Devotion to Our Lord in the Womb: The Divine Nine Months

Devotion to Our Lord in the Womb embraces a distinct and separate stage in the history of the Incarnation, writes English author and Jesuit priest Henry James Coleridge. Our Lord's life in the womb of His Blessed Mother, he adds, is a part of His infinite condescension which calls for a corresponding devotion. Beginning with the Annunciation itself and ending on the eve of the Nativity, it covers the whole unborn life of Our Lord. This portion of His human existence is the period of His greatest humiliation and self-abasement. It is only natural that those who take up this special devotion should find themselves consoled and assisted in a wonderful degree by the practices and contemplations associated with it.

In this abridgment of the 1885 edition, Coleridge identifies the Incarnation as the greatest work of God. Indeed, he writes, it may be considered as the crown and completion of the creation of the universe. Christ was sent to earth for the redemption of mankind, and for their instruction in the manner of serving God perfectly. The eye of faith can see from the early life of Christ many holy and tender lessons of humility, obedience, silence, recollection, dependence, and other virtues.

The devotion to the infancy of Christ throws light on the position of the Blessed Mother in the Kingdom of her divine Son, His dependence on her and union with her, the immensity of her graces, and the supreme perfection of her virtues. Among other things, the author also discusses the preparation of St. Joseph for his high and special office in the accomplishment of the Incarnation and all that followed from it.

Excerpts from The Nine Months:

"...Mary cannot have either the fulness [of grace] which is infinite and which sheds itself on all creatures without exhausting itself, nor can she have the imparted grace of the fulness which was in our Lord as Man, in Him alone without measure. In the same way she could not have been so full of grace as not to be able to receive more, or to increase in grace, nor, with regard to the fulness of truth of which St. John speaks, could she in her mortal life, have had that in such a manner as to know all things, nor did she behold God as He is, in the way in which the saints in glory behold Him. Her plenitude of grace was the plenitude of a pure creature, and therefore immeasurably distant from that which is in God and in our Lord. When the Angel addresses her as full of grace, he must be understood as implying that she was as full of grace, as she could be full. And the Saints and Fathers tell us that she was thus so full of grace, as that she could have had no greater fulness, unless she had been herself united to the Godhead, as was the Humanity of her Son. The reason for this is the simple principle, that she had been raised, or was to be raised, to a dignity than which no higher, under God, can possibly be conceived, the dignity of the Mother of God."

"The object of the Incarnation was the Redemption of the world. If Mary the Mother of God was raised so high in the favor of God in order that she might be fit, to be the conscious and willing instrument of this great work of the Incarnation, it stands to reason that her influence and power with God, which of necessity correspond to her graciousness in His sight, must be exercised in favor of those for whom He became her Son, and that she must have the office of being the patroness and advocate of all those for whom He was to die. As our Lord made Himself our Brother by taking flesh in her most pure womb, our relation to her as His brethren must be that of children, and thus the holiest and tenderest of ties that can exist between creatures, that of Motherhood and Sonship, binds us to her and her to us by a bond that nothing can sever. When she ceases to be the Mother of Jesus Christ she will cease to be our Mother through Him."

"The first quality which the Angel attributes to our Lord is greatness. He was to be great on account