By Fr John Flader
Question – Our parish priest often celebrates a Mass in honour of Our Lady on Saturdays. I am very happy with this, and would be interested to know why this Mass is celebrated on Saturdays in particular.
Devotion to Our Lady on Saturdays goes back a long way and has special significance.
Even from a symbolic point of view, it has great meaning.
One of the titles of Our Lady is “Morning Star”, and just as the bright star in the Eastern sky just before dawn announces the arrival of a new day, so devotion to Our Lady on Saturday leads us to devotion to Jesus on Sunday, the Lord’s Day.
After all, it was Mary who brought Jesus into the world, and Jesus is often called the “Sun of Justice”.
The tradition of dedicating Saturdays to Our Lady is very ancient.
In its spirit it goes back to the gathering of the apostles around Our Lady on that Holy Saturday after Christ’s death on the Cross.
When the apostles were sad and as yet not convinced that he would rise from the dead as he had told them he would (cf. Mk 9:31, Lk 18:33), Our Lady went to accompany and reassure them, bringing a ray of light into their spiritual darkness.
After all, she was their mother, as Christ had declared to St John from the cross the day before: “Behold your mother” (Jn 19:26).
In the 13th century, Caesarius of Heisterbach explained it like this: “Mary alone kept faith in the resurrection of her son, within the general despair of Holy Saturday, when Christ lay dead in the tomb. Marian devotion on Saturday is understood from Sunday, the day commemorating the resurrection”.
The custom of celebrating a Mass of Our Lady on Saturdays goes back to Alcuin of York (735-804), a theologian and advisor to Charlemagne.
Alcuin composed six weekday votive Masses of Our Lady, two of them for Saturday, to be used when the memorials of saints were not celebrated.
Not long afterwards, the custom of praying the Little Office of Mary on Saturdays in the Liturgy of the Hours began and became widespread.
In the 10th century there were Saturday Masses in Mary’s honour being celebrated in Italy, France, and Germany. The Franciscans and Benedictines spread the devotion, and by the 17th century the Dominicans had started the practice of honouring Mary with special acts of devotion on the 15 consecutive Saturdays preceding the feast of the Holy Rosary.
The Popes attached an indulgence to the 15 Saturdays for anyone who went to Confession, received Holy Communion, and prayed five decades of the Rosary.
Also in the 17th century, St John Eudes and Venerable Jean-Jacques Olier began to speak to their spiritual sons about the first Saturday of the month as a day of reparation for blasphemies against the Blessed Mother.
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary on Saturdays was confirmed in modern times by the revelations of Our Lady to Sr Lucia, who had seen the apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima in 1917 along with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco.
On December 10, 1925, Our Lady appeared to Sr Lucia, who was then a postulant in the Dorothean convent in Pontevedra, Spain, and requested the institution of the devotion of the five first Saturdays in reparation to her Immaculate Heart.
Our Lady told Sr Lucia: “Behold, my daughter, my heart encircled with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. Give me consolation, you, at least; and make known on my behalf that I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all who on the first Saturday of five consecutive months confess their sins, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary, with the purpose of making reparation to my Immaculate Heart.”
So, as you can see, devotion to Our Lady on Saturdays is deeply rooted in Catholic tradition.
