Today, 12 September, the Church keeps the Most Holy Name of Mary. It is the feast of a single word — and, contrary to what you would expect of so gentle a devotion, it was born on a battlefield.
11 September 1683
Vienna had been under siege for two months by the Ottoman army of Kara Mustafa. The city was the door to central Europe and was about to fall; the mines had already breached the walls.
Pope Innocent XI had spent his pontificate trying to unite Christian princes who preferred to fight one another. He managed it at the last hour. On 12 September the king of Poland, John III Sobieski, came down from the Kahlenberg with the largest cavalry charge in history and broke the siege.
The dispatch Sobieski sent to Rome is a deliberate correction of Caesar. Where the emperor had written I came, I saw, I conquered, the king wrote:
“Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit” — we came, we saw, God conquered.
In thanksgiving, Innocent XI extended to the whole Church the feast of the Name of Mary, kept until then only in some places — the oldest at Cuenca in Spain, from 1513.
The reform of 1969 removed the feast from the general calendar. The reasoning was fair enough: there were many Marian memorials and some overlapped.
But the devotion did not die, and in 2002 John Paul II restored it as an optional memorial. That is why many old missals have it and some modern ones do not — there was no contradiction, there was a return.
What the name means
Nobody knows for certain. Miryam, in Hebrew, is older than Scripture as a given name — Moses’ sister already bore it — and scholars propose several roots:
- Lady, from a root meaning height, eminence. This is the reading most accepted today.
- Beloved, or “she who is loved by God”, from an Egyptian root — plausible, given the setting of the Exodus.
- Star of the sea, the most famous and the most fragile. Saint Jerome wrote stilla maris, a drop of the sea; a copyist changed it to stella, star, and the slip gave the West the Ave Maris Stella and a thousand years of poetry. A copying error the whole Church ended up adopting.
The honesty of it is worth keeping: the etymology is uncertain, and the Church has never made an article of faith of it. What is celebrated today is not a definition — it is a name that gets said aloud.
Why a name
To call somebody by name is the simplest thing there is, and it is what you do when there is nothing else left to do. Today’s feast asks for no long prayers. It asks that the word be within reach.
“Look to the star, call upon Mary.”— Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
“We came, we saw, God conquered.”— John III Sobieski, after Vienna, 12 September 1683
“The name of Mary is joy in the heart, honey in the mouth, melody in the ear.”— ascribed to Saint Bernard
The prayers
The passage below is from Saint Bernard, in the second homily super Missus est. It is the text that fixed this devotion in the West:
In perículis, in angústiis, in rebus dúbiis, Maríam cógita, Maríam ínvoca… Ipsam sequens non dévias, ipsam rogans non despéras, ipsam cógitans non erras.
In dangers, in straits, in doubts, think of Mary, call upon Mary… Following her, you do not stray; asking her, you do not despair; thinking of her, you do not go wrong.
— Saint Bernard, Homily II super Missus est
And this is the Collect of today’s memorial:
Concéde, quæsumus, omnípotens Deus, ut fidéles tui, qui sub sanctíssimæ Vírginis Maríæ nómine et protectióne lætántur, eius pia intercessióne a cunctis malis liberéntur in terris, et ad gáudia ætérna perveníre mereántur in cælis.
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that your faithful, who rejoice under the name and protection of the most holy Virgin Mary, may by her loving intercession be delivered from all evils on earth and be found worthy to come to the eternal joys of heaven.
Amen.
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis. Holy Mary, pray for us — you whose whole name fits inside one breath.
- The Nativity of Our Lady — her birth, four days before.
- Words of the saints — a growing collection, in English and Portuguese.
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