Sunday was the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, i.e., Mary’s Birthday. The Church marks that feast nine months after the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 8. (For confused Catholics, Dec. 8 marks the day Mary was conceived without sin in her mother Anne’s womb, not the day Jesus was conceived by Mary. That is the Annunciation, March 25.)

The Marian feast the Church celebrated before that was Aug. 22, the Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I explained the meaning of Mary’s Queenship, its relationship to Christ’s Kingship, and what both realities have to do with the rest of us here. That last feast got me thinking about how it’s connected to her birthday.

In the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, they celebrate the monarch’s birthday sometime in May or June. Elizabeth was born in April (and Charles in November) but because many of the events associated with the royal birthday occur outdoors, it’s been a tradition for around 200 years to mark the royal birthday during good spring weather. The British marked the “Queen’s Birthday” for seven decades.

The death of Britain’s Elizabeth II and the abdication of Denmark’s Margrethe II in the past two years generated a genuine outpouring of loss among the peoples of those countries, something those of us not living in monarchies might not understand. While both monarchs were figureheads, they were not puppets: behind the scenes, they provided a certain stability amidst the changes in governing politics and politicians, Elizabeth for 70 years, Margrethe for 52. There is something valuable to seeing a certain continuity to one’s country that transcends the challenges of the moment, a sense of “family” that makes one feel British or Danish, not just Tory or Labour, Right or Left. That “thicker” bond is missing in a country that changes heads of state every four or eight years. It perhaps is that “missing” thing that our political polarization makes us sense is absent.  

Obviously, one cannot translate human categories to heavenly ones, since heaven is not a political place. But perhaps it does help us recover the sense of something that has been on the wane in recent decades: a sense that heaven is “family.” That was especially true in the way Catholics approached the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly within Marian-centric cultures like the Italian or Polish or Latino. As much as God was … God, Mary was “Mama.” She was “approachable.” She “cared” for our humble needs. 

There is, of course, a biblical basis for that: Jesus was explicit about entrusting us to her care: “Behold your Mother!” “Behold your son!” (John 19:26-27). The Church has always understood that passage as applying not just to John the Evangelist but to all of Jesus’ disciples. It’s why the Church speaks of Mary as “Mother of the Church.”

But that maternal sense vis-à-vis the Blessed Mother also has other horizontal implications. An awareness of Mary as Our Mother has always helped Catholics appreciate a deeper, more visceral, less cerebral sense of their own fraternity and sorority with each other. If Mary is our Mother, we are then also brothers and sisters. 

If you doubt that had a bonding effect among Catholics — even an unconscious one — consider this. When he stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s on Oct. 16, 1978, Pope St. John Paul II was the first non-Italian Pope to face the crowd on St. Peter’s Square since 1523. How would he connect to these people, for whom he would be bishop, who had been accustomed to their own national for the past 455 years?

He did so first on a spiritual level even before a simply human one: “I was afraid to accept this nomination … but with trust in Our Lady – the Most Blessed Madonna” – [I did]. Even before asking for correction “if I make a mistake in your — our — Italian language” he had already connected to his immediate flock. And he concluded by speaking of his pontificate as entrusted to the hope and trust of Our Lady, “Mother of Christ and of the Church.”

Our political structures, our celebration of individualism, our Protestant influences of “Jesus Christ as my personal Savior,” our lonely culture that bowls alone all erode the sense that heaven is a family. It has a King — and a Queen — but it is a family. No one gets there without some connection to the saving mystery of Christ, the “firstborn of many brothers” (Romans 8:29) into whom we are engrafted and adopted by baptism. 

The Bible does not speak of Mary’s birth. What we are told of it comes from a non-canonical book, the Protoevangelium of James. But we don’t need the Bible to “prove” Mary was born, and our Tradition tells us the essential religious truth of her conception: free from sin, original and personal. Again, a great privilege that comes from the grace her Son would make possible, but also a great revelation to us, for we see a real human being (in addition to Jesus) who lived as God intended human beings to live, i.e., free from the stain of sin.

So perhaps we can draw something from the experience we’ve had of human queens and of our Church’s Mariological tradition to appreciate the family that is the Kingdom of God. It is a family with a God who loves us and gave himself for us. But it is also a family with a Mother who “pray[s] for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” the most critical moments of our existence — a fitting encouragement to renew our devotion to our Queen Mother ever more deeply.