Marian Devotion, the Rosary, and the Scapular

In paragraphs 66, 67 of the Constitution Lumen Gentium already cited, which treats explicitly the question of Marian devotion, the Second Vatican Council affirms with clarity the legitimacy of this rightful veneration and recalls its nature and foundations:

A Special and Absolutely Unique Cultus: The Cultus of Hyperdulia

With these words the Constitution Lumen Gentium recalls the characteristics of Marian devotion. In willingly underscoring with precision its special and absolutely unique character, the Second Vatican Council affirms the irreducible specificity of Marian veneration which cannot and must not be confused either with the cultus of the adoration due to God alone (latria), or even with the cultus of the saints (dulia). Even though the terms latria, dulia and hyperdulia, classically employed in theology, were not explicitly employed either in the Constitution Lumen Gentium or in the post-conciliar documents, it is not useless to recall here their existence and always-valid significance. Certainly, in the depth of popular consciousness, clear conception of what distinguishes the homage rendered to God from what is rendered to Mary, to the saints or to holy things, is often missing, and this is understandable. But theologically speaking, the religious cultus, an expression of the moral virtue of religion, has been made the object of a triple distinction well-established by St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, then taken up by the majority of Catholic theologians since the thirteenth century (16): "Since, therefore, the Blessed Virgin is a mere rational creature, the worship of latria is not due to her, but only that of dulia: but in a higher degree than to other creatures, inasmuch as she is the Mother of God. For this reason we say that not any kind of dulia is due to her, but hyperdulia" (17).

One must distinguish very carefully, then, the kinds of veneration which are indicated by the three following expressions:

With the rather dry sobriety proper to juridic style, canon 1255 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law had the merit of clearly summarizing these distinctions: "To the Most Holy Trinity, to each of the persons who belong to it, to Christ our Lord, even under the sacramental species, is due the cultus of latria; to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the cultus of hyperdulia; to the others who reign with Christ in heaven, the cultus of dulia" (18).

In a more ample perspective the French Mariologist René-Marie de la Broise knew how to recapitulate with clarity the profound spiritual sense which these distinctions evoke:

Without having employed the slightly technical term hyperdulia which was habitually used before the Second Vatican Council, and whose sense is so well described by de la Broise, it is certainly the same sense of the word which is expressed in Lumen Gentium 66. The absence of the word, actually unused in the East, but which figured, however, in one of the eight successive redactions of the conciliar text (20), should not then be interpreted as its rejection from Catholic vocabulary for the Church of our times (21). If the nature of Marian devotion, which differs essentially from the cultus of adoration rendered to God, is qualified as absolutely unique (singularis omnino quamquam est) this is certainly in comparison with the veneration of the other saints, as Monsignor Philips, one of the principal redactors of the text explained (22). It is moreover possible to recognize in this expression a trace of the influence of the great Italian Mariologist G.M. Roschini on the "principal of transcendent singularity": "Mary most holy, being an altogether singular creature who transcends all others so as to constitute an order unto herself, is also the subject of privileges which are altogether singular and which have been granted to no other creature" (23).

G.M. Roschini alludes here to a fundamental truth, all too often passed over in silence in our days, namely "the belonging of the Virgin Mary to the order of the hypostatic union" (24) according to metaphysical terminology which has proven itself. There exist in effect three orders of reality which are irreducible but ordained among themselves "in view of a more and more intimate communication of the Divinity" (25): the order of nature, the order of grace and the hypostatic order. This last is most certainly distinct from the hypostatic union which designates the union of the two natures, human and divine, in the one divine person of Christ. But the hypostatic union is the principle of an order which includes two members, namely the human nature of Christ (which does not subsist apart from his divine person) and the Mother of God. As the French Dominican Mariologist M.J. Nicolas explains: "There are two in this order because God wished to bring about the Incarnation by means of birth and not by way of creation" (26). In the final analysis, this is to take into account the fact that the Virgin Mary is party to the divine decree, constitutive of the hypostatic order, which ordained the Incarnation of the Word. It is this belonging of Mary to the hypostatic order which fully justifies the Church’s practice of rendering to the Mother of God a cultus which is entirely special, having as its foundation a grace of another order than that venerated in the other saints, that is to say the grace of the divine maternity:

The fact that this belonging of Mary to the hypostatic order is no longer taught in our days (28) probably contributes to explaining why in numerous post-conciliar publications there is often a unilateral insistence on the specific difference between the veneration of Mary and the cultus of adoration reserved for God, which nevertheless causes no difficulty, but is made at the cost of a second important difference, that of recognizing and stating, although more subtly, that which exists between Marian devotion (hyperdulia) and the cultus of the saints (dulia).

Moreover, the ordinary Papal Magisterium has addressed itself to this issue on several occasions. Pope Paul VI wanted to return to the teaching of Vatican II "to remove doubts and, especially, to help the development of that devotion to the Blessed Virgin which in the Church is motivated by the Word of God and practiced in the Spirit of Christ" (29). The mere reading of the introductions of the respective apostolic exhortations Signum Magnum (1967) and Marialis Cultus (1974) suffices to show the doctrinal and pastoral solicitude of this pope to reaffirm that to the altogether special place which Mary occupied in the redemptive plan of God corresponds a special and totally unique cultus towards her.

More recently, Pope John Paul II, whose Marian Magisterium is of an unequalled depth and richness, devoted an entire catechesis on the nature of Marian devotion which constitutes a prolongation of that of Paul VI and a precious commentary on Lumen Gentium 66 and its authentic interpretation:

Already in his encyclical on The Mother of the Redeemer (1987), Pope John Paul II formulated this affirmation: "This cultus is altogether special: it bears in itself and expresses the profound link which exists between the Mother of Christ and the Church" (RM 42). If the Second Vatican Council didn’t hesitate to present Mary as a member of the Church, it was to specify that she is such in a way that is "supereminent and altogether singular" (LG 53). Moreover, as Pope Pius XII pointed out, this is not a new doctrine: "Although it is true that, like ourselves, the Blessed Virgin is a member of the Church, still it is no less true that she is a unique member of Christ’s Mystical Body" (31). The divine maternity, ordained to the redemptive Incarnation, cannot be purely and simply located among the ministries and functions in the Church. As a Montfortian commentator on the Marian encyclical of John Paul II well expressed it, there is truly "her double relation to Christ and to the Church (the second rooted in fact in the first) which allows us to discover the true countenance of the Virgin. It is also from inside this double relation that our attitude toward Mary should be formulated" (32). To the Mother of the Redeemer who is also Mother of the Church, of which she is a member in a "supereminent and altogether singular" way, is due a veneration which is absolutely unique.

However, there is still a question: is the cultus of the Virgin Mary unique in its degree as well as in its kind? The very few theologians who have occupied themselves with this question continue to propose various responses according to whether or not they consider the divine maternity as the formal object of hyperdulia. According to Garrigou-Lagrange "It is the more common and more probable opinion that hyperdulia differs from dulia not in degree only but in kind, just as the divine maternity belongs by its term to the hypostatic order, which is specifically distinct" (33). The Italian ecclesiologist Gherardini also argues in this sense: