Why do I need Mary? I have Jesus.
I have heard this so often, not just from Protestants, but from faithful Catholics striving for holiness. It was my thought at one point. At face value, it makes sense. Why would I need an advocate with Christ our Advocate? Why would I need a way to God when Christ Himself is the Way?
There is no grand intellectual and theological answer to such questions. No, it is much simpler. The answer to why we need Mary when we have Jesus is common sense: it is fundamentally human.
There is no such thing as “just me and God,” though it is easy to think (and think we live) that way. From the beginning of our lives, it was not us and God; it was our mother or father telling us there was a Being we call God, who made us and loves us infinitely. After that conversation, it was still not just us and God. It was many more conversations, and even after we began to speak to God like a person, one-on-one, in the secret chamber of our heart, it was still ultimately not just us and Him. Parents and priests and friends still spoke of Him to us, helped us see Him rightly, helped us know His word.
God could have told us all things about Himself immediately after the initial introduction by our parents. But He didn’t.
God could have told us at one point, “Don’t listen to all those things your parents and pastors and friends say of Me. Just come to Me privately in prayer or in Scripture, and I will tell you all you need to know there.” But He didn’t.
God in His wisdom and power has chosen secondary causes—people around us, events around us—to communicate with us and point toward Him. It is not good that man should be alone. It is not good that man should be in relationship with God alone.
“Well, that is so,” one may concede. “What does that have to do with Mary? She is not on earth anymore. It is only natural that mothers and fathers and pastors teach us about God. They’re right in front of us, flesh and blood, and do a good enough job, so why do we need a woman in heaven, special as she might be?”
The answer to this, too, is woven into the very fabric of the Faith, every time we confess we believe in “the communion of saints.” We enter Christ’s Church with our Baptism. A vision of the Church that is only made up of those Christians within our immediate vicinity is too small a vision of the Church. It is too small of thinking to believe the community we become a part of is only as large as a parish, a diocese, a state, a country—even the world. All who die in Christ yet live. So Holy Mother Church, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has shown us the grand communion of saints of which we become a part of: Church Militant on earth, Church Suffering in purgatory, and Church Triumphant in heaven. The veil between them is very thin, especially when Christ unites us.
It is only natural that those saints in the Church Triumphant in heaven would have a particular interest in us. In fact, they could not be in heaven if they did not care about us. Charity, which they are perfected in, loves God and neighbor. Because the saints in heaven love God, they love us for His sake. To love is to will the good of the other, and the highest good is God, so it is certain the saints more ardently want us to get to heaven than perhaps even our best earthly friends do. Further, because they have already done what we want to do—get to heaven—they know how to do so far better than anyone we can meet on earth.
Now if the saints know how to get to heaven, then Mary knows best of them all. She knows Christ better than any human, by virtue of her Immaculate Conception and having lived alongside Him in His flesh and blood and divinity for thirty-three years. If anyone is an expert on loving Christ, it is Mary. The whole wisdom of two thousand years of Church teaching and tradition can likely hardly compare with what she personally knows about Him—that is why she is Mother of the Church. The fact is that there is truly no one better to ask about how to love Christ than His own mother.
In my own faith, I realized all of this before I became stuck again, right where I see a lot of Catholics get stuck. This is the problem, perhaps below all the wondering about why we need Mary: how do I have a relationship with her?
It is much easier to go to a flesh and blood mother or priest for advice on how to get to God. It is easier even to go to a book. But it can feel like talking to empty, mute air when talking to Mary.
At first glance this seems so. It can be rare, even with God Himself, to hear a clear voice in our hearts and know with absolute certainty that it is Him. But it is a good thing that God and those in the Church Triumphant do not only communicate with words whispered to our hearts, though they may. It is more often through love, understanding, and highly suspicious “coincidences” that they speak to us.
It first happened to me with certain saints. Perhaps it’s easiest if they wrote autobiographies, or have biographies or novels written about them. Suddenly, you become captivated by a particular saint. Their words resonate in your heart as if meant just for you. You relate to their lives, feel you understand them and if they were beside you, they would understand you too. You have a sort of magnetic attraction to their lives, and then you might even begin to see them everywhere. On a t-shirt on Etsy, in books in a store or online. A friend “randomly” gives you a holy card of them. Maybe a symbol of theirs—think of St. Therese’s roses—abruptly becomes ubiquitous in your life. If the saints can do this, Mary can as well.
The trouble people run into with her is that she was perfect; it is often the weaknesses of the saints that draw us most. But our Mother is not discouraged by that. No, if we are only open, she is so willing to show us that though perfect, she was still very human—she wept and was ill and was happy. She may show us that holiness is very human.
In revealing this and herself to us, in captivating our hearts, she will quickly quiet the great fear that many of us have in going to her: that she will stand in the way of Christ and distract us from Him. Nothing is further from the truth. To distract us from Christ would contradict what makes her our Mother: that she was the one human created for the sole purpose of bringing us to God, and the one human who can do that work perfectly. If we begin to be distracted, the fault is all with us, not with her; she will likely be the first to gently tell us that, in keeping with her mission: to take us, her spiritual sons and daughters, and draw us far deeper into the Heart of Christ than we would have made it on our own. Not because Christ is not powerful enough to do so by Himself. No, but precisely because of how He made us as humans, so bound to one another in community—and in need of a Mother who knows Him perfectly to continually speak of Him to us.
To deny the need for Mary is to deny our own humanity, and humanity’s need for mothers.