Four Means

The book is wide in its scope however and proposes four principal means that must be employed to possess and love Christ.

A perfect devotion to Mary, Mother of the Incarnate Wisdom, is the fourth means, which makes it possible for Christians to offer themselves totally to the Incarnate Word and remain completely dependent on Him.

The other means are desire, prayer, and mortification. It was de Montfort’s compassion for our weakness in using these means of holiness and in responding generously to God’s grace that urged him to take the fourth part of his Treatise and enlarge it into a special study now known as “True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin.”

While “True Devotion” is undoubtedly de Montfort’s most important and inspiring contribution to religious literature, it is not, as is often supposed, a complete expression of his teaching. To regard it as complete in itself is to condemn de Montfort’s spirituality as unbalanced and to misunderstand both his life and his work. His principal theme is always Christ-Wisdom, and it is on this foundation that he has erected his system of spirituality. Devotion to Our Lady is not an end in itself, but a means, although a most perfect means, of possessing Jesus Christ.

Despite his style and intense spirituality, de Montfort himself is the most modern of saints—almost flamboyant in the zeal of his missionary experiments. One could easily imagine him as an eighteenth-century Bishop Sheen or Father Peyton, making full use of the spectacular and the unconventional, if only it would lead men to Christ. He was one of the greatest of the preachers and missioners of the eighteenth-century Church and one of the most dynamic opponents of the dangerous heresies of Jansenism and Calvinism. The antidote to this insidious poison—a corruption spreading from within Christianity itself—was not only Saint Margaret Mary’s revelations of devotion to the Sacred Heart but also de Montfort’s teaching on devotion to Mary.

When the spirituality of Louis Marie de Montfort is seen in its true perspective, his life can be appreciated for what it was—the life of *“the herald . . . of the reign of God through Mary.” *(From the address of His Eminence Frederico Cardinal Tedeschini, after unveiling the statue of Saint Louis Marie in St. Peter’s, Rome.)