Most Holy Name of Mary

Today we celebrate the name of Mary, and the date has a very specific historical reason. Devotion to the name of the Virgin goes back to the middle of the twelfth century. The feast was established in 1513 by Julius II for the Spanish diocese of Cuenca alone; it was then extended to Toledo, then to all of Spain. It was Innocent XI who made it a feast of the whole Church, by a decree of 1685, to remember what had happened in Vienna on September 12, 1683. That day the Ottoman army had been besieging the city for two months and was on the point of taking it; the alliance between Emperor Leopold I and the king of Poland, John III Sobieski, launched the counteroffensive that freed Vienna. The charge of the Polish cavalry from the Kahlenberg is considered the greatest cavalry charge in history. For Europe, that was the point where the Ottoman advance stopped for good. The feast was dropped from the calendar in the 1969 reform and was reinstated by John Paul II in 2002. In Italy, Maria has been the most common name of all for centuries, often joined to others. And in Campania it’s also the name that a great many men carry as their second name. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Mary, today is your name day.