On the Feast of the Assumption last week, a respectful dissenter showed up and asserted a lot of wrong things about Mary and one of them was this:
“Mary is not the Queen of Heaven.”
Because many of us live in modern Western American culture, I completely understand why this guy believes this.
1. In America, we have a disdain for royalty, though that is changing with the newfound interest in English royalty.
2. In modernity, we understand the queen to be the wife of the king. Mary is Jesus’ mother, not His wife, so just on a practical level she doesn’t fit the bill according to our modern ideas of royalty.
3. Nowhere in Scripture does it explicitly say the words, “Mary is Queen of Heaven.” When you ascribe to the Sola Scriptura doctrine, you require every Catholic dogma to be explicitly written out in Scripture.
I can’t go into all the ways we know Mary is Queen of Heaven based off what we find in Scripture, so I’ll give the evidence that was most eye-opening to me as a former Protestant.
“In the ancient Near East, most nations were monarchies ruled by a king. In addition, most cultures practiced polygamy: so the king often had several wives. This posed problems. Whom should the people honor as queen? The woman ordinarily honored as queen was not the wife of the king, but the mother of the king.” —Scott Hahn
In many places in the OT, we see the mother of the king in the role as queen. Bathsheba was not David’s queen; she was queen once her son Solomon became king. And, she sat at his right and interceded for others.
Christ is the King of Heaven and Earth. He had no wife and all ancient people in Biblical times would have understood that if Jesus is King, then Mary, His Mother, is queen.
Today, we honor Mary as the Queen of Heaven, Catholic Pilgrims. It is important to remember that “everything about Mary is dependent upon and points to Mary’s divine and Royal Son.” —Tim Staples
Have a blessed Tuesday.
Mary, Queen of Heaven, pray for us!
*Statue is located at Mary’s house near Ephesus in Turkey.
