Chaps who possess a copy of the 1962 Missal inform me that it contains de Montfort in its Appendix pro aliquibus locis; and the SSPX ORDO (the Francophone one) lists him for April 28 "en certes lieux". Chaps who use the Novus Ordo tell me that he has now entered (optionally) the Novus Ordo Calendar! We aged chaps do try to keep-up-to-date, and depend so much upon you Bright Young Things to keep us informed. In return I can tell you that he is in the Ordinariate Calendar. How could he not be?
I have long had a high regard for this Breton priest; hence he is gummed into my (1955) Altar Missal, available always when the rubrics allow a Votive. This regard was shared by S John Paul II, who took his motto, totus tuus, from the Saint's writings.
I first met S Louis Marie in the 1950s when I was a little boy, in the Catholic Church in Clacton-on-Sea, where, most suitably, a fine statue, very movimento as the Saint strides forward, stands right beside the culturally very Breton shrine of our Lady of Light. There's not much else that's Breton about Clacton! I wonder if the Confraternity of our Lady of Light still survives in that parish; if the Rosary is still said daily at that Shrine. (Regular readers will recall my series on the history of this superb devotion, involving the eccentic Cornish convert baronet the Reverend Sir Harry Trelawny, which I published in January 2020. Stuff you just couldn't make up! I beg readers who are new to this blog to go back to it.)
De Montfort comes from a Baroque devotional milieu which has been an object of criticism. Particularly out of favour has been the wholehearted style of his devotion to our Lady, which involves a consecration of servitus [slavery] to Mary. In fact, it wasn't too popular in his own time: there were unwholesome people around called "Jansenists" who sniffed at such things.
Promise me that you will run a mile if you ever meet one.
Grounds for snooty disdain are obvious: granted that the word doulos [slave] occurs frequently in Scripture, surely, so the condescending will remark, it is Jesus whose doulos, slave, S Paul so often proclaims himself to be. So is the douleia of Mary just another example of popery putting the Mother of God into the place reserved for her divine Son?
But no reader will have forgotten the biblical verb hypotassesthai: to submit oneself, to order, to arrange, to subject oneself hypo, beneath, another, be that 'other' a master, a spouse, a ruler, or whatever. New Testament religion is a million miles from the individualistic Protestantism which knows only a relationship between the one and the One. S Paul in fact calls upon us to submit ourselves in this way one to another: not just to Jesus (although all must be en Christoi). And since Mary alone is unflawed by Original Sin, she is the one to whom a Christian can be hypotassesthai without that relationship being flawed (as all other hypotaxeis except that to her Divine Son can run the risk of being) by unchristlike traits in the other.
S Louis Marie is far from being the first Christian to have practised and promoted this Slavery of Mary. In his True Devotion to Mary he lists many predecessors in both East and West; to whom I would add my own favourite Bishop of Exeter, John de Grandisson. He concluded a life of servitus to Mary by having himself described on his lead coffin as Matris Misericordiae miserrimus servus. So clearly this devotion is authentic Anglican Patrimony! Since the terms kyrios(a) and doulos(e) are correlative, the terms domina and kuria [Lady], common in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity (not to mention the more archaic Greek despoina and the English phrase our Lady in the Book of Common Prayer), imply a Montfortian devotional attitude.
I think you should make the Montfortian consecration today.
