LET us say one more word about the place of devotion to Mary in the Sodality. By design we have throughout our paper put the Marian element in last place. Our reason was this. We desired to trace the inner structure of the Sodality back to its source, that is, the fundamental truths of the Spiritual Exercises. We were anxious to define first the theological and then the psychological background against which devotion to Mary assumes great importance and a new significance. Through this approach we found it more easy to avoid the pitfalls into which very recent writers on the Sodality have sometimes fallen, namely the controversy concerning what place devotion to Mary should hold, which can so readily become a pseudo-problem.

EVALUATED in the light of its history, its internal structure and its aims, the Sodality of Our Lady is an organisation of great importance in the life of the Catholic Church. At the same time, the Sodality has undergone a strange distorted interpretation in the minds and feelings of many Christians of our day who have come to regard it merely as an association of pious prayer founded mostly for women. For this reason it will be profitable to try to describe the meaning of the Sodality from two points of view - the spiritual as well as the historical.

A Sermon Outline by Rev. Fr. Joseph Mary Gill, S.J. Director of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Patrick

THIS Word was made Flesh!
This Word is the 2nd Person of the Holy Trinity!

This Word now lies as a puny Thing
as a little Thing
as a very small Thing
It lies under the heart of a mortal mother

In this sketchy outline wherein we have attempted to derive from the Spiritual Exercises the spiritual significance of the Sodality we might further show, and with profit, how a reconsideration of the Sodality's origins can provide a constantly new revitalization of any Sodality. Wherever a Sodality has returned to its first beginnings (its first spirit), an amazing new life appears. Just as the Exercises moulded men in the Society of Jesus who have experienced through the discernment of spirits a titanic battle between Christ and Satan; men who have understood through their identification with the crucified Christ that victory in this battle belongs only to those who follow Jesus in a spirit of prayer and total self-denial; men who come from their retreat