This memorial to our blessed mother is celebrated a week after the Assumption. Reflected in the fifth decade of the Glorious Mysteries, the crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven was a feast originally celebrated on the 31^st of May which explains why many of our traditional hymns sung to our lady in the month of May speak of her crowning.

It was in 1954 that Pope Pius XII  who in the centenary year of the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception  instituted this feast with his encyclical Ad coeli reginam  and from 1969 this memorial is celebrated a week after the Assumption of Mary.

The crowning of Mary as Queen of all creation is the culmination of all the privileges granted to our Lady; the Mother of God, assumed body and soul into heaven. Our Lady’s role in the history of salvation is unique. The same is true, however, for each one of us in a smaller scale. The Lord is with each of us and we have found favour with God and he has a mission for us to fulfil.

There is much to learn from Our Blessed Mother

Like Mary, in our lives too, there are turning points where we may experience an invitation to embrace something difficult rather than discard it. Something which wrecks our dream for ourselves or for our loved ones.  Yet like Mary, we too say yes to God’s will and in doing so we become the ‘hand- maids’ of God.

This call to saying yes requires a predisposition to being in tune with the many invitations of God, if not we would find ourselves fighting the will of God in our lives. The angel said to Mary, ‘You will conceive and bear a son,’ not ‘Are you willing to conceive and bear a son?’ That is how God’s will comes to us; in the things that happen to us; more than in the things we choose!

We know that God does not have favourites and Mary was not the ‘favourite one’ but the ‘favoured one’ of God, which means in reality that her disposition to God found favour with him. He knew that she would never turn him down. She found favour with God because of who she chose to be, a hand maid of the Lord.

Finally, Mary was not ‘blessed’ in the sense as we understand it today as one of having received comforts and privileges. This  perhaps is how we use the word blessed when we exclaim, “how blessed am I”. Mary is just the opposite, her blessedness did not come with a list of privileges but with a role of responsibility. She is not blessed because she is going to be the Mother of God, or the Queen of Heaven, she is blessed because she believed and accepted THE word of God even though that call would have a sword pierce her heart.

Today she is crowned Queen of Heaven and we willingly accept her as our Queen