The Church and Our Lady

 Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

From Henri de Lubac's "The Splendour of the Church:"

"[T]he maternity of Mary with regard to Christ involves for her a spiritual maternity with regard to all Christians: "She bore One according to the flesh, but spiritually she bore the whole human race" (St. Bonaventure) - while the spiritual maternity of the Church with regard to all includes that power over the Eucharist by . . . which the Church . . . carries out a . . . maternal function with regard to Christ Himself.  Hence those comparisons . . . between Our Lady and the priest and those speculations on Our Lady's priesthood . . . . It was natural enough to consider, after the gift of life in Baptism, and that of the Word in the preaching which gives birth to faith, the sacramental sentence which makes present the body of Christ, as did Mary's Fiat at Nazareth.  From the twelfth century onwards we repeatedly come across the exclamation: "O truly to be venerated is the dignity of priests, for in their hands, as in the womb of the virgin, Christ is incarnated anew." . . . St. John Eudes was to see in [the priest] "the image of our Virgin Mother", since by him "Christ is formed, giving to the faithful and sacrificed to God."