Introduction

“The Paraclete, moreover, Whom the Father will send in My Name, will teach you all, and suggest to you all whatsoever I will have said to you” (John 14:26). This work of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (from Greek for advocate) is profoundly present during Our Lady’s coredemption. In the Spirit, she was moved to make a sacrifice of herself in union with Christ for our redemption, the ultimate act of love. St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe, moved also by the Holy Spirit, imitated the sacrifice of Redeemer and Coredemptrix in his heroic self-sacrifice at Auschwitz, where he offered his own life in place of a condemned man. It is St. Maximilian Mary’s totally Marian spirituality that led him to make such a sacrifice: because where Mary is, the Holy Spirit is too — for the Holy Spirit is quasi-incarnate in the Immaculate.1

Saint Mary Immaculate, Spouse of the Holy Spirit

Before St. Maximilian Mary is decried as a heretic, let’s dig deeper into what exactly he means when he speaks of Our Lady as a quasi-incarnation of the Holy Spirit. He is not saying that the Immaculate Virgin is the Holy Spirit, nor that she is Divine: St. Maximilian Mary maintains, with the Church, that Our Blessed Mother is a creation of God, neither God Himself, nor a “fourth person of the Trinity,” nor any other absurd notion. Rather, St. Maximilian Mary is acknowledging that the union between the Holy Spirit and the Immaculate is so profound that St. Francis of Assisi described the Blessed Virgin as “Spouse of the Holy Spirit,”2 a title that St. Maximilian Mary observes to be actually “a distant semblance of the life of the Holy Spirit in her and through her.”3 St. Maximilian Mary deepens and clarifies this teaching by describing the Holy Spirit as the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception”:

Who is the Spirit? He is the fruit of the love of the Father and of the Son. The fruit of created love is a created conception. Thus, the fruit of love, of the prototype of this created love, is nothing but conception. The Spirit, therefore, is an uncreated, eternal conception. He is the prototype of any conception in the life of the universe […] a most holy conception, infinitely holy, immaculate.4

Our Lady, like the Holy Spirit, is the fruit of love between the Father and the Son; unlike the Holy Spirit, however, she is a created manifestation of this eternal, uncreated love. Although Mary is a created person, her identity as the created Immaculate Conception makes her an icon of the Holy Spirit5 through whom alone, and “in no other way […] does the love of creatures reach Jesus, and through Him, the Father.”6 It is in the Holy Spirit that all is presented to Christ, but in Him exclusively through Mary, so that she is, as it were, the Holy Spirit embodied, while remaining her own person, unconfused with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and the Coredemption

In his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, St. John Paul the Great discusses the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Our Lord the Redeemer:

The mission of the Holy Spirit “draws from” the Redemption: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn. 16:15). The Redemption is totally carried out by the Son as the Anointed One, who came and acted in the power of the Holy Spirit, offering himself finally in sacrifice on the wood of the Cross. And this Redemption is, at the same time, constantly carried out in human hearts and minds – in the history of the world – by the Holy Spirit, who is the “other Counselor.”7

In her Coredemption, the Immaculate is, by the power of the Spirit, fully active in both her Son’s mission and that of the Holy Spirit. Our Blessed Lady bore the pain of Calvary by the inspiration of the Spirit; by her ineffable union with the Spirit, her Immaculate Conception (the greatest grace that Our Divine Lord won on Calvary) she, with her Son, redeemed us. In her desire for our salvation (itself an inspiration of the Spirit), the Mother of God opened her heart to us, that we might take refuge in her, and through her find Jesus. The Holy Spirit Himself was not a co-redeemer on Calvary because He could not suffer for our redemption,8 but Mary Immaculate, moved by the Spirit, could suffer and did suffer unto the Love of the cross.

The Paraclete Sent in Christ’s Name

In John 14:26 Our Divine Lord promises that the Father will send the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, and will send Him in the Name of Christ, for it is the mission of the Spirit to ‘complete’ the redemption in the hearts of those who believe. The Holy Spirit does so by pleading for us and in us, like Our Lord Jesus does; and for this reason too, it stands to reason that He is sent in Christ’s Name. The Immaculate, in union with the Holy Spirit, co-operates as advocate also, and she did so through her participation in the Sacrifice of Calvary. The Holy Spirit cannot suffer, but He inspires us to offer up our sufferings for the salvation of souls: St. Paul writes that “the Spirit Himself prays for us with indescribable groanings” (Rom. 8:26). How great must His prayers for us have been on Calvary, manifested in the sufferings of Jesus and Mary! These, precisely because they are inspired by, and in a manner of speaking, the intercession of, the Paraclete, reveal to us the most sublime of mystery of God’s love.9 The Redemption, and Marian Coredemption in particular,10 present to us the ineffable Love of God in a human mode. Fallen man is not inclined to love; rather, he is inclined to selfishness and the abuse of his freedom, but the redemptive Sacrifice of Our Lord and Lady shows man how, while in this life, he can and ought to participate in the Divine Life of love.11 It is the Immaculate’s Coredemption that, through Christ, obtained for us the life of grace in her and her Son. The Spirit’s advocacy for us through the Immaculate is manifested in the Marian dimension of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, by which she continues to intercede for us before the Father.12 The same Holy Spirit, sent in the Savior’s Name, inspired the Immaculate to be our Coredemptrix-Advocate, the vessel of our salvation on Calvary, just as she was in Nazareth and at Bethlehem before.

He Will Teach You All Things

Our Divine Lord teaches us that He is the Truth, so it is fitting, that His Spirit teaches us all things. The Spirit not only reveals to us the sublime love of the cross; He also teaches us how to live it. St. Paul glorifies God the Father in his letter to the Ephesians (3:13-19) for His surpassing love in sending us the Holy Spirit. At the foot of the cross, the Immaculate co-operated in the Holy Spirit’s mission of teaching us the charity “that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19) as Mother Coredemprix. The Immaculate Virgin’s compassion by itself only reveals to us an idea of the love of God; but through a personal relationship with Mother Mary, the Holy Spirit truly teaches us the charity of God. This is because charity is found in the will: It is lived through the choices that we make. Through the redemptive sacrifice of Calvary, the Holy Spirit has revealed to us what the idea of charity looks like, but He also teaches us what it is through experience. According to Ven. Fulton Sheen it is essential to repentance that the sinner should witness the pain that his sin had caused. He uses the analogy of a mother who suffers pain for a grievous sin of her child.13 Is this not the state that we find ourselves in relation to the Immaculate? We have killed her son and God! When we meditate upon her sorrows, not by gazing upon them as on a statue, but rather truly suffering with her, we have an encounter with love; an encounter with the cross. It is through this experience that the Holy Spirit teaches us Who God is; namely, that He is eternal charity surpassing understanding. Through Our Lady Coredemptrix, the Holy Spirit teaches us the love that is the cause of all, for when we embrace the Immaculate at the foot of the cross, and through her, Jesus, we are truly taught what charity is, and Who God is in Himself.

He Will Suggest to You All I Have Said to You

It is the Holy Spirit Who will suggest to us, or remind us, of all that Christ has said to us. What better place to begin to understand the role that Our Lady Coredemptrix plays in this mission of the Holy Spirit than to turn to John 19:26-27, where the Gospel records Our Lord giving His Mother to us as our own. In showing due concern for Mary’s well-being, Christ was acting out of filial piety, an obligation which passed onto St. John14 and to all of us. We must call to mind that filial concern for the Immaculate includes concern for her participation in the economy of salvation, her office of Mediatrix.15 This mission is united with St. John’s apostolic mission, a mission of all the faithful, which is the work of the Spirit.16 Through her coredemption, the Immaculate is so consumed by her participation in the mission of the Son, united to Him in His suffering, offering her sufferings with her own Redeemer for the redemption of her children. Through her sorrow at the foot of the cross, the Immaculate took up her cross and followed Christ, renewed her maternity of Jesus Christ by doing the will of His Father (cf. Mt. 12:50), and became a shining example of the beatitudes, through her humble poverty of spirit in accepting the will of God. Through the Immaculate’s selfless and total participation in the work of the Son as Coredemptrix, the Holy Spirit is able to enter into creation through her. Consider how, in her deepest being, the Immaculate is the created manifestation of God’s charity, Who is the Spirit,17 and how He works through her so freely that she needs not be consciously thinking of her co-operation in the mission of the Spirit, but only of her participation in the mission of the Son. All her acts are so consumed by charity that they are themselves Immaculate, that is, full of grace,18 so that those who encounter the Immaculate necessarily encounter God the Holy Spirit Who brings the Mystical Body of Christ to participate in the divine life through Our Lord Jesus Christ through her. In Our Lady Coredemptrix, the Holy Spirit suggests to us the cross — and it is the cross that Our Divine Lord preached. It is on the cross and at its foot that Jesus and Mary show forth God’s love for men, and through their redemptive sacrifice the Spirit suggests to us all that Christ has taught us.

To Lay Down One’s Life for His Friend

Our Divine Lord teaches that there is no greater love than that a man would lay down his life for his friend (Jn. 15:13), and this is exactly what St. Maximilian Mary did in the death-camp of Auschwitz. To reach the point of that totally selfless love, however, St. Maximilian Mary spent years getting to personally know the Immaculate through prayer and dedication to the apostolate. It was the question he constantly laid at her feet, “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?,” that enabled him to be filled with the Spirit and live the love of the cross when the time to do so came in the death-camp. The profound love of Mary Coredemptrix is clearly the result of her ineffable union with the Holy Spirit, a union that, through the Immaculate, we are called to imitate. St. Maximilian Mary described our life of imitation of this union as “transubstantiation into the Immaculate,” not meaning a literal transubstantiation, but a mystical one, through which we speak only what Mary desires, do only what she commands, and think only her Immaculate thoughts. This requires us to deny ourselves through mortification and prayer, and most importantly, by avoiding occasions of sin! Whatever leads us to sin (if it can reasonably be done so) should be avoided — and a moral imperative is attached when the occasion of mortal sin is called proximate19 — but so long as we unnecessarily expose ourselves to self-love, we will neither be ‘transubstantiated’ into the Immaculate nor perfectly conformed to Jesus Crucified in this life, and we increase the likelihood of falling into mortal sin, and thus suffering eternal damnation in the next. Only a true repentance, an honest change of course in one’s life in grace will enable us to be saved. Let us fly to the Immaculate Mediatrix of grace, for through her, the Spirit of Truth shall anoint us as children of the Most High in Christ. When we take up our cross with our Coredemptrix at our side, the Spirit will truly teach us the love of Jesus through Mary’s compassion, and as we embrace it with her, He shall suggest to us the love that Christ has taught us, a love that we shall live with Jesus and Mary on the cross in this life, and in resurrected glory with them in the next.

 

1Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, ed. Anotella di Piazza, vol. II (Nerbini International, 2016) (SK 1310, p. 2280). Henceforth, all citations of the Writings St. Maximilian Mary will be cited according to their number, abbreviated “SK.”

2Saint Francis of Assisi, Antiphon of the Office of the Passion. Recall that through spousal love, the two become one flesh (Gen. 2:24).

3SK 1310 (p. 2280).

4SK 1318, (p. 2301).

Saint Maximilian Mary is speaking of the Blessed Trinity as the “exemplary cause.” The concept of exemplary causality is the understanding that, for all things that exist, there exists the exemplar (or model) of the thing in God. The exemplar is not impersonal, however. Fr. Angelo Geiger, F.I., explains in his paper “Marian Mediation as Presence And Transubstantiation into the Immaculate” [in Mary at the Foot of the Cross, Acts of the International Symposium on Marian Coredemption (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate , 2003), (pp. 127-171)]that exemplary causality is fundamentally personal, rooted in the Persons of the Blessed Trinity and in the Immaculate (who, though a creation existing in time, the Church teaches is nonetheless united in the Mind of God to our Lord by one and the same decree [Ineffabilis Deus]). The exemplary cause affects, in a really personal way, that which it causes. Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner points out that the exemplary cause — God through Jesus and Mary — transcends the Aristotelian categories of efficient cause, formal cause, material cause, and final cause, which are themselves rooted in exemplary cause.

5Cf. Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, F.I., St. Maximilian Kolbe: Martyr of Charity – Pneumatologist (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate, 2004), (p.67, esp. n.143, pp. 68-70).

Henceforth, this work will be abbreviated Pneumatologist.

6SK 1310 (p. 2280).

7Saint John Paul the Great, Dominum et vivificantem, 18 May 1986, no. 24 (https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_18051986_dominum-et-vivificantem.html). Accessed 4 March 2024.

Recall that “Anointed One” (i.e., Christ, or Messias) refers to anointing with the Holy Spirit (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 690).

8Cf. Fr. Alessandro Apollonio, “The Holy Spirit and Mary Coredemptrix” in Mary at the Foot of the Cross, Acts of the International Symposium on Marian Coredemption (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate, 2001), (pp. 77-83).

9Cf. St. Cyril of Alexandria, In Joannis Ev., Lib. X, in Patrologiae cursus completus (Series Graeca), vol. 74, pp. 301, 302: “[Christ] says that the most perfect and most carefully prepared mysteries have been revealed to us through the Paraclete: it is [revealed] through this Holy Spirit, Who has been sent from the Father in His Name (that is, of the Son).” Cf. also 1 Jn 3:16-18. Henceforth, all references to Patrologiae cursus completus will be cited according to respective series (Patrologia Latina abbreviated PL; Patrologia Graeca PG), volume, and page number.

10This is because the Immaculate is a human person co-operating with God; Our Lord Jesus is a Divine Person accomplishing an act Himself. This is not to discount or minimize the free co-operation of the humanity of Christ with his Divine nature; however, it is essentially different for the Lord God, through His Own humanity, to accomplish an act, and for the Him to accomplish that act through someone else’s humanity (e.g., the ineffable “quasi-incarnation” of the Holy Spirit in the Immaculate); cf. Fr. Fehlner, Pneumatologist (pp. 74-92). One of the reasons I highlight Coredemption above is because our co-operation in the subjective redemption and participation in the life of God is like unto that of the Immaculate rather than that of Christ (albeit in an almost infinitely less perfect manner).

Editor’s Note. Our Lady participated with Our Lord in the objective redemption of all mankind, which is much higher plane and mode than our participation in the subjective redemption.

11Cf. Jn 15:13, Jn 12:24-26, Mt 16:24-25, Phil. 2:3-4, and others.

12This is not to say that Our Blessed Lady is somehow physically present in the Eucharist; however, because the Eucharist is a re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary in the current state of our glorified, Risen Lord, so too is the Immaculate, assumed into heaven and reigning with Christ, present in the work of the Eucharistic sacrifice — namely, in our subjective redemption, and in the Thanksgiving we make to the Father through our Eucharistic Lord. Cf. Heb. 7:25, 9:24, 4:14-16, mindful of the reality of Marian Coredemption.

13Cf. Ven. Abp. Fulton J. Sheen, “The Catholic Hour: A Word to the Intellegentsia,” Radio (NBC, March 1944). Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sz0uI-W_qE&t=3884s. Accessed 21 March, 2024.

14Facit quod faciendum admonet, et exemplo suo suos instruxit praeceptor bonus, ut a fillis piis impendatur cura parentibus: tamquam lignum illud ubi erat membra morientis, etiam cathedra magistri docentis […Joannes] suscepit eam [Immaculatam] in sua, non praedia, quae nulla propria possidebat; sed officia, quae propria dispensatione exsequa curabat. St. Augustine, PL 35 (p. 1951).

15Mediatrix with the Mediator Jesus, a participation in the one Mediation of Christ (Marian maternal co-mediation), and thereby Mediatrix in the order of grace, i.e., Distributrix of all graces. See Jn. 19:26 for Scriptural basis.

16Cf. 1 Cor. 12:13; Acts 4:31; Eph. 3:16-20; Is. 34:16.

17St. Bonaventure, I Sent. d. 10, a. 2, q. 1.

18Cf. Fr. Stefano Maria Manelli, F.I., Developments of Scotistic Mariology in St. Maximilian M. Kolbe, in Bl. John Duns Scotus and His Mariology: Commemoration of the Seventh Centenary of His Death (New Bedford, Ma.: Academy of the Immaculate, 2009), (pp. 86-96).

19That is, those situations in which we are likely to fall into mortal sin. To wilfully put ourselves in such a situation is itself a mortal sin.