Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we celebrate Mary as Queen, and the date is no accident: it falls on the eighth day of the Assumption, its octave, as if to spell out what follows from it. The feast is recent. Pius XII established it in 1954, with the encyclical Ad caeli Reginam, at the close of the Marian year; in the 1969 reform of the calendar it was moved from May 31 to August 22 precisely to tie it to the Assumption. The title, however, is very ancient, and it lives inside the most common prayers: Queen of Angels, Queen of Saints, Queen of Peace, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs. These are the invocations of the Litany of Loreto, which has been prayed for five centuries. The biblical passages tradition leans on are the psalm that speaks of the queen in gold of Ophir standing at the king’s right hand, the bride in the Song of Songs coming up from the desert like a column of smoke, and above all the twelfth chapter of Revelation: the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars, who faces the dragon. That crown of twelve stars on a blue background, by the way, is the flag of Europe: the person who designed it in 1955 had exactly that passage in mind, and always said so. In the Smorfia, Our Lady is number eight. If your name is Regina, today is your name day.