Many depictions of Mary show her wearing a long veil that covers her head and stretches to the ground. This is also referred to as a mantle. Many Catholics find comfort in the image ...

Your question goes right to the heart of a crucial point about Mary: she was human, not divine. Being human, she did not have knowledge of the future in the way that God does. ...

The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God is a liturgical celebration observed on January 1st.  It is a holy day of obligation for Catholics, meaning that Mass attendance is required (though the Mass obligation is sometimes ...

Holden Caulfield's Moments of Grace The spiritual wisdom of Salinger's famous teen Midway through J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, notices ...

“The Joy of All Who Sorrow” is an Orthodox icon which depicts Mary standing below Jesus, who is in heaven. Mary is shown in the center of the icon, holding out her arms to ...

Some of Mary’s apparitions have involved messages or visions that have a prophetic character. In 1982, the visionaries of Our Lady of Kibeho in Rwanda saw a frightening image of rivers of blood and ...

The lyrics of “Mary, Did You Know?”, a popular Christmas carol, were written by Protestant songwriter Mark Lowry. It’s a beautiful song that wonders whether Mary knew in advance about the way that her ...

In 1981, at a high school in Kibeho, Rwanda, a teenager named Alphonsine Mumureke had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Mary identified herself to Alphonsine as “the Mother of the Word.” ...

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the state known as original sin began with Adam and Eve, and has defined human nature ever since. “By his sin Adam, as the first man, ...

To recap the story from Matthew's Gospel: When Mary and Joseph were betrothed, but had not yet lived together as man and wife, Joseph learned that she was with child. (At this time, according ...

Quick answer: no. Backstory: in 1988, a young woman at St. Maria Goretti Parish in Scottsdale, Arizona, reported having received prophetic visions of and messages from the Virgin Mary. She also told her ...

Reported Marian apparitions do sometimes make the news, but I don’t know of any actual apparitions caught on camera. There are no “recorded” images of Mary captured on live TV or film. That said, ...

It depends on whether you are talking about the linguistics of the title or the theology of the title. “Theotokos,” an early Greek name for Mary, is often translated to “Mother of God.” ...

On a rainy August evening in 1879, in the town of Knock in County Mayo, Ireland, several witnesses saw three figures standing outside the parish church. They described the three figures as Mary, standing ...

On September 19, 1846, two children in the French village of La Salette saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Eleven-year-old Maximin Giraud and his friend Mélanie Matthieu (some sources say she was fourteen, ...

Religious imagery is found in many gangs, for a variety of reasons. In the case of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she is a cultural and national icon as much as a religious one (as ...

The earliest writings about Mary are in the New Testament, which was written in the second half of the first century. After that, Mary is mentioned in several apocryphal texts (texts that are written ...

The Council of Ephesus, which was held in 431, was crucial in affirming the truth of the title “Mother of God.” People had been calling Mary that for quite some time, but it was ...

Over the centuries, many different chaplets (series of prayers usually said on a string of beads) have been written to express devotion to a particular saint or to an aspect of the Christian faith. ...

A Marian apparition is a supernatural appearance of Mary to a person (or group of people) on earth. Since the early centuries of the Church, there have been thousands of reported Marian apparitions. ...