The Ancient Israelite Law That Explains Mary's Crown

You've probably said these words 100 times without stopping to ask what they actually mean: Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy.

Or you have seen a statue of Mary somewhere with a crown resting on her head and thought, even just briefly, "That's a strange thing to put on a statue of a young woman from a small town in Galilee," and then you've moved on without asking why it's there.

Tomorrow, August 22nd, the Church celebrates a feast that most Catholics have heard of, but very few could actually explain: the Queenship of Mary.

And this isn't the Assumption, which everyone at least recognizes as her being taken body and soul into heaven.

This one tomorrow is the feast that comes eight days later, and it makes a claim that sounds, on its face, almost too bold to be real.

Mary isn't just in heaven.

She reigns there as Queen.

So where does a claim like this actually come from, and what does it mean in practice for someone praying in a pew tomorrow morning or even Sunday? The feast itself is a relatively young one as far as the liturgical calendar goes.

Pope Pius XII formally instituted it in 1954 in an encyclical titled this: To the Queen of Heaven.

So he did not invent the idea, and that's what I wanna make clear, but he was giving official, universal liturgical shape to something that Christians had already been saying in prayer and depicting in art for well over 1,000 years.

The title Queen of Heaven shows up in devotional life going back to the earliest centuries of the Church, and images of Mary crowned as Heavenly Ruler appear in Christian art as far back as the sixth century.

Pope Pius XII's encyclical came four years after he had defined the Assumption as dogma in 1950, and he explicitly connected the two.

If Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, he argued it made sense that she would be exalted there, fitting her unique role, seated in glory near her son, rather than simply present among the redeemed like everybody else.

Originally, the feast was placed on May 31st, the final day of the month that is traditionally dedicated to Mary.

It stayed there for over a decade, but then in 1969, as part of a broader revision of the liturgical calendar after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI moved it to August 22nd, deliberately setting it eight days after the solemnity of the Assumption on August 15th.

So that placement was on purpose because it was meant to draw a direct line between the two feasts, showing that her bodily glorification in heaven and her queenship are not separate honors bestowed on her independently.

One flows immediately out of the other.

Having been assumed into glory, she is, in that same act, crowned.

So the historical piece is straightforward enough, but the harder and more interesting question is why the Church would say this in the first place.

Why queen specifically and not some other title? Part of the answer goes back further than most people expect, all the way down to the royal core of ancient Israel.

In the kingdom of David and Solomon, the king typically had multiple wives, like seven h- like hundreds of them, guys [laughs] like 700 wives, which also meant that there was no single queen in the way that we would think of the term queen and king today.

No one wife holding a unique official position above the others.

Instead, the position of highest honor next to the king belonged to his mother, a role with a specific Hebrew title, Gebirah, G-E-B- G-E-B-I-R-A-H.

The reason I sometimes spell these words, side note, is because some people don't watch the videos, so if I put them on the screen, they- they'll miss that, and this way you can go back.

Write it down if you wanna look it up yourself.