Christ, Victor

TRANSCRIPT

A favorite reference for Our Blessed Lord among Catholics and the 40,000 Protestant denominations is "Christ, Victor," but it is especially prevalent within Catholicism. In these perilous, uncertain and challenging times, it yields a great comfort in terms of the end.

However, let's look at this for a moment: Christ is God. As such, He has no rival because He's all-powerful, infinite, etc. That's kind of the philosophical definition of God. Satan is not God's rival. God has no rival.

Satan's rival is St. Michael. It is they who did battle following Lucifer's rebellion and, of course, the dragon lost. So since God has no rival, how precisely is He "victor"? He's not conquering anyone in the common understanding of being a victor, again because no one can challenge God.

You can defy Him. You can disobey Him. You can reject Him. But you can't challenge Him. It's not possible. He is infinite. Creatures are not. Game over before it even begins. So how is Christ "victor"?

Well — easy answer — He is victorious in His creatures over Satan. It is through and in His creatures that a victory is secured. The first instance of that was St. Michael. True, the ingredients (so to speak) of the victory all originate in God, but it is realized, comes to fruition, in His creatures.

So in the immaterial realm, it is St. Michael who defeats the dragon, the ancient serpent. In the material world, the victory comes through the highest of all creatures, the Blessed Virgin Mary. And since she is the Mother of God, her victory extends into and is completed in the immaterial world.

The final victory is achieved through her. Saint Michael's victory over Satan is different from Our Lady's. Our Lady's crushing of his head is the final end of him. Now, for many Protestants, all this Mary stuff is unsettling because they think it somehow detracts from Christ. That's revealing of a very poor understanding of God. God is superior to all. And the victory He achieves is not for Himself, but for His creatures. And He chooses to humiliate Satan in his pride by achieving that victory through His creatures.

The highest of all creatures is the Blessed Virgin Mary. And Catholics have a thorough and robust theology that engages with this eternal truth because God had His plan of salvation in mind from all eternity. This is the foundational reason why the holy Rosary is so central to the Catholic private devotional life: It looks at Christ's victory through the Blessed Virgin.

The various mysteries of the Rosary move through the very first moment of Mary's role in salvation history, when God the Father sent the angel Gabriel to her to announce the eternal plan, straight through to the final glory of salvation, the crowning of her as the Queen of Heaven.

It would be difficult to find a more Scripture-centered devotion than the Rosary. Every single meditation is taken from holy writ. But in Catholic daily life, the Rosary is sometimes a difficult devotion because of the level of concentration and discipline it takes. On a personal note, a couple of years ago, I even wrote a book, The Weapon, to help people concentrate on the mysteries and to think of the devotion in terms of spiritual warfare — which it is.

That book is available by simply going to our store and purchasing it. Just click on the provided link. Immersing one's mind in solid reflection of the story of salvation history for 15–20 minutes is a challenging task, at least sometimes. Minds wander, thoughts crowd in, and all of that has to be "conquered." It requires enormous exercise of willpower and exertion of mental power.

It is, in a way, a small participation in the ultimate victory. Just loving is not enough. That love must be made tangible in concrete ways. Sometimes the Rosary can be monotonous, tiring, even feeling like a chore for some. Among Catholics who get the spiritual significance, but still deal with all the frustrations, it's referred to as the Catholic cure for insomnia.

Meditating on the things of the spiritual world with our feet still stuck in the mud of the material requires a lot effort to stay focused straight through. And most Catholics would tell you that it is not really achieved that frequently. We say all this to simply say, "Who cares?" Pray the Rosary. We can't give a tutorial on how to say the Rosary here in this Vortex, other than to say that all its associated prayers — the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be — are all drawn right from the pages of Scripture.

They are the utterances of the Holy Spirit, His breath blown into the minds of the sacred authors. Just as His appearance at Pentecost was preceded by a noise like that of a loud, roaring wind, so too was His presence in the pages of the Bible.

The Holy Trinity became present, for the first time in history, in Nazareth, to draw Mary into the plan of salvation and center it all in her. She is the woman that the Lord God promised in Eden would crush the serpent's head — because that is how He wanted it to be. It is to Mary, in Nazareth, that the fullness of salvation history is first spoken, which is fitting since it was to begin with her and end with her, according to the divine will.

All of this is the stuff of the Rosary. Christ, Victor is victorious through Mary, and that victory is dispersed to us through her. No one challenges God — no one. But His victory is accomplished through those of His choosing.

Meditating on the most sublime mysteries, beginning with the beginning and ending at the end, is a truly wonderful participation in those mysteries. Pray your Rosary. A programing note related to all this: Many of you will recall that during the early days of the Wuhan virus, during all the lockdowns, we produced a somewhat spontaneous show we called Marian Moments.

We wanted to keep people's minds trained on the things of Heaven, even in the midst of much concern and worry here on earth. People loved it. We aired live every day around lunch, and spoke in-depth each weekday about various aspects and beauties of the Church's love of our queen and mother.

We are happy to let you know that we are planning a return of Marian Moments shortly after Easter, this time with increased production value, but still with the same beautiful reflections that come to us from the saints and doctors of the Church. We'll keep you posted on all that as soon as we have new information.