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BOOK REVIEW: The Mystical Rose by Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman

John Henry Cardinal Newman was one of the great Catholic converts of his day. Born in 1801, Newman was raised Anglican. At the age of 24 he was ordained an Anglican priest. He was of high regard in the Anglican Church and his conversion to Catholicism rocked the Anglican world. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847 and he eventually was made a bishop, and then a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. Newman was an outstanding scholar and a tenacious apologist. He also was a prolific writer. One of his most reknown books was the classic The Development of Christian Doctrine . Yet he also wrote about many other matters of the faith including the Blessed Virgin Mary. Through his preaching and his writing, Newman led many Anglicans and other non-Catholics of his day to the fullness of the Catholic faith.

The Mystical Rose is a compilation of Newman's writings on Mary. It is divided into two parts. The first part shows how the Catholic Church's teachings on Mary are based in the New Testament and the Early Church Fathers. The second part is taken from his work Meditations and Devotions and explains the various attributes given to the Mother of God in the Litany of Loreto. This book provide a good overview of Marian doctrine and a sound meditation on the Woman who bore our Redeemer. Here is a brief excerpt:

Mary has been made more glorious in her person than in her office; her purity is a higher gift than her relationship to God. This is what is implied in Christ's answer to the woman in the crowd who cried out, when he was preaching, "Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the breasts which thou hast sucked." He replied by pointing out to his disciples a higher blessedness; "Yea, rather blessed," he said, "are they who hear the word of God and keep it..."
Protestants take these words in disparagement of our Lady's greatness, but they really tell the other way. For consider them; He lays down a priniciple that it is more blessed to keep His commandments than to be His Mother, but who even of Protestants will say that she did not keep His commandments? She kept them surely, and our Lord does but say that such obedience was in a higher line of privilege than her being His Mother. She was more blessed in her detachment from creatures, in her devotion to God, in her virginal purity, in her fullness of grace, than in her maternity. This is the constant teaching of the holy Fathers: "More blessed was Mary," says Augustine, "in receiving Christ's faith, than in conceiving Christ's flesh." And St. Chrysostom declares that she would not have been blessed, though she had borne Him in the body, had she not heard the word of God and kept it.
This of course is an impossible case; for she was made holy that she might be made His Mother, and the two blessednesses cannot be divided. She who was chosen to supply flesh and blood to the Eternal Word was first filled with grace in body and soul. Still, she had a double blessedness, of office and of qualification for it, and the latter was the greater. And it is on this account that the angel call her blessed. "Full of grace," he says, "blessed among women"; and St. Elizabeth also, when she cried out, "Blessed thou that has believed." Nay, she herself bears a like testimony, when the Angel announced to her the favor which was coming on her. - The Mystical Rose, pg. 48-49

In Christ,
Joe