Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, apostle of true devotion.

“Totus tuus ego sum, et omnia mea tua sunt” (Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort, Treatise on True Devotion, 233), “I am all yours, and all that is mine belongs to you”

I. God chooses the weak to confound the strong: the Pauline theology of littleness

Saint Paul addresses to the Corinthians one of the densest affirmations in all his theology of divine election: “Consider, brothers, your calling: there are not among you many who are wise according to the flesh, nor many who are powerful, nor many who are of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to confound the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to confound the strong. God chose what is base and despised, what is not, to reduce to nothing what is, so that no one may boast before God” (1 Cor 1:26-29). This Pauline logic of the divine inversion of human criteria runs through the whole history of Christian holiness. God does not call those most qualified according to the world: He calls those most available according to the heart. And among the saints who most radically embodied this Pauline logic, particularly in its dimension of Marian spirituality, is the French missionary Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, a Breton of humble origin, ordained late, marginalized by prudent bishops, but chosen by God to leave to the Church one of the most influential Marian treatises in all Christian history.

II. Montfort: the Breton missionary and his Marian spirituality

Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was born in 1673 in Montfort-sur-Meu, in Brittany, into a large and modest family. Ordained a priest in 1700 in Paris, he devoted himself to popular missions in the rural areas of western France, traveling on foot, for more than fifteen years, through the parishes of Brittany, Anjou, Maine, and Poitou. His missions lasted several weeks in each parish and combined intense preaching, sacraments celebrated before crowds, processions, missionary hymns composed by him, and the setting up of “calvaries,” popular monuments to the passion of Christ. But the heart of his missionary spirituality was always Marian. Convinced that all spiritual renewal passes through total consecration to Mary, he wrote, at the end of his life, two texts that would become classics of Catholic spirituality: the Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin and The Secret of Mary. These two texts remained forgotten for more than a hundred years after his death. The manuscript of the Treatise was discovered in 1842 in a monastery chest at La Chevrolière, and its publication began a progressive rediscovery of Montfortian spirituality that would culminate, in the twentieth century, with its adoption as the basis of the spirituality of Pope John Paul II. Montfort also founded two congregations, the Company of Mary, known as the Montfortians, and the Daughters of Wisdom, both committed to mission and to a radical Marian spirituality. He was canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1947.

III. Revealed to the little ones: the gospel of Marian pedagogy

The Gospel of Matthew that accompanies this celebration presents Jesus’ canticle of jubilation, in which the divine pedagogy of revelation to the little ones is expressed: “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the prudent and have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, for such was your good pleasure” (Mt 11:25-26). This Gospel word is the hermeneutical key of Montfortian spirituality. The True Devotion that Montfort proposed is not a sophisticated doctrine for theological initiates: it is a simple path for souls willing to make themselves little. The method consists essentially in handing over everything to Mary (prayers, merits, satisfactions, all good works) so that she may offer them to the Son as belonging to herself. This total surrender, which Montfort called “holy slavery of love,” is not a diminishment of human freedom but its supreme realization: becoming completely available to God through the most perfect maternal mediation in human history. The simplicity of this spiritual proposal explains its popular effectiveness over three centuries and its adoption by souls as diverse as the Polish seminarian Karol Wojtyla, who would later become John Paul II, and who adopted as his episcopal and papal motto the abbreviated Montfortian formula: Totus Tuus.

IV. The true devotion and the totus tuus: the Montfortian legacy in the contemporary Church

Marian consecration according to the method of Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort spread progressively throughout the Catholic Church from the rediscovery of the Treatise in 1842. Pope Pius IX personally consecrated his life according to the Montfortian method. Popes Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII promoted the devotion. But it was with Pope John Paul II, elected in 1978, that Montfortian spirituality attained a new dimension of universal visibility. The young Karol Wojtyla, in his years as a worker and clandestine seminarian in Nazi-occupied Poland, came upon a copy of the Treatise on True Devotion and was profoundly transformed by reading it. He adopted as his motto the Totus Tuus, “all yours,” of the Montfortian consecration, and he kept this motto throughout his pontificate. The encyclical Redemptoris Mater of 1987 and the apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae of 2002 contain multiple references to Montfortian theology. The Second Vatican Council, although without explicitly citing Montfort, gathered into Lumen Gentium several insights that he had developed in his texts: the universal motherhood of Mary over the faithful, her mediation subordinate to that of Christ, her exemplary role in the configuration of every Christian to the image of the Son. The True Devotion continues, in the twenty-first century, to be studied and practiced on every continent, and the Totus Tuus has become one of the most widespread Marian mottos of the contemporary Church. The Breton missionary who traveled on foot through the parishes of western France left to the universal Church a path of holiness that neither three centuries nor multiple cultures have managed to exhaust. On the contrary, each generation that rediscovers it finds it as timely as on the day it was written.