Dear Joseph, +May the LORD bless you in your confusion!
All that I think this prayer of St. Louis de Montfort says is that if we choose, we can offer our prayers THROUGH the hands of our Mother to the Most Holy Trinity...and thus purified and offered with her pure intention, we can be assured that they have been purged of our sinful or distracted or selfish motives and intents. After all, she stood at the foot of the Holy Cross and I'm sure that she was offering her Son to the Father. We can KNOW for certain that she always tells us, what she told the waiters at Cana, "Do whatever He tells you!" Since she is the PERFECT and FIRST Christian, she will see to it that our offerings are made perfect and that her Only-Begotten Son receives them perfectly. I see NO un-Orthodox teaching here. We have many of the words of the Fathers...showing this:
St. Ambrose of Milan:
"The first thing which kindles ardor in learning is the greatness of the teacher. What is greater than the Mother of God? What more glorious than she whom Glory Itself chose?" (The Virgins 2:2[7] [A.D. 377]).
St. Methodius:
"Hail to you for ever, Virgin Mother of God, our unceasing joy, for unto thee do I again return. Thou are the beginning of our feast; you are its middle and end; the pearl of great price that belongs unto the kingdom; the fat of every victim, the living altar of the Bread of Life [Jesus]. Hail, you treasure of the love of God. Hail, you fount of the Son's love for man. . . . You gleamed, sweet gift-bestowing mother, of the light of the sun; you gleamed with the insupportable fires of a most fervent charity, bringing forth in the end that which was conceived of thee . . . making manifest the mystery hidden and unspeakable, the invisible Son of the Father--the Prince of Peace, who in a marvelous manner showed himself as less than all littleness" (Oration on Simeon and Anna 14 [A.D. 305]).
St. Methodius:
"Therefore, we pray thee, the most excellent among women, who glories in the confidence of your maternal honors, that you would unceasingly keep us in remembrance. O holy Mother of God, remember us, I say, who make our boast in thee, and who in hymns august celebrate the memory, which will ever live, and never fade away" (ibid.).
St. Ephraim the Syrian:
"You alone and your Mother are more beautiful than any others, for there is no blemish in you nor any stains upon your Mother. Who of my children can compare in beauty to these?" (Nisibene Hymns 27:8 [A.D. 361]).
Proclus, Archbishop of Constantinople, writes during the period between those two councils: "He, who in the womb of the Virgin, had condemned me, assumed me, I who am subject to condemnation." Here, too, although the role of the Virgin and of her free consent seem not to be stressed, the paschal and redemptive orientation of the Incarnation is emphasized.
Proclus is more specific in a homily discovered recently: commenting on Is 45:8, the preacher sees justice on earth, for Mary has liberated Eve, by becoming the help whom, in his original plan, God designated for man, while the Emmanuel, coming down from heaven to earth, by abolishing the empire of the devil, saved Adam. The Colombian patrologist Roberto Caro notes: "The first transgression has been repaired by the action of both Mary and Christ; it is a truly active, but differentiated, causality; Mary and Christ are not two independent redeemers who would have agreed together to accomplish a common work; the two different verbs used by the orator indicate the distinction: On one hand the sin of Eve vanishes (aneklith�) by Mary's action; on the other hand this sin is only repaired (ses�stai) by the action of Christ alone."
According to Caro, we have here the twofold affirmation of Mary's collaboration with Christ and of Christ's transcendence over Mary within this same collaboration. Proclus however, does not state precisely here what Mary's help consists of; nevertheless, his text as a whole makes it clear that the bishop has in sight the collaboration of the new Eve with the New Adam in the work of Salvation of the world.
Later on, Basil of Seleucia exclaims: "Oh womb so holy that welcomed God, womb in which the writ of sin was torn up." Here too, though vaguely, Mary is shown exercising a free and voluntary consent in favor of God the Savior; this acceptance, especially, stipulates the cancellation of every record of the debt we had to pay and nailed it to the cross (Col 2:14). The author thus implies that Mary receives the Lord in his very activity of Redeemer, Repairer of sin. More than a century ago, J. H. Newman already took notice of this impressive thought of Basil: "Mary shines above the martyrs like the sun above the stars and she is Mediatrix between God and men." For Basil, Mary's mediation is a result of divine Motherhood, a unique privilege that establishes her as Mediatrix between God and men. Basil justifies this view point by a suggestive biblical reasoning: if Peter was proclaimed "blessed" for having confessed Christ, if Paul has been qualified by Him as "chosen instrument" for having preached His name to the nations, what should we not think of Mary's great power, she who gave Him a human body?
Caro notes: thus we find formulated, for the first time in the fifth century, with Basil of Seleucia, one of the most fecund principles of Mariology: the close link between Mary's motherhood and the Word determines in her a fullness of grace by which she transcends in merit all other creatures. To be convinced of the power of Mary suggests that we have recourse to her help and her privileged intercession.
We can therefore see, in the reasoning of Basil of Seleucia, a first outline of the Church's contemplation of the three stages of the mystery of Marian coredemption: the consent to the Incarnation already seen as paschal, foreseeing Jesus' death on the cross, and explaining Mary's power in the distribution of graces, basis of our recourse to her intercession.
We can thus say that, since the fourth and especially the fifth century, the Greek Fathers, expounding the views of Irenaeus, have become the clearer and more active witnesses of the unfathomable mystery that constitutes the privileged and unique mission of the Virgin Mother in the economy of Redemption. This role was magnificently summed up by the fifth century Fathers in these statements: Mary is the Mother of the Economy (Theodosus of Ancyra, MG 77,393 C), the Mother of Salvation (Severien of Gabala, MG 56,4) and the one who gives birth to the Mystery (Proclus of Constantinople, MG 65,792 C).
It should be enough here to quote Saint Andrew of Crete: Mary is "the first reparation of the first fall of the first parents"(MG 97,879).
St. Proclus, who died Patriarch of Constantinople, and who in 429 preached a sermon in that city, at which Nestorius was present, beginning with the words "The Virgin's festival (parthenike panegyris) incites our tongue today to herald her praise." In this, we may further note, he describes Mary as:
"...handmaid and Mother, Virgin and heaven, the only bridge of God to men, the awful loom of the Incarnation, in which by some unspeakable way the garment of that union was woven, whereof the weaver is the Holy Ghost; and the spinner the overshadowing from on high; the wool the ancient fleece of Adam; the woof the undefiled flesh from the virgin, the weaver's shuttle the immense grace of Him who brought it about; the artificer the Word gliding through the hearing"
In her honor,
+Fr. Gregory
