One can get an idea of the grandeur or this great feast day of the Church when looking at such a great work of art as this sculpture by the the baroque architect/sculptor Equid Quirin Asam. This work is in the 17th centruy church of the Benedictine Abbey of Braunau in Rohr, Germany. This, of course, could still be accomplished in our Sacred spaces if man would allow it. It's not about cost - look at the relatively new Our Lady of the Angels cathedral in Los Angeles which cost how many millions of dollars? My opinion is that this structure is dull and meaningless on all accounts-inside and out. It is the LACK of a spiritual aesthetic for the sacred that renders it so. It's all about design.
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Hers is a humanity that comes into being--seeing. Unlike us at birth, She, from the moment of Her Conception was not altricial but precocial—not blind, naked, and helpless but aware, in love, clothed in virtue, and exercising it. For at the moment of Her Conception Her humanity Is Assumed from non-being into Being, into being Aware, into being in Love, and Compassionate with His Passion for the salvation of all of humanity, including Her own. In that first instant of Her human existence, in Most Holy Communion with the Divine, She is immediately humbled in the Light of this Vision and Is Crowned by It without demur or delay, elevated in dignity, nobility, and indeed royalty as Queen of Heaven and of Earth, of angels and of men. As poor in spirit from the moment of Her Conception, radiating from Her humanity the Divine attribute of simplicity as poverty, The Blessed One, The Immaculate, is in that same instant filled with His Infinite Riches, and Hers is the Kingdom of Heaven and She its Queen. As meek, malleable, and ductile from the moment of Her Conception, and humbled to humus in Her humanity, The Blessed One, The Immaculate, immediately inherits that earth of which She is partly made, and of which She is thereupon made Queen, and, in that same instant, immediately offers it to Him for the purposes of His Incarnation. In support of this assertion relative to Her immediate Coronation, Her Queenship, St. John Eudes writes:
But blessed the heaven and the earth which have for their Queen the admirable Child Mary. For She possesses more light and wisdom, strength and power, than all the kings and queens who ever were or ever will be. And this little Mary is a great Princess and a most powerful Queen; Queen of men and of Angels, Empress of the universe. She was Princess and Queen from the womb of Her mother . . . Is it not suitable to the glory of the eternal King of Kings, that She who was to be His Mother would bear a royal crown even from Her birth? [Moreover] The Most Holy Trinity elected Her from the moment of Her conception, in fact from all eternity, as Queen of heaven and earth: Ab aeterno ordinata sum, or, as the Hebrew has it, A saeculo inaugurata sum princeps, or, according to another version, A saeculo coronata sum: “I possess [She declares] the quality of Princess and Queen, crowned from all eternity--And I was enthroned from of old.” Prov. 8:23 (From: St. John Eudes, The Wondrous Childhood of the Most Holy Mother of God, pp. 237 ff.)
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