“Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction” (2 Cor 1:3-4), and with the Lord may She be blessed, whom He has made the Mother of mercy, our most loving Queen and Advocate, the Mediatrix of His graces, the Dispenser of His treasures! […]

Expressive symbol of love and gratitude

Your presence here today in this shrine, in a crowd so immense that no one can count it, is a testimony that the Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Queen, whose maternal and compassionate Heart worked the miracle of Fatima, has heard our supplications superabundantly.

Ardent and grateful love has brought you, and you wished to give it tangible expression by condensing and symbolizing it in that precious crown, fruit of such generosity and so many sacrifices, with which, by the hand of our Cardinal Legate, we have just crowned the miraculous statue. […]

How can thanks not be given? Or rather, how to worthily give thanks? […] Today all of you, all the people of the Land of Holy Mary, with your spiritual shepherds and with your government have – along with the ardent prayers, the generous sacrifices, the Eucharistic solemnities and the thousand tributes that filial and grateful love has prescribed – further added that precious crown, and have crowned the brow of Our Lady of Fatima with it. Here in this blessed oasis, pervaded with the supernatural, where her prodigious patronage is most keenly felt, where all of us feel closer to her Immaculate Heart, pulsing with immense tenderness and maternal solicitude for you and for the world.

A precious crown, an expressive symbol of love and gratitude!

Heaven and earth united to glorify Mary

For your immense numbers, the fervor of your prayers, the thunder of your acclamations, all the holy enthusiasm that vibrates irrepressibly in you […] evoke in our minds other multitudes far more numerous, other acclamations far more ardent, other triumphs far more divine, another moment – eternally solemn – in the endless day of eternity: when the glorious Virgin, entering triumphantly into the heavenly homeland was, by the blessed hierarchies and angelic choirs, raised up to the throne of the Blessed Trinity, who, girding her brow with a triple diadem of glory, presented Her to the heavenly court, seated at the right hand of the immortal King of the ages and crowned Queen of the universe.

And the Empyrean saw that She was indeed worthy to receive the honor, the glory, the dominion; for She was more filled with grace, more holy, more beautiful, more deified, incomparably more, than the greatest Saints and the most sublime Angels, either individually or all together; for She is mysteriously related, in the order of the hypostatic union, to the whole Blessed Trinity, with Him who alone is in essence the infinite Majesty, King of kings and Lord of lords, as the firstborn Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Word, and beloved Spouse of the Holy Spirit; for She is the Mother of the Divine King, of Him to whom from His mother’s womb the Lord God gave the throne of David and eternal kingship in the house of Jacob (cf. Lk 1:32-33) and who proclaimed of himself that all power in Heaven and on earth had been given to Him (cf. Mt 28:18): He, the Son God, mirrors the glory, the majesty, the empire of His kingship upon His heavenly Mother; because associated, as Mother and Minister, with the King of martyrs in the ineffable work of human Redemption, She is forever associated with Him, with an almost immeasurable power, in the distribution of the graces which flow from the Redemption.

Maternal and beneficent royalty, to be acknowledged by all

Jesus is King of the eternal ages by nature and by conquest; through Him, with Him and subordinate to Him, Mary is Queen by grace, by divine kinship, by conquest, by singular election. And her Reign is vast like that of her Son and God, for nothing is excluded from her dominion.

Therefore the Church salutes Her as Lady and Queen of Angels and Saints, of patriarchs and prophets, of Apostles and martyrs, of confessors and virgins; she thus acclaims Her as the glorious Queen of Heaven and earth, the most worthy Queen of the universe – Regina cælorum, gloriosa Regina mundi, Regina mundi dignissima – and she teaches us to invoke Her day and night amid the groans and copious tears that this exile produces: Hail Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.

For her royalty is essentially maternal, exclusively beneficent. And is it not precisely this royalty that you have experienced? Is it not the infinite benefits, the innumerable caresses lavished upon you by the maternal heart of the august Queen, that you here today proclaim and acknowledge? […]

Crown of loyalty and hope, of vassalage and faith

You crown Her Queen of peace and of the world, so that She may help it to find peace and to rise from its ruins.

And so that crown, symbol of love and gratitude for the past, of faith and vassalage in the present, becomes for the future a crown of loyalty and hope.

You, crowning the statue of Our Lady, have made, with the pledge of faith in her royalty, one of submission to her authority, of a filial and constant correspondence to her love. You did even more: you have enlisted crusaders for the conquest or re-conquest of her Reign, which is the Reign of God. That is: you have committed yourselves to work so that She may be loved, venerated and served around you, in the family, in society and in the world.

And that in this decisive hour of history, just as the reign of evil, with its infernal strategy, employs every means and all forces to destroy faith, morality and the Kingdom of God, so the children of light and children of God must give all on the part of all to defend it, if we do not want to see a ruin immeasurably greater and more disastrous than all the material ruins accumulated by war.

In this struggle there can be no neutral or undecided parties. What is needed is an enlightened, convinced, courageous Catholicism, of faith and Commandments, of sentiments and works, both private and public. The motto the brave Catholic youth proclaimed in Fatima four years ago: “One hundred percent Catholic!” ◊

Excerpts from: PIUS XII.
Radio message on the occasion of the solemn
coronation of Our Lady of Fatima,
13/5/1946: AAS 38 (1946) 264-267