Q&A: Could you please answer a very important question for me? We are supposed to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and body. How much should we love the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother?
Fr. James McMillan, SMM
Submitted by a member: MD., East Hartford, CT
How Much Should We Love Our Lady?
Christ Himself gave us the answer to your question when He told His disciples at the Last Supper. “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you”. Like everything else in the Church, our love for one another, including our love for the Blessed Mother, should be modelled on Christ’s own love for the human race.
Obviously, Christ is imposing this commandment as an ideal, because we are all aware that it is impossible for us to equal the love that He has shown, and still shows, for human beings. It is a goal that He asks us to strive for, even though we are convinced that we can never actually attain it.
The answer to your question, then, about “how much” we should love the Blessed Virgin Mary is simply this: try to love her as much as Christ Himself loved her and still loves her in heaven. You’ll never quite equal Christ’s love for her; none of us ever will. But that’s the goal He expects us to try for.
So don’t be afraid of loving her “too much”. When we begin to love her, honor her and venerate her more than Christ did, we can start worrying about “exaggerations in Marian devotion”. But we all have a long way to go before we reach that point.
