Enduring Faith And Timeless Truths Of Fulton Sheen By Dr. Mark Zia

Mary was the Mother of God, meaning she is the human who can lead us the closest to Christ. In chapter 8 of The Enduring Faith & Timeless Truths of Fulton Sheen by Dr. Mark Zia, a devotion to Mary is shown as essential to a relationship with her son. In reverence to this woman, Catholic-Christians give Mary the high form of veneration, called hyperdulia. Against what many Protestant-Christians believe, this is not worship, but respect for the woman who brought Christ into the world. A love of Mary is not only supplemental to worshiping Christ, but necessary. Sheen states “It is impossible to love Christ adequately without also loving the Mother who gave Him to us. Those who begin by ignoring her soon end by ignoring Him, for the two are inseparable

Once my friend was riding with me and he pointed out a statue too, not to say how lovely it was, but to ask why Catholics worship Mary. The question of why Catholics worship Mary is a common curiosity from Protestant-Christians and it is one that is based off of a completely false assumption. Always getting a bad reputation for “worshiping Mary”, some Catholic might pull away from their devotion to the Blessed Mother. If there is one thing Catholics can learn from this chapter it is that a love of Mother Mary is not worship and a devotion to her “does not prevent our honoring Our Lord. Nothing is more cruel than to say that she takes souls away from Christ” (Zia 85). Mary has always lead people to Christ, seen at the Wedding at Cana, and never stopped even after His death when she became the spiritual mother of the Church (John

Her relationship and love of Christ makes her the perfect spiritual mother for Christians, a role she began to fulfill after Jesus was buried and she was no longer the Mother of the Physical Body of Christ. As the Mother of Christ, the woman who said yes to carry God’s son in her womb; Mary proves to be the new Eve, possessing a direct opposite of Eve’s disobedience to God, and become the compliment to Christ as the new Adam on the cross. At the foot of the cross, the new Eve watched her son die for the sins of the world. As depicted in Michelangelo's Pietà, Mary holds her son just as she did in the manger, but “between Bethlehem and Calvary our sins had intervened” (Zia 90). Yet Mary accepted her role as the Mother of God even in his death, and always remained the person who loved Christ the most and the person Christ loved the most, making Mary worthy of the greatest veneration and the woman whose intercession will lead us the closest to