We are rounding the end of 2024 this week. At the beginning of 2024, I wrote an article called Marian Devotion in a Church-Eclipse. In it, I gave readers the negative reasons as to why Mary was our only guide to orthodoxy in an unprecedented era of compromised visibility due to a heretical hierarchy afflicting the true Catholic Church. (“Visibility” is a normative mark of the true Church. It usually refers to the hierarchy. Yet many traditionalists now believe we are in an eclipse of that visibility, as predicted by Our Lady of La Salette, due to all the scandals both doctrinal and moral.)
But today, I am going to give the positive reasons as to why Mary is the Exemplar both to the Catholic Church and the heart of the Sensus Fidelium.
Just before St. Maximilian Kolbe was arrested by Nazis and taken to Auschwitz in his home country of Poland to die a martyr, he penned in his journal the answer to a question that he had been pondering his whole life: Why did Mary say to the children at Lourdes that she was The Immaculate Conception and not that she was simply Immaculately Conceived?
Being a good Augustinian and Bonaventurian, it hit St. Maximilian just before his arrest the following: St. Augustine taught that God the Father was the Lover, God the Son was the Beloved and the Holy Spirit was the eternal love spirated between the two in absolute purity. This means the Holy Spirit was the eternal Immaculate Conception. Thus, as the spouse of the Holy Spirit (but as one born in time) Mary had to be the temporal Immaculate Conception. This is because Mary was the most pure and even supreme creation of the Blessed Trinity. (Also, spouses share a name!)
At Lourdes, Mary said she was The Immaculate Conception—but she meant the Temporal One, not the Eternal One. Why not the Eternal One? Because only the Holy Spirit is the Eternal Immaculate Conception, “spirated” (as the Holy Fathers say) in eternity as the actual love between the Father and the Son. Mary, on the other hand, was conceived in time by a normal union of man and woman. That is, her Immaculate Conception in St. Anne’s womb took place on the 8th of December. This is obviously different from the Incarnation which took place in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit on the 25th March. Thus, beginning in St. Anne’s womb on the 8th of December one year, Mary became the Temporal Immaculate Conception.
This provides some insight into the unbreakable unity between the Holy Spirit and the Immaculate Virgin Mary. It also reveals to us that the main measure of how much you love the Holy Spirit is your love of Mary. They are not the same person (for one is God and the other is a creature) but they are spouses, meaning they are a package-deal in the heart of any Christian. And this is why Mary is known as the “destroyer of all heresies.”
The closer you are to Mary, the more you are going to also be a destroyer of heresies. This isn’t because Mary is primarily a heresy-hunter (for she is primarily Mother and then Queen) but rather because what is important to her Spouse (the Holy Spirit) is going to be supremely important to Mary, even from her point of view in heaven.
What is important to the Holy Spirit? Most Catholics do not realize it is infallible dogma (not devotion) that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Catholic Church. Let me write that again. It is infallible teaching from papal Magisteriums that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Catholic Church. The back cover of the Æterna Press Roman Martyrology alludes to this theological reality very beautifully:
In making up this long roll of honor, the Church has been actuated by that instinctive wisdom with which the Spirit of God, who abides in her and teaches her all truth, has endowed her, and which permeates through and guides all her actions. She is the Spouse of Christ, without spot or wrinkle or blemish, wholly glorious and undefiled, whom He loved, for whom He died, and to whom He promised the Spirit of Truth, to comfort her in her dreary pilgrimage through this valley of tears, and to abide with her forever. She is one with Him in Spirit and in love, she is subject to Him in all things.
Notice that the human aspect of the Catholic Church can be sullied, but the divine aspect of the Catholic Church is Immaculate, like Mary. This is because saints in heaven (although not at fraction of the level of glory of merit as Mary is in heaven) are also sinless like her. Also, the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church is decreed as “immaculate,” as without any dirt or error. This is because it comes directly from the Holy Spirit. As we read above, the Holy Spirit “teaches her all truth.” The Catholic Church is truly one with Christ in the same Holy Spirit. Because the Catholic Church has been cleansed by the blood of Jesus, the eternal aspect of her exists in both her saints in heaven and in her teaching “without spot or wrinkle or blemish, wholly glorious and undefiled.”
With all the dogmatic scandals and moral scandals, it is very hard for most good Catholics in 2025 to remember this. But it is true that the Catholic Church’s saints and her teaching are immaculate, not unlike Mary, towards whom we are aiming. We in the Church Militant on earth are only trudging to this goal. And this is why we call Mary the “Exemplar of the Church.” The Exemplar is the goal (in this case an actual person) as to what we want the Catholic Church to be, namely, an entity united with the Holy Spirit and free of all sin.
Of course, for the Immaculate Virgin Mary, her freedom from sin was her never having sinned via her own Immaculate Conception, where all of us currently on earth had to be cleansed by the waters of baptism and many of us via the Blood of Jesus transmitted in the confessional. But Mary remains the Exemplar of the Catholic Church on earth for this reason.
Put all of this together and it becomes clear again that the more you love Mary, the more you love the Holy Spirit. The more you love Mary, the more you love orthodoxy. Why? Because Mary is the exterminatrix of all heresies. Also, her spouse, the Holy Spirit, is the soul of the Catholic Church. Notice again the Holy Spirit is the soul of the perennial Catholic Church, not the soul of the heresiarchs of modernism (or Arianism or Albigensianism or any other heresy that afflicted the Catholic Church from within or without.) Thus, Mary is the Exemplar of the Church Militant, the guide to true orthodoxy, and the key to avoiding the heresy of modernism. This is why it is so important you pray your Rosary to avoid modernist heresies.
Mary is the Exemplar to the Church. While the Holy Spirit is the Soul of the Catholic Church, Mary is the spouse to the Soul of the Catholic Church. Thus, the closer you are to the Temporal Immaculate Conception, the closer you are to the Eternal Immaculate Conception. This, again, is why Mary is the key to coming out of this Church crisis, and why the triumph over modernism will be the once-for-all Fatima Promise of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Notice it is her heart we await, already filled to the threshold of infinity with the Holy Spirit.
p/c (both above) to Jeffrey Bruno