A Life of a Name, for the feast on the twelfth day of September — III classis
Et nomen Virginis Maria. “And the virgin’s name was Mary.” — Luke 1:27, from the Gospel of the Mass
A word on the genre
A hagiography is a life, and the feast of this day has no life of its own to relate; it celebrates not a saint but a name, and the Lady who bears it already has her biography in the Gospel and her greater feasts throughout the year. What follows, then, is the life of the Name itself: what it means, how it came to be loved, how it came to be feasted, and what it did on a hillside above Vienna one September morning in 1683. A name, in the Scriptures, is never a mere label. To know the name of a thing is to know its nature, and to invoke a name is to call upon the person. Our Lord Himself commands us to hallow the Name of His Father; the Church, on this day, teaches us to reverence the name of His Mother.
I. The name at Nazareth
The Gospel of the Mass is the Missus est (Luke 1:26-38), and the evangelist, who elsewhere spends no words on the ordinary, pauses to tell us the name of the girl to whom Gabriel was sent: et nomen Virginis Maria. St. Luke could have written “a virgin of Nazareth” and passed on. He did not. The Fathers took note. St. Ambrose observes that the name is set down so that we may know that the Virgin was not chosen at random but marked out, and St. Bernard, in his second homily on this text, will build his most famous sermon on the two words alone.
The name is the Hebrew Miryam, borne before her by the sister of Moses, the prophetess who led the daughters of Israel in the song of triumph at the Red Sea (Exod. 15:20). That is not an accident either. The first Miriam sang over the drowned army of Pharaoh; the second sang the Magnificat over the scattering of the proud. The name was common enough in Palestine — the Gospels count at least six women who bear it — and it was into this ordinary name, as into an ordinary town and an ordinary espoused girl, that the extraordinary was poured.
II. What the name means
The Fathers and Doctors did not agree on the etymology, and their disagreement is itself a kind of litany.
St. Jerome, in his Book of Hebrew Names, rendered it stilla maris — “a drop of the sea.” A copyist’s pen, somewhere in the centuries after him, turned stilla into stella, and the Church has never wished to correct the error, because Stella maris, Star of the Sea, is what she has proved to be. St. Isidore of Seville read it as illuminatrix, she who enlightens, and also as “Lady,” from the Syriac Mar, so that Mary is Domina, the Mistress, as her Son is Dominus. Others found in it mare amarum, “bitter sea,” and referred it to the sword of sorrow foretold by Simeon; and modern philologists, who have their own contribution to make, trace it to an Egyptian root meaning “beloved.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, in a sermon on the Ave Maria, gathers three of these together and gives each its doctrine: she is Star of the Sea because she guides the wayfarer through the storms of this world to the port of eternity; she is Enlightener because she brought forth the Light; she is Lady because she rules, under her Son, over the household of the faith. Drop, star, light, lady, bitterness, beloved — the Church has been content to let the name mean all of them at once. It is the privilege of a mother’s name to be inexhaustible.
III. Respice stellam, voca Mariam
The love of the Name is as old as the love of the Lady, but it found its classic voice in St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). The passage from his second homily Super Missus est is read in the Breviary and has been read by every generation since:
“O thou, whoever thou art, who feelest thyself tossed on the waves of this world among storms and tempests rather than walking on firm ground — turn not thine eyes from the brightness of this star, if thou wilt not be overwhelmed. If the winds of temptation rise, if thou run upon the rocks of tribulation, look to the star, call upon Mary. In dangers, in straits, in doubts, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Let her not depart from thy mouth, let her not depart from thy heart… Following her thou dost not stray; praying to her thou dost not despair; thinking of her thou dost not err; upheld by her thou dost not fall.”
Respice stellam, voca Mariam. Bernard is not writing theology in this passage; he is giving instructions for a shipwreck. The whole of what the feast means for practice is contained in the imperative voca — call. The name is not for contemplation only. It is for shouting when the water is at the throat.
After Bernard the stream widens. St. Anthony of Padua preached that the Name is sweet in the mouth, melodious in the ear, and a joy in the heart. St. Bonaventure wrote that the name of Mary cannot be pronounced without profit to the one who says it. Richard of St. Laurence, in the thirteenth century, composed a whole treatise De laudibus Beatæ Mariæ in which the name is turned over like a jewel. Blessed Henry Suso is said to have pronounced it with such tenderness that those who heard him wept. And St. Alphonsus Liguori, in The Glories of Mary, devotes an entire discourse to “the sweetness of the name of Mary in life and in death,” teaching that the devils fear it, that the dying are consoled by it, and that the Church has joined it in the Ave to the name of Jesus so that the two might never be separated on the lips of the faithful.
IV. The feast is born: Cuenca, 1513
The liturgical veneration of the Name was, like most Marian feasts, a local thing before it was a universal one. In 1513 Pope Julius II granted to the diocese of Cuenca in Castile permission to keep a feast of the Holy Name of Mary, placed at first on the seventeenth of September, within the octave of the Nativity of Our Lady. It spread through Spain and was given, under St. Pius V, to the Sunday after the Nativity. It was a Spanish devotion for a hundred and seventy years — one of those quiet regional observances of which the Church has hundreds, and which might have remained so.
V. Vienna, 12 September 1683
Then came the year 1683.
In July the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa laid siege to Vienna with an Ottoman army the chroniclers put at over a hundred thousand men. The Emperor Leopold I withdrew from the city; the garrison under Starhemberg held the walls through August as the Turkish sappers mined toward the gates, and by early September the defenders were reduced to a few thousand and expected the assault daily. If Vienna fell, there was nothing between the Ottoman army and the heart of Germany.
The relief was assembled under the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, who had marched from Kraków with the Polish host to join the Imperial and German forces — some seventy thousand men in all. Before the descent from the Kahlenberg on the morning of the twelfth, Mass was celebrated on the heights by the Capuchin friar Blessed Marco d’Aviano, papal legate and confessor to the Emperor, who had preached the campaign through the Empire as a crusade under the protection of the Mother of God. Sobieski served the Mass himself. The army bore the name of Mary on its standards; the watchword given for the battle was Maria.
The Christian line came down from the wooded hills through the morning, and in the late afternoon Sobieski launched the charge of the Polish winged hussars — the largest cavalry charge in history, the military historians say, something over eighteen thousand horse — against the Ottoman centre. The Turkish army broke and fled, abandoning its camp, its guns, and the Grand Vizier’s tent. The siege was over in a day. Sobieski wrote to Innocent XI in the words that have been repeated ever since: Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit — “We came, we saw, God conquered.”
It was the twelfth of September, the day after the Sunday within the octave of Our Lady’s Nativity, on which the Spanish feast of her Name was kept.
VI. Innocent XI and the universal feast
Innocent XI, who had prayed and financed and diplomatized the relief of Vienna for two years, did what Pius V had done after Lepanto. In thanksgiving for the deliverance, he extended the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary to the universal Church, to be kept on the Sunday after the Nativity. In 1911 St. Pius X, in his reform of the calendar and his clearing of the Sundays, fixed it upon the twelfth itself, the anniversary of the battle, where the traditional calendar still keeps it as a feast of the third class.
The Mass is Vultum tuum, from the Common of the Blessed Virgin. The Epistle is that passage of Ecclesiasticus (24:23-31) which the Church has always applied to her: “I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope… he that hearkeneth to me shall not be confounded.” The Gospel is the Annunciation. And the Collect asks that those who rejoice sub sanctissimæ Virginis Mariæ Nomine et protectione — under her Name and protection — may by her intercession be delivered from all evils on earth and come to eternal joys in heaven. The two halves of the prayer are the two halves of the day: Vienna, and the deathbed.
The reformed calendar of 1970 dropped the feast, judging it a duplication of the Nativity; it was restored in 2002 as an optional memorial. The traditional rite never lost it.
VII. The Name and the enemy
It is right to say something about why the Church attached this feast to a battle, since the modern conscience is uneasy about it.
The Church has never taught that the Mother of God takes sides in the quarrels of princes. She has taught, from Lepanto and from Vienna and from a hundred lesser deliverances, that the Christian people may cry to their Mother in extremity and that she hears them. Kara Mustafa’s army was not the enemy of Austria only; it was the instrument by which the Faith itself would have been driven from central Europe, as it had been driven from Anatolia, from Constantinople, from Hungary. The men on the Kahlenberg understood that they were fighting for the Mass, and Marco d’Aviano told them so.
But the deeper truth of the feast lies in the Vulgate rendering of Genesis 3:15, which the Church has kept in her liturgy against all philological objection: ipsa conteret caput tuum — “she shall crush thy head.” The enmity between the woman and the serpent is not a figure of speech. St. Alphonsus records the constant tradition that the Name of Mary is a terror to the devils, and the exorcists of the Church have found it so. The victory on the Kahlenberg was a visible instance, on the largest scale, of the invisible thing that happens every time a tempted soul says Maria.
VIII. The Name at the hour of death
If the feast looks backward to Vienna, its Collect looks forward to the end of every life.
Every Catholic has been taught to say, morning and night, the three names that St. Alphonsus called the surest viaticum: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, assist me in my last agony. The tradition of the saints is unanimous that the Name of Mary said at the point of death is a great grace. St. Bonaventure taught that the devils fly at the sound of it; St. Germanus of Constantinople that the mere invocation of her name is a sign of the presence of life in the soul; and the Hail Mary itself, in the petition the Church added to the angel’s greeting, asks for exactly one thing at exactly one moment: nunc et in hora mortis nostræ.
The name that guided the ships and broke the siege is the name a dying man says when he can say nothing else. That is why it is enough for the Church to make a feast of it.
IX. What the feast teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That a name may be a refuge. The Scriptures say that “the name of the Lord is a strong tower; the just runneth to it, and shall be exalted” (Prov. 18:10). The Church, without any confusion of the creature with the Creator, has found in the name of His Mother a second tower, built beside the first and opening onto it. She is not the way, but she is the star that shows it.
That devotion and history are not two things. The feast did not arise from a theologian’s desk but from a Spanish cathedral and a Polish cavalry charge. The Church remembers her deliverances in her calendar as Israel remembered the Red Sea in its Psalms, and for the same reason: that a people who forget what God has done for them will not trust Him for what comes next.
That the sweetest devotions are the simplest. No one needs a treatise to say Maria. St. Bernard’s counsel was addressed to the sailor in the storm, not to the scholar at his book. The Church makes a feast of a single word so that we may learn to say it often.
Practice
Examine. When you are afraid, whom do you call? Not in theory but in fact — in the moment of temptation, in the sleepless hour, in the news that stops the breath. If the name of Mary is not yet among the first words that rise, the feast is an invitation to put it there.
Do. Say the Holy Name deliberately today, and often: the aspiration Maria, Mater gratiæ, Mater misericordiæ, tu nos ab hoste protege, et hora mortis suscipe — “Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of mercy, do thou protect us from the enemy and receive us at the hour of death.” Bow the head at her name as at her Son’s; the custom is ancient and its neglect is recent.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Concede, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut fideles tui, qui sub sanctissimæ Virginis Mariæ Nomine et protectione lætantur; eius pia intercessione a cunctis malis liberentur in terris, et ad gaudia æterna pervenire mereantur in cælis.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that Thy faithful, who rejoice under the Name and protection of the most holy Virgin Mary, may by her loving intercession be delivered from all evils on earth and be found worthy to attain everlasting joys in heaven.”
Devote. The Litany of Loreto, said slowly, attending to the titles that are the Name unfolded — Stella matutina, Refugium peccatorum, Auxilium Christianorum; or the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, with the Coronation kept before the mind, since the Name of Mary is a name of a Queen.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the Marian aspirations and the Little Office, and the theology of invocation — why the saints are called upon by name. The Church History path treats the Ottoman wars from Lepanto to Vienna and the popes who fought them with prayer and gold: Pius V, Innocent XI, and the friars who preached the crusades.
Sanctissimum Nomen Mariæ, sit nobis refugium in vita et in morte. Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genetrix.
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “Feast of the Holy Name of Mary” and “The Name of Mary”; St. Bernard, Homiliæ super Missus est, II; St. Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super Ave Maria; St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary, Part II, Discourse on the Name of Mary; the Missale Romanum (1962), 12 September; and standard histories of the 1683 siege of Vienna.