(LifeSiteNews) — Yesterday LifeSiteNews reported that a new document from the Vatican has discouraged the use of “Mediatrix of All Graces” as a title for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The document suggests that the title lacks solid grounding in Revelation and carries “limits that do not favor a correct understanding of Mary’s unique place.”

On the contrary, the doctrine that all graces come to us through the mediation of the Blessed Virgin has been taught many times by the Successors of St Peter.

All graces come to us through Mary

In 1849, in an encyclical on the Immaculate Conception, Pope Pius IX taught that:

 God has committed to Mary the treasury of all good things, in order that everyone may know that through her are obtained every hope, every grace, and all salvation. For this is His will, that we obtain everything through Mary.[1]

And in 1854, in Ineffabilis Deus, the document by which he defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the same pope taught:

All our hope do we repose in the most Blessed Virgin — in the all-fair and immaculate one who has crushed the poisonous head of the most cruel serpent and brought salvation to the world.

It is Mary, “who, with her only-begotten Son, is the most powerful Mediatrix and Conciliatrix in the whole world.”

Mary represents all mankind before God

In his 1891 encyclical Octobri Mensis Pope Leo XIII explained that:

The Eternal Son of God, about to take upon Him our nature for the saving and ennobling of man, and about to consummate thus a mystical union between Himself and all mankind, did not accomplish His design without adding there the free consent of the elect Mother, who represented in some sort all humankind.[2]

He continued:

[A]ccording to the illustrious and just opinion of St. Thomas… the Annunciation was effected with the consent of the Virgin standing in the place of humanity.

Mary represented all mankind and:

With equal truth may it be also affirmed that, by the will of God, Mary is the intermediary through whom is distributed unto us this immense treasure of mercies gathered by God, for mercy and truth were created by Jesus Christ.

Thus:

[A]s no man goeth to the Father but by the Son, so no man goeth to Christ but by His Mother.

God reveals his goodness and mercy in giving us Mary as Mediator

Pope Leo XIII taught that this doctrine of Our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces reveals the “goodness and mercy” in the “design of God”. The Holy Father wrote:

What a correspondence with the frailty of man! We believe in the infinite goodness of the Most High, and we rejoice in it; we believe also in His justice and we fear it. We adore the beloved Saviour, lavish of His blood and of His life; we dread the inexorable Judge. Thus do those whose actions have disturbed their consciences need an intercessor mighty in favour with God, merciful enough not to reject the cause of the desperate, merciful enough to lift up again towards hope in the divine mercy the afflicted and the broken down.

He continued:

Mary is this glorious intermediary; she is the mighty Mother of the Almighty; but-what is still sweeter – she is gentle, extreme in tenderness, of a limitless loving-kindness. As such God gave her to us. Having chosen her for the Mother of His only begotten Son, He taught her all a mother’s feeling that breathes nothing but pardon and love. Such Christ desired she should be, for He consented to be subject to Mary and to obey her as a son a mother. Such He proclaimed her from the cross when he entrusted to her care and love the whole of the race of man in the person of His disciple John. Such, finally, she proves herself by her courage in gathering in the heritage of the enormous labours of her Son, and in accepting the charge of her maternal duties towards us all.

No salvation except through Mary

Three years later, in his encyclical Iucunda Semper Expectatione (1894), the pope reaffirmed the doctrine of Our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces:

The recourse we have to Mary in prayer follows upon the office she continuously fills by the side of the throne of God as Mediatrix of Divine grace; being by worthiness and by merit most acceptable to Him, and, therefore, surpassing in power all the angels and saints in Heaven.

“God,” the pope teaches, “in His most merciful Providence gave us this Mediatrix” and “decreed that all good should come to us by the hands of Mary.”

The same doctrine can be found in Adiutricem (1895), another of Leo XIII’s encyclicals on the Holy Rosary.

In this text the pope teaches that the power God has “put into her hands is all but unlimited” and that “among her many other titles we find her hailed as ‘our Lady, our Mediatrix’, ‘the Reparatrix of the whole world,’ ‘the Dispenser of all heavenly gifts.’”

And addressing himself to Our Lady, he repeats an ancient prayer: “None, O Mother of God, attains salvation except through thee; none receives a gift from the throne of mercy except through thee.”

The Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces

In 1921, Pope Benedict XV authorised a Mass and Office of Our Lady under the title Mediatrix of All Graces and permitted a Feast to be celebrated in her honor. In his encyclical Fausto Appetente Die this pope taught:

Mary’s authority with her Son to be such that whatever graces he confers on men she has their distribution and apportionment.

And in Inter Sodalicia (1918), he taught that:

[E]very kind of grace we receive from the treasury of the redemption is ministered as it were through the hands of the same Sorrowful Virgin.

His successor Pope Pius XI taught that “everything comes to us from Almighty God through the hands of Our Lady”.[3]

And in at least three different documents he referred to Mary as “the treasurer of all graces with God.”[4]

To conclude, we may consider the Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on the Canonization of Louis Marie de Montfort (1945) under Pope Pius XII. This confirmed that the the “pious and salutary doctrine” that “God wants us to have everything through Mary” is a doctrine “all theologians at the present time hold in common accord.”

St Louis Marie de Montfort is the saint who, perhaps above all others, is associated with the doctrine of Our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces. He wrote:

God the Holy Spirit entrusted his wondrous gifts to Mary, his faithful spouse, and chose her as the dispenser of all he possesses, so that she distributes all his gifts and graces to whom she wills, as much as she wills, how she wills and when she wills. No heavenly gift is given to men which does not pass through her virginal hands. Such indeed is the will of God, who has decreed that we should have all things through Mary, so that, making herself poor and lowly, and hiding herself in the depths of nothingness during her whole life, she might be enriched, exalted and honoured by almighty God. Such are the views of the Church and the early Fathers.[5]

Such indeed are the views of the Catholic Church, of her Saints, her Fathers, her Doctors, and her Popes.

RELATED: Vatican rejects Marian titles ‘Co-Redemptrix’ and ‘Mediatrix’ in new doctrinal note

[1] Pope Pius IX, Ubi Primum

[2] Pope Leo XIII, Octobri Mensis

[3] Pope Pius XI, Ingravescentibus Malis, 1937.

[4] Pope Pius XI, Galliam, Ecclesiae filiam, 1922; Exstat in civitate, 1924; Cognitum sane, 1926.

[5] St Louis Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, No. 25.