Today’s solemnity wonderfully completes the celebration of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven. Just as we celebrate the solemnity of Christ as the universal king, so today we celebrate the universal Queenship of Mary. She is not only the fairest creature of our race, but she is queen of the whole creation, and the Angels honor her just as we do. Mary is without doubt the highest created person in the created universe.
We will never stop singing her praises, because God never stops honoring Mary as the highest human person and created person in all of his creation. Honoring her as Queen is both a duty and a privilege of all rational creatures. Some theologians after Vatican II asserted that Christ has to be understood as a human person or he wouldn’t be human. That was not only a theological error but also an anthropological error. It is the supreme glory of our human nature, that it could be assumed by a divine person as completely and totally his own nature. But likewise, it was a denigration of Mary. She is the highest of all human persons, the most perfect personal creation by God. Her son is God, and while his nature is shared by two other persons this cannot be the case that is human nature. The possibility of multiple persons in one nature belongs only to God. On the human level, two persons in one nature is not simply a deformity, but an impossibility tied to the limitations of created nature.
So, honoring Mary as the highest created person, the Queen of Angels and Saints, is another way of honoring her Son, the truth of the Incarnation, that the ultimate perfection of his human nature, the capping off, was not human personhood but divine personhood.
But beyond this doctrinal glory, we have to see the ecclesial consequences of her Queenship for her children. We are her children by adoption. That means she is our Queen Mother due to grace, just as she is Christ’s Queen Mother due to both nature and grace. If she is our Queen Mother, then we truly do have of royal lineage. Mary is our Queen Mother, just as Christ is our King Brother. That means we are truly members of royal family, royal members of the household of God.
This is not pure poetry, or simply metaphorical declaration, but a statement of fact that fills us, or should, with great wonder. And in one sense, the mystery is even greater, for Christ has called us to actually share in his Kingship, something which no worldly king can do. There can be only one thing in this world, where no participation is really possible. It is not so in Heaven. In God all things are possible. Just look at Mary.
