And so they have.  All generations, that is, that have been faithful to the Gospel teaching and have assimilated in any degree the consequences of S. Mary’s nearness to God.  When we speak of “Blessed” Mary we are but doing what angels and holy women have done, and it is great pity if in doing so we have to make a conscious effort, if the words do not spring spontaneously from our lips.  Surely, we have not gone far toward the mastery of God’s coming in the Incarnation if we have not felt the purity of the instrument through whom God enters our nature.  The outward and visible sign of our understanding is found in our ability to complete the Ave as the Holy Spirit has taught the Church to complete it:  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death.”

This reiterated attribution of blessedness to Mary our Mother calls us to pause and ask just what blessedness means.  It is of course the characteristic Scripture locution for those who in some way enjoy the special favour of God.  Blessedness is the state of those who have received special divine gifts of favour.  A characteristic scriptural description of the blessedness of the righteous in contrast with the disaster of the unrighteous may be studied in the first Psalm.  In the New Testament we naturally turn to the Sermon on the Mount where the Beatitudes give us our Lord’s thought about blessedness.  I think that we can describe the notion of blessedness there presented as being the state of those who have taken God at His word and chosen Him, and by that act of choice, while they have forfeited the world and the world’s favour, have attained to the spiritual riches of the Kingdom of God.  They are those to whom God is the Supreme Good, in whose possession they gladly count all things but loss.  These are they who here in the pilgrim state have already attained to the enjoyment of God because they want nothing other or beside Him.

Supremely blessed, therefore, is Mary our Mother, who never for a moment even in thought was separate from God.  From the earliest moment of her existence she could say, “My beloved is mine and I am His.”  We try to think out what such a fact may mean when translated into terms of spiritual energy, and it seems to mean more than anything else boundless power of intercession such as the Church has attributed to S. Mary from the earliest times.  We see no other way of estimating spiritual power save as the power of prayer.  It is through prayer that we approach God—­for we remember that sacrifice is but the highest form of prayer.  The blessedness of S. Mary, that peculiar degree of blessedness which seems signalized by the reiterated attribution of the quality to her, must for our purposes to be understood as “power with God,” power of intercession.  It means that our Lord has chosen her to be a special medium of approval to Him, and that through her prayers He wills to bestow upon men many of His choicest gifts.