The Catholic Church teaches that the Divine Revelation which she received from on high has been handed down in two main channels -- Holy Scripture and Apostolic Tradition, whether written or oral. (Conc. Vatic. Sess., III., cap. ii. (Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 14).) Anxiously and nervously to search in every case for categorical affirmation of Catholic Doctrine, or of practices based upon that Doctrine, in the pages of Scripture or in the scanty writings of the early Fathers, would be to betray a want of confidence in the authority of the living Tradition of the Church. None the less it is true that almost every dogma of Revelation may be found, at least in principle and germ, in the pages of the inspired Scriptures. Such is most certainly the case with regard to all that our Faith teaches us concerning the Holy Mother of God. On the first page of Holy Scripture her advent is proclaimed, as that of the Woman of promise who should wage incessant warfare against the Evil one, winning the victory where our first mother had been overcome. Of God's Mother the prophets have prophesied; in her David exulted as the Queen in her beauty, and the Ark which is the dwelling-place of the Lord; the glories of her virginity, of her Maternity, of her faith, were proclaimed by the Angel messenger and by the Holy Ghost; the unborn Baptist exulted at the sound of her voice; at her prayer the first miracle was worked by her Son; she stood beneath His Cross, her soul transfixed with the sword of sorrow, intimately united with His Passion; upon His Mother our Lord bestowed His first smile at Bethlehem ; His last care upon the earth was for His Mother on Calvary ; she was seen in vision by the Apostle, to whose filial care she had been committed by her dying Son, as a Wonder in Heaven itself, symbolising the struggles and the triumph of the Church over the powers of Hell. All this, and much more than this, is to be found in the Holy Scriptures of our religion. And even during the Public Ministry of her Son, when Mary was, in the Counsels of God, withdrawn for the moment from public view, one was found, a poor woman, otherwise obscure, unknown, who— speaking perhaps more wisely than she knew— became, together with Gabriel and with Elisabeth, the type of the Church of God in proclaiming the ineffable Blessedness of His glorious Mother. The words of that brave woman of the people now made precise by the affirmations, of the Faith, are on the lips of every priest and religious who day by day after the recitation of the Divine Office is taught by the Church humbly to repeat the familiar sentences :
Blessed be the Womb of Mary the Virgin that bore the Eternal
Father's Son,
And blessed be the paps that gave suck to Christ the Lord.