Earlier today, November 4, 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released Mater populi fidelis with Pope Leo XIV’s approval. The document is a response to years of questions related to Marian titles and devotions that the dicastery has received. It seeks to illuminate the ways that we refer to Mary and encourage proper devotion to her that is based on a sound understanding of her role in Christ’s salvific plan. Importantly, it is meant to foster devotion and not restrict it, since right devotion towards Mary illuminates the message of the Gospel and turns us towards Christ. However, it recognizes that attributing acts and powers to Mary that are rightly Christ’s alone is not only harmful to us, but displeasing to her and, thus, not real devotion at all.
Mater populi fidelis offers three criteria – derived from Lumen Gentium – to assist in understanding Mary’s role:
- Our relationship with Christ always takes supremacy over our relationship with Mary. In fact, “any gaze directed at her that distracts us from Christ or that places her on the same level as the Son of God would fall outside the dynamic proper to an authentic Marian faith.”
- Mary’s role in God’s plan was born out of His will, not His need. He could have accomplished our redemption and salvation without her. Her work is a gift that He allows her to participate in through His goodness, not His deficiency.
- Mary’s mediation does not add or subtract anything from Christ’s salvation. She neither supplants, nor supplements Him. Instead, Christ is fully sufficient.
In addition to presenting these criteria, the document explores Mary’s cooperation with Jesus’s salvation work. First, it considers both her participation in the objective redemption that flows from Jesus’s life and resurrection. This participation was foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15, when Mary is referred to as the woman who will share victory over the serpent and when Jesus addressed her as “woman” while He suffered on the cross, He was referencing this prophecy.
Yet, the victory of Calvary was through Christ alone – Mary’s participation in it was the result of the grace that God had given her so that she could say “yes” to Him at the time of the Annunciation and again as she witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion. In fact, the unique and critical roles that she played throughout Christ’s life and during the early years of the Church were the result of His will for her and her participation was through her acceptance of this will. Even prior to this acceptance, however, God redeemed her so that she could be ready to receive Christ – it is by His grace that she is prepared to participate in His redemptive work through the Immaculate Conception. Ultimately, Mary is blessed through her fiat and through her blessing, we also are blessed. This is why John the Baptist leapt for joy in his mother’s womb: Mary’s bore her Blessing which brings joy. Mary is, in a real sense, the “prototype” of God’s redemptive work in His people: prepared and made willing to serve, blessing through the blessings she herself has received.
Additionally, Mary’s role as mother is emphasized throughout the document. In Mary, we find the mother of our Lord, but also the mother of all believers. As Jesus was dying, he committed His mother into the charge of His disciple and entrusted the disciple into the care of His mother. In doing so, He gave her to all of us as our mother and her motherhood continues through the current influence she has upon our lives. Her free cooperation with Christ continues “throughout the life of the Church.”
Having highlighted Mary’s role in salvation history, Mater populi fidelis examines a few potentially confusing titles for Mary. It rejects the first, Co-redemptrix, because redemption comes from Christ alone and this poorly defined title can too easily obscure this truth. Importantly, the document cites then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as saying, “the formula ‘co-redemptrix’ departs to too great an extent from the language of the Scripture and of the Fathers and therefore gives rise to misunderstandings…everything comes from Him [Christ].”
The second title, Mediatrix, is also confusing because it suggests that Mary somehow mediates redemption. For this reason, the second Vatican Council favored terms that emphasize Mary’s maternal cooperation and intercession such as ‘maternal intercession,’ ‘maternal help,’ and ‘manifold intercession.’ This preference does not mean that Mary does not cooperate with and play a role in bringing about redemption. In fact, her participation does mediate redemption in a way because Christ’s salvific plan is inclusive and he uses all who cooperate with it to ‘mediate’ one another’s redemptive journeys through His own power. Lumen Gentium explains it thus: “the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing in one source.” Of course, Christ invites us to participate in His work not because he needs us, but because He wills it for us. Christ is completely sufficient in Himself. Additionally, the way that Mary (or any of us) participates in Christ’s redemptive plan for creation is vastly different and subordinate to Christ. Consequently, titles that refer to Mary’s mediating role should make this clear.
The third title, Mother of Believers, is more appropriate and accurately understood. As Pope Francis said, “She is a Mother. And this is the title she received from Jesus, right there, at the moment of the Cross…She received the gift of being his Mother and the duty to accompany us as Mother, to be our Mother.” As Jesus’s mother, her relationship with Him is unique and He responds to her requests in a unique way. As our mother, her intercessions for us are imbued with the tenderness and the intensity of a mother. Additionally, her role as Christ’s mother means that her goal is always to direct us to her Son. Pope St. John Paul II wrote that Mary should be honored, “in such a way that ‘when the mother is honored, the Son…is duly known, loved and glorified.’” This role, in addition to her inspirations and intercessions for us, are the ways that she continues to participate in Christ’s redemptive work.
The title, Mother of Grace, is potentially more problematic because, while Mary quite literally bore Grace into the world by birthing Christ, and while His grace continues to flow through her, she possesses no grace of her own apart from Christ. Consequently, this title becomes an issue when Mary is portrayed as having her own “repository of grace.” This is particularly apparent in the title, “Mediatrix of All Graces.” While Mary can plead for God’s grace to flow into our lives, grace does not come through her. St. Thomas Aquinas said that “no creature can confer grace.” This is because grace is, by definition, the freely given life of Christ in our souls. It is relationship, covenant, friendship with God Himself. St. Bonaventure said, “Created grace…is the direct effect of the friendship that God bestows, which touches the human heart directly.” Grace is an intimate and direct encounter with God, one which cannot be intermediated. For this reason, Lumen Gentium taught, “the blessed Virgin’s salutary influence…does not hinder in any way the immediate union of the faithful with Christ, but, rather, fosters it.” The grace of the Holy Spirit flows directly from Him to us and calling Mary the “Mother of Grace” can obscure or condition this intimate immediacy. However, Mary remains an “advocate of grace” who intercedes for us so that Grace may flow freely into our lives. For this reason, the title, “Mother in the order of graces” is preferable.
Additionally, the grace that so filled Mary overflows through her cooperation with God and helps to prepare us to receive Christ’s grace. Like her, our response to God’s grace should be to share that grace with others through our cooperation with Him and our love for them. However, Mary’s overflowing grace is “distinguished from the cooperation of any other human being due to the maternal character that Christ himself conferred upon her while on the cross.”
Central to the purposes Mater populi fidelis is the idea that “the faithful People of God do not distance themselves from Christ or the Gospel when they draw near to Mary; rather, they can see ‘in this maternal image all the mysteries of the Gospel.’ In her motherly face, they see a reflection of the Lord who seeks us out, who comes to meet us with open arms, who pauses before us, who bends down and raises us up to his cheek, who looks upon us with love and who does not condemn us.” In her motherhood, we find someone who shares our human experience and, through her welcome, draws us to Christ. It is this bond that many believers have with Mary that has led to the popularity of Marian piety, and this is good. In fact, it is what Jesus, Himself, encouraged from the cross. Through Mary, we see a symbol of Christ’s “affection and closeness” and are led to Him.
Authors Note: Reading Mater populi fidelis was a gift for me personally. I was born and raised protestant and for a brief period of time, Mary was all that stood between me and accepting the fullness of the Catholic faith. As a child, I had many Catholic friends and, over time, their age-limited understanding of Catholicism instilled in me a deep suspicion of reverence for Mary. In fact my discovery that there were Catholics in the world involved a pair of friends swinging with me on my hammock and trying to convince me that it was better to pray to Mary than God, in part because she was pretty and thus, in their first-grade minds, superior. As a child with an active prayer life, this was almost as appalling to me then as it is today.
Mater populi fidelis is meant to “deepen the proper foundations of Marian devotion by specifying Mary’s place in her relationship with believers in light of the Mystery of Christ as the sole Mediator and Redeemer.” As a former protestant, the clarifications it provides alleviates anxieties that I have long had about not being sufficiently devoted to Mary on the one hand and about allowing Mary to infringe on the role that is Christ’s alone on the other. Reading them feels like I have been lifted off of a tight-rope and placed into a field in which I can run freely because of a well-placed fence that runs along its perimeter. For me, at least, the document has met its purpose.
Image: “The Virgin Mary” (CC BY 2.0) by Tobyotter
Ariane Sroubek is a writer, school psychologist and mother to two children here on earth. Prior to converting to Catholicism, she completed undergraduate studies in Bible and Theology at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. She then went on to obtain her doctorate in School and Child Clinical Psychology. Ariane’s writing is inspired by her faith, daily life experiences and education. She is currently writing a women's fiction novel and a middle-grade mystery series. Her non-fiction book, Raising Sunshine: A Guide to Parenting Through the Aftermath of Infant Death is available on Amazon. More of her work can be found at https://mysustaininggrace.com.
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