripture to be commented upon has been continued, where, as usual, the Breviary is content with its own, 'and so on'; and in the extract from Saint Bernardine of Siena, Mary's Gospel words have been inserted in the several places where they are referred to in his text.
Of course, much more of Marian prayer and praise might have been gathered from the authoritative pages of the Breviary. What has been chosen is thoroughly representative of the Universal Church, and sets forth at least somewhat of the glory of the Mother of God - a glory which, when all is told that man can tell, must still remain unspeakable.
- Father John Fitzpatrick, O.M.I.