In the 1930s, the priests serving a large Catholic church in central London kept a secret — or so a story goes.
The story is that, on occasion, when the church was quiet and empty, a well-dressed older woman would arrive. Several people accompanied her, but they remained in the background as she went to the Blessed Mother’s altar, where she remained for some time, kneeling in thought or prayer.
When she left, she always summoned a priest, handed him some money and whispered, pointing to Mary’s statue, “Get flowers. Get roses.” He would dutifully buy a bouquet of roses and place it before the statue.
The priests believed that this mysterious woman was Queen Mary, the wife of the reigning King George V and great-grandmother of today’s King Charles III. Among themselves, they called her “The Lady of the Roses” to protect her privacy.
Influenced by Catholic devotions?
The woman may have been Queen Mary, though historians agree that the queen was a committed, lifelong member of the Church of England. Nothing indicates her dissatisfaction with that religion at any time in her life.
Still, Anglicans do honor Our Lady, and, when Queen Mary was young, she and her family spent time in Florence, Italy, where she encountered Catholicism. Very intelligent, she would have been alert to the Catholic practices and Catholic piety, including Marian devotions, around her. Her observations in Italy may have made an impression on her.
Was the queen of Great Britain and Ireland, whose husband led the empire upon which “the sun never set,” in fact the elusive “Lady of the Roses”? Who knows? If so, she is one of untold millions of Christians who, through 20 centuries, have found and nourished a bond with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church
No human relationship is as unique and strong as that between a mother and her child. The relationship between Jesus and Mary was much more than genetic, and it was reciprocal.
The Blessed Mother’s faith in Jesus, her Redeemer, the Son of God, was sublime, towering, unqualified, as seen at Cana, the site of Christ’s first miracle, and at Calvary, where she was one of only three not to desert the crucified Lord. With his dying words, Jesus gave her to us as our mother. The Acts of the Apostles explicitly names her as a part of the first Christian community.
Believers have honored her all this time, calling her their own spiritual mother. The Church knows that she herself was conceived without the stain of original sin, that she conceived Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that she was assumed into heaven at the end of her life.
All-too-human holiness
Mary was a human being, not an angel, certainly not a goddess. Her humanity is another cause for the feeling that Christians have for her, linking them with her.
A human, she understands humans, human emotions and, indeed, human limitations. Learning that she would be the mother of the Savior, without a human father, she was puzzled. When she and St. Joseph, worried and anxious, found the young Jesus in the Jerusalem temple, she could not comprehend why he had separated himself from them.
She experienced widowhood. Watching the Lord’s cruel crucifixion must have devastated her. What mother would not be devastated? Her faith never wavered.
Read John 2:1-12 and John 19:25-27 and the early chapters of St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s Gospels to better understand who the Virgin Mary was, why she was vital in the unfolding of salvation, how magnificently she fulfilled her role, and why she is the best example to follow in our own journey to heaven.
