Cardinal Fernández speaks on ‘love and truth in Marian devotion’
October 30, 2026
The prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith delivered a lecture, “Love and Truth in Marian Devotion,” at a recent conference at the Marianum.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández said on October 21 that we are “called to allow our Marian devotion to be enlightened and progressively transformed by the action of the Spirit. In this way, it can become ever more spontaneous and authentic, as it was in Elizabeth, without our having to seek continually new reasons or elaborate arguments for loving Mary.”
“It does us so much good to stop and gaze upon Mary in order to rediscover, little by little, peace of heart and the joy of our vocation,” he continued. “Her figure cannot be reduced to the cultural forms of any one era, whether medieval, baroque, or associated with the ‘devotio moderna.’ In her we rediscover the genuine fragrance and freshness of the Gospel, which the various historical manifestations of Marian devotion can express beautifully, but can sometimes also obscure.”
Cardinal Fernández concluded:
May your studies never distance you from prayer, nor your theological research cause you to forget the simplicity of the faithful who turn to Mary with a disarming trust, the kind of trust that pleases Mary so much. Above all, I wish that your study of Mary may continually lead you back to those two inseparable places: the Mary of the Gospels and the Mary loved by ordinary believers.
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