If you are Catholic and you pray the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, there is a 99.99% chance that, like the rest of us, you are mystified and curious about some of her titles. For example, how is she a Mystical Rose, or a Tower of David, or a Tower of Ivory, or a House of Gold? The answers are remarkable and they are all in the book A Sky Full of Stars.


We are meant to imitate the virtues of Our Lady as we invoke her titles, but we miss this opportunity if we don’t know what they mean. Go deep into each title and know Mary and fall in love with her all over again.

 

The Book

Understand each of Our Lady's titles in the litany

If you've been praying the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary (also known as the Litany of Loreto) you must have wondered what some of the titles mean.

The book A Sky Full of Stars explains each title thoroughly by invoking Scripture, Tradition, typology, and devotional writings. It is written so that you will understand it even if you are new to the faith.

By shedding light on each title, you will get to know Our Lady just a little bit more... you will fall in love with her all over again.

This video provides a little clue on how the book got its title.

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Excerpts

When I was a child, our family said the rosary together and I thought the time spent praying it was already too long. So when my mother introduced the litany that is said after the mysteries, the more I dreaded the rosary because it took more time.

Of course, that is no longer my sentiment today. I would like to think that the way I pray the rosary has changed for the better over the years. But some of Our Lady’s titles in the litany continued to trouble me because I didn’t know what they meant. These are titles like “Tower of David”, “Gate of Heaven,” and “Morning Star” to name a few. No one told me what they meant, so it felt a little bit empty and odd saying them without understanding them. It was as if I were just parroting the words.

To remedy this, I looked up the different meanings of the titles over the years. They were mostly pious expressions, and while there is nothing wrong with that, they did not really explain the titles. The internet came to the rescue when it pointed me to a book, written in 1957 by Fr. Lawrence G. Lovasik, entitled Our Lady in Catholic Life. It is a prayer book where I found out that the different titles of our Lady were remembered on each Saturday. More importantly, Fr. Lovasik’s introduction to the titles captured the background and meaning of most of them. The book is no longer in print and can be very difficult to find so I was thrilled to find a second-hand copy through book dealers.

The search led me to Church documents, encyclicals, as well as commentaries on some of Our Lady’s titles by St. Alphonsus Liguori and Blessed John Henry Newman. One of the revelations of this search is that some titles of Our Lady explode with meaning when attached to their contexts in Old Testament episodes, culture, and temple worship. Early Christians and the Church Fathers made these typological connections early on. They saw that people, objects, and events in the Old Testament were types that foreshadowed a fulfillment in the New Testament, which are called anti-types. We can appreciate these in books like the Biblia Pauperum (The Poor Man’s Bible) and Speculum Humanae Salvationis (The Mirror of Salvation), which I heavily relied on to make sense of some titles in the Litany. These books are collections of woodblock prints that put Old Testament types side-by-side with their New Testament anti-types. The juxtaposed pictures were a way to instruct “poor men and women” who couldn’t read. Through prints like this, it is remarkable to see Mary foreshadowed; and it naturally excites me to share them with you.

I restrained from including doctrine for as much as I could, but it was just impossible to explain some of Our Lady’s titles without so doing. In the end, the finished work is a mixture of Marian devotion, Catholic doctrine, and Old Testament typology.

Highlights

Easy to understand

The style is very conversational, and even if some explanations go deep, they are explained thoroughly even for people with little background.

Cross-Referenced

Some explanations refer to other titles. In the digital format, clicking on the reference allows you to jump to the topic.

Points to Consider

After each title, the book offers a way of thinking of Mary so you have something to focus on when you pray each invocation in the litany.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Bishop Socrates Villegas

A Sky Full of Stars must be an obligatory reference material for religion teachers and seminarians. It helps the reader to see the Virgin Mary within the perspective of sound biblical theology and solid Catholic tradition... [and is] also easy to understand.

Bishop Socrates Villegas Archbishop Lingayen Dagupan
Bishop Socrates Villegas

It happens quite often that Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary suffers due to ignorance and grave lack of understanding [, and] many fall prey to fundamentalist sects and anti-Catholic tides. This book answers that need. It makes no attempt to be defensive but has chosen what we call “positive orthodoxy”, presenting the faith in its original clarity

Bishop Socrates Villegas Archbishop Lingayen Dagupan
ABS-CBN Online

Chapters read simple and forthright, with well-researched short stories that inspire and entertain as much as they inform.

Joko Magalong-De Veyra ABS-CBN Online
BusinessWorld

A Sky Full of Stars explains in detail the origin and meaning of the title of Mary.

Joseph Garcia BusinessWorld
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The Author

Joby finished his theology courses on doctrine, scripture, liturgy, and catechism from the satellite program of the University of Notre Dame, USA. He is a contributing writer at theCatholicTalks.com, and catholic365.com where some of his articles have been translated into different languages for different websites around the world.

He teaches multimedia arts at a prominent arts and design school where he engages students in conversations about religion, spirituality, pop-culture, and food.

Feel free to contact him if you want a talk in your organization.