Mary, Teacher of the Christian Pilgrimage

By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated 19 October 2026

Mary teaches us to contemplate the wonders of God’s love

With her motherhood, ever active toward us, Mary reaffirms the transforming presence of God in the history of human beings, with the purpose of calling them and reminding them of salvation. To recognize this presence is to recognize that God is acting effectively and decisively in our lives. He breaks into the world with His power to save it. The Virgin invites us to recognize that God exists, lives, and acts from all eternity.

In His manifestation, He reveals Himself above all as God, Love that desires to communicate Himself and to dialogue with man. Through His wonderful works, the fruit of His self-giving, He asks for our adoration, praise, and thanksgiving, so that we too, imitating the Virgin, may show Him our love and receive Him with greater attention. Mary teaches us that we have been given intelligence and heart precisely so that we may attune ourselves to our God and become the voice of all creation in magnifying Him, since material creatures cannot sing His infinite praise.

Through His works and in looking upon man, made in His image and likeness, God shows Himself close to His creatures and intervenes to direct them toward His glory, according to the designs of His divine wisdom. To recognize God’s breaking into history means opening oneself, like Mary, to the contemplation of His mystery and His glory. It means seeking God above all things, being and living aware of this ineffable presence. It means being nourished by Him, being flooded by His splendor. It means freeing oneself from the slavery of sin in order to be enfolded by His love that conquers, redeems, and saves. It means understanding oneself in the knowledge of God, in the inner light of the Holy Spirit.

This prayerful openness to the contemplation of the mystery of God, moved by the Holy Spirit and with the help and example of Mary, is necessary in order to reveal, with a free and attentive heart, the true face of God, who reveals Himself in love. In the context of our life, our worship of God must emerge with strength and show itself continually, so that His glory may always remain the supreme reason for our existence, just as it was for the mother of the Lord.

Mary teaches us to be free in our choices

Our “yes” to God, like Mary’s, is born of submission to His will, flowing from our whole being as the highest expression of our freedom sustained by His grace. Freedom is a gift that God deeply respects: for this reason, to surrender it to God is the greatest gift we can offer Him, letting His grace act fully in us. This total adherence to God, like Mary’s free “Fiat,” places us within His plan of love, on a path of growing fidelity and fullness in love. For this reason, the source of our happiness and our first duty as creatures is an unceasing and loving search for God. However, the Lord created us free and desires that we come to Him in full freedom.

Although He has the absolute initiative in ordering and determining the plans of salvation and in carrying them out at set times, on different levels, and in various ways, He invites the human person, as He did with the Virgin of Nazareth, to freely accept His Word and bear witness to it, and above all, in His interpersonal relationship with the human being, He invites each one to accept and cooperate with His grace, respecting the dignity of the person created in His image and likeness.

The free response to God, as happened with Mary, fully involves the human person, who is called first of all to truly believe in faith everything that God manifests and to be ready to obey the plan of His will manifested in it. This faith implies a generous openness to God’s love and the certainty that He will fulfill all His promises.

In this relationship of the free creature, open to the salvation and glory of God, lies the whole mystery that involves responsible man and places him, like Mary, within the mystery of the divine Trinity.

Mary teaches us to carry Jesus in our heart

To open oneself, like Mary, to the mystery of God who reveals Himself in love also means belonging totally and completely to Christ. Sacred Scripture teaches us that in Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature,” that we are “partakers of Christ,” that “we shall live with Christ.” Saint Paul repeats this more than seventy times!

Christ identifies Himself with Christians, as when He called Saul on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” We belong totally to Christ because we are in Christ as members of a body. We form a unity; we have full participation in the activities and destiny. We are the mystical body of Christ, so real that it unites us and incorporates us with the head and also with the other members: we are in Christ as branches on the vine. A union and sharing of vital sap, a sharing in the fruit-bearing that takes place in the branches and in the sap of the vine.

To belong to Christ, to believe in Him, to follow His ways of life, as Mary did and teaches, means being taught by Him and constantly referring to Him in order to make our existence rich in holiness. But this implies, as an inevitable consequence, bearing witness to Him and proclaiming His Gospel to the world. The true Christian and the whole Church cannot remain inert when they have received from Jesus the explicit command: “Go into all the world.”

Mary invites Christians to become aware of their missionary vocation, which is to promote the spiritual regeneration of men, causing them to be reborn as children of God in the new life in Christ. To proclaim Christ, to love Him, to possess Him, and to follow Him means sharing Him with others; it means promoting man, because God desires his salvation. To bear witness to Christ and to be His disciples means contributing effectively so that all men may share in the salvation won for them by the death and resurrection of Christ.

Brought into the contemplation of the risen Crucified One, the true Christian is ultimately the one who, having risen with Him, bears witness to every person in need of salvation to His victory beyond the painful journey of life, because he can no longer keep to himself the vital and transforming experience he has had in Christ, but must necessarily proclaim it to the world.

Mary teaches us to be docile to the Spirit

To know God and to be true disciples of Christ is possible only through the active and constant work of the Holy Spirit, who allows us to become fully part of the “divine family” and who, in Mary, worked the first great wonders of His grace. It is the Spirit, as Saint Paul affirms, who reveals Jesus to us and gives us the sense of sonship in relation to the Father: “those who are born of him are children of God,” and again: “you have received the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry: Abba, Father.” This Spirit, who worked fully and wonderfully in Mary, acts in us, guides our activity, sustains our weakness, prays in us with inexpressible groanings, makes us know our vocation as members of Christ, and leads us on the path of union with the Father in Christ, granting us the graces we need.

Although He does not show us His divine face, the Holy Spirit reveals Himself to us in His action, as He did in Mary from the immaculate conception of the Word of God, and He is the Person of the Most Holy Trinity who first dwells in our soul, touches our heart, resides in us, and brings the Son and the Father into us. He is the one who animates our whole spiritual being, the mysterious voice of our conscience, the inspirer of our thoughts, the breath and respiration of our love, the support of our will on the right path of salvation.

Remaining in us as the sweet guest of the soul, the Holy Spirit urges us to conform ourselves ever more, in our feelings and actions, to the love of Jesus, to live the commitment that Jesus proposed to us at the Last Supper: “Love one another as I have loved you.” The new creature formed by the Spirit, as happened in Mary, is the creature in whom love reigns fully. In the Spirit and with the Spirit, this creature lives the new Covenant, because it has gained newness of life; it loves, believes, and hopes, and in the Spirit it rises to the Father, offers itself for the salvation of the world, and becomes, as our mother Mary constantly shows us, also father, brother, mediator, and consoler for all men.

Mary teaches us to be animated by love

The path of the man who reveals and draws near to the mystery of God, who allows himself to be animated, guided, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, who welcomes and follows the perfect discipleship of Jesus, can only be the path of love, because this is what he learned in the school of his Divine Master. The Word of God, through whom all things were made, in becoming flesh, came to dwell in the land of men and entered the history of the world as the perfect man, animating it and recapitulating it in Himself through a loving and sorrowful re-creation.

The Son of Mary was the one who revealed to us that “God is love” and taught us that love is the fundamental law of Christian perfection and also of the transformation of the world. The path of man, in becoming the path of God in Christ, is therefore only the path of love. Looking at his Master, the Christian sees and understands that He, although King by nature and vocation, did not want to reign through His absolute power as creator, but only through love, giving the greatest proof of it by accepting to suffer and die for us.

To live in love means, as we contemplate in Mary and in her action toward us, opening oneself completely to God and, in Him and through Him, also to others. All this unites us to God and to our brothers and sisters, and its first vital element is prayer, as contemplation-action, a prayer, therefore, that is not abstract but that starts from the transforming dialogue with God and from the meditation-acceptance of His Word, as happened with Mary, who pondered and kept all things in her heart, and that returns to one’s own life and to the life of others to renew it and give it meaning.

Prayer, understood in this way, is above all giving glory to God, the giver of every good and every consolation; being always attentive to the salvation of others; knowing how to listen; feeling loved and letting oneself be loved; letting God work within us; letting ourselves be guided by Him; becoming people animated by creativity, initiative, and organization for the benefit of the brothers and sisters who live beside us; letting oneself be guided by the Truth in order to guide them to the Truth that unifies, saves, and transforms the world.

Living in love, always immersed in an attitude of prayer in the presence of the divine Trinity, transforms us into bearers of salvation and joy in the world. Like Mary, the pure transparency through which God smiled upon the earth, sending into the world His Son, the source of joy, we too must be bearers of this saving joy, which is born of faith and full adherence to God and springs from a heart free of sin, the source of infinite sadness.

The Virgin reminds us that joy is only possible if we are free from the suffocating weight of our sins, so as to make room for the Spirit and foster in us the ripening of His fruits of sanctification and joy. Union with God and joy are equivalent. As we are converted and pass from the slavery of sin to the freedom of belonging totally to God, we are clothed with joy and radiate it to the world. This joy that transforms us finds its nourishment in Christ, in the love of the Father, and in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Mary teaches us that her being “All Joy,” “All Holy,” and “All Grace” is the fruit of her total belonging to God, of her walking to Jerusalem behind Christ in suffering and in prayerful love, which becomes cooperation, wholly dependent on Christ, in the salvation of the world.

The Virgin invites us to put on the wedding garment so that we may be admitted to the banquet of joy in the kingdom of heaven, where she has attained complete fulfillment and where we will be filled with God, the only true joy.

Mary urges us to trust in her maternal heart

As spiritual Mother of the Church and Mother of all men, deeply involved in the work of renewing the world in Christ, the Virgin often shows her Immaculate Heart in her apparitions, to express with a compelling iconic image her universal mission: to cooperate apostolically in the invisible birth, in the flourishing of the life of Christ in the heart of man.

The “consecration” repeatedly requested by the Virgin, that is, entrusting oneself totally to her maternal care, aims to lead us to relive our consecration to God through Christ in the Spirit, which already took place on the day of our Baptism. With her example and intercession, the Mother of the Lord wishes to help us live our baptismal consecration and understand the profound meaning of the baptism of regeneration and renewal in the Spirit, which made us children of God and partakers of the divine nature.

Saint John Paul II stated: “How can we live our baptism without contemplating Mary, blessed among women, so receptive to the gift of God? Christ gave her as mother. He gave her as mother to the Church. Every Catholic spontaneously entrusts his prayer to her and consecrates himself to her in order to consecrate himself better to the Lord.”

And Rahner writes: “What happens in us in Baptism has its origin and initial force in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Beside every baptismal font of Mother Church stands the mother of Jesus.”

The experience of the saints shows with great force and clarity that, when we entrust ourselves to Mary, she becomes ours and we become hers, and between her and us a wonderful intersubjectivity is established: a mutual attentiveness, a deep relationship, an exchange of goods, a friendly atmosphere, an influence, and a self-giving love. All this must lead us to understand and welcome Mary as a mother in whose heart we take refuge, and also as teacher and model of life on the path of faith, in the total response to God, in the readiness to cooperate in the plan of salvation.

It is therefore understood that the characteristic of devotion and dedication to Mary is to be integrated into Christian life as an essential condition for its full maturity and completion: to entrust oneself to Mary, to welcome her as mother, means, ultimately, to enter into the redemptive mystery of Christ. Mary’s role is to help those who entrust themselves to her to fulfill their vocation in Christ, to rediscover and live fully their belonging to God. With her presence and by welcoming us as children, Mary invites us to detach ourselves from our pride, the root and cause of every personal and social sin. She spurs us on the path of holiness and of the Gospel virtues that she herself lived. She invites us to honor in ourselves the state of grace of which she is full and of which she is the perfect model, that is, to live in friendship with God, in communion with Him, in the indwelling of the Spirit, in order to reproduce in ourselves the spiritual features of the Firstborn Son, our Brother and Lord.

Let us be guided by Mother Mary

The Church teaches us that Mary is Mother and Companion of Christ the Savior: “Mother” binds her to her Son, who is the eternal Son of God incarnate in her. “Companion” binds her to the mission of the Savior. Associated with the Son, Mary gave herself completely to Him with love and joy, but also with immeasurable suffering, adoring in her gift to the Son and in His work the mysterious plan of the Father. In the work of the divine Redeemer, Mary cooperated in a very special way, so that her merits, her virtuous actions, and her sufferings are part of the mystery of our redemption.

By consecrating herself completely to the person and work of her Son, Mary placed herself at the service of the mystery of salvation, under Him and with Him, with free faith and obedience. Her love, her faith, and her obedience to God are not like flowers scattered in the desert, but a growth that accompanies the whole life of Mary as a living and constant structure of her personality.

Awareness of all this must lead us to recognize Mary’s presence in our life, to act under her attentive and maternal gaze, following her example of total dedication to Christ, convinced that our heavenly Mother is always near us to encourage, console, support, and lead us to Him.

The period that runs from the “fullness of time” to the end of our earthly history engages Mary’s spiritual motherhood without wearying, weakening, or diminishing her dedication. We must always depend on her throughout our earthly pilgrimage, asking her, at the end of the journey, to show us at last Jesus, the blessed fruit of her womb.

Deepen your studies: explore Mariology, Marian Theology, Marian apparitions, and the Postgraduate Program in Mariology.

On Mary as teacher of the Christian pilgrimage of faith, see the Encyclical Redemptoris Mater of Pope John Paul II.