The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Mother of Christ

0/5 ( ratings)

Excerpt;

Mary the Mother of our Lord and of His reputed father, Joseph, the Gospels only make such mention as connects them with His personal history. But when He had ascended into Heaven, and when the religion which He had founded spread throughout the East and the West, filling not only Palestine but the surrounding countries with flourishing Christian churches, it was both natural and inevitable that every follower of His should feel a deep interest in knowing all about these revered parents of His and their entire family. And this inquiry was stimulated by the misstatements and cal umnies of the Jews regarding Mary and Joseph.

We need only recall the names of a few of the early Christian writers who record the traditions collected in Judaea itself, in the very places where the Mother of Christ and her family had lived — traditions coming down to us from the age of the Apostles, put in writing by their disciples, and repeated by the most enlightened and saintly scholars of the four succeeding centuries. Foremost among these names stands that of St. Jerome; not, as everybody knows, that he is first in the order of time, but because, in the opinion of all who believe in Christ, he labored most successfully in tne native land of Jesus and Mary and Joseph, to gather trad transmit to all coming generations the inspired writings of the Old and the New Testament, together with all the historical knowledge which could throw light on them. After St. Jerome come St. Justin Martyr, the great Origen, St. Epiphanius and St. John Damascene , St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Gregory Nazianzen, natives of Asia Minor, like Origen; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. John Chrysostom ; St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, both contemporaries of St. Jerome. Such are a few of the sainted names which vouch for the existence and the authority of the traditions relating to the parentage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to her birth and early life up to the point where St. Luke and St. Matthew take up the thread of the narrative in their Gospels. The same respected authorities supply the facts of Mary’s life after the Ascension of our Lord. She was too dear to the heart of the early church, to the grateful veneration of the last and best beloved disciple of the Lord, John the Evangelist, not tft be cared for reverently and tenderly by all these fervent followers of the Master; so that the details of her latest life and of her blessed death must have been remembered and recorded by the first generations of Christians — her own spiritual children all of them — most of them her own countrymen, and many of them hst blood-relations.

With these preliminary remarks we may confidently enter upon our task — that of condensing into a few pages the Life of her who is the Second Eve, the Mother of the True Life, most dear to every one who holds Christ to be the Second Adam, the Messiah, the Restorer and Saviour of our race.

Also includes the work:

St Charity: A True Life
Catholic Pro-Life Story
by Mel Waller