Two Mothers in May: Mother’s Day in the Light of Fatima
Mother’s Day is not, strictly speaking, a feast of the Catholic Church. Yet it falls each year within the month most deeply consecrated to Our Lady, and this year, by a happy providence, only three days before the anniversary of her first appearance at Fatima.
This is no small accident of the calendar. It is an invitation to lift Mother’s Day beyond mere sentiment — beyond cards and flowers and the obligatory phone call — and to set it within the deeper truth of motherhood as the Church has always understood it. For in the Catholic faith, we have not one mother, but two.
The Mother Who Bore Us
The honouring of mothers is not a modern phenomenon. It is a duty written into the Fourth Commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12). Saint Paul reminds the Ephesians that this is “the first commandment with a promise” (Ephesians 6:2) — the promise of long life and blessing for those who keep it.
A mother is, in the natural order, the closest image of God’s tenderness that most of us will ever know. She is the first to feel us, the first to speak to us, the first to feed and shelter and pray over us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the family is the ecclesia domestica, the domestic church (CCC 2204), and at the heart of that domestic church stands a mother.
Catholic mothers carry an immense vocation. They are very often the ones who first taught their children to pray, who first traced the Sign of the Cross on their foreheads, who first carried the rhythms of the liturgical year into the home. To honour them is to honour the order God Himself established. To neglect them is to wound something written into the foundation of human life.
The Mother We Were Given
Yet Catholics also profess a mystery that goes beyond natural motherhood.
When Christ hung dying upon the Cross, He looked down at His own mother and at the disciple whom He loved, and He said: “Behold thy mother” (John 19:27). In that moment, the Church has always taught, Our Lady was given as Mother to all the faithful. Not symbolically. Truly.
She is the Mother of God by virtue of her divine maternity, and the Mother of the Church by virtue of Christ’s own bequest from the Cross. Pope Saint Pius X, in his encyclical Ad Diem Illum, taught that the Blessed Virgin is the Mother of all who are members of the Mystical Body of her Son. The Second Vatican Council confirmed the same: that Mary is “a Mother to us in the order of grace” (Lumen Gentium, 61).
The Brazilian Catholic thinker Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira described this as the most precious grace of Marian devotion: the moment when Our Lady establishes a truly maternal relationship with each soul who turns to her — a bond formed by ties beyond words, in which she rescues her children from predicaments they cannot escape and forgives faults they know they do not deserve to be forgiven.
Fatima: A Mother Who Came to Find Her Children
It is fitting, then, that the anniversary of Our Lady’s apparitions at Fatima falls so closely upon Mother’s Day this year.
On the 13th of May 1917, Our Lady appeared to three small Portuguese children — Lúcia and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta — in the field of Cova da Iria above the village of Fatima. Over six successive months, she came with a message of prayer, penance, and reparation for sin. She asked for the daily Rosary. She revealed her Immaculate Heart. She promised that, in the end, Her Heart would triumph.
What is often missed is that she came not as a sovereign but as a mother. She came as a mother comes when she hears one of her children weeping in a distant room of the house — not to scold, but to gather. Her message at Fatima is not separate from her maternal love for the Church; it is her maternal love for the Church, made visible to three children and, through them, to the world.
That she chose to come in May, the month most associated with mothers, is no accident. May has been consecrated to Our Lady in Catholic devotion for centuries. To find Mother’s Day and the Fatima anniversary set side by side within it is to find the Church’s deepest theology and the world’s natural piety brought into a single harmony.
How Catholics Might Mark Mother’s Day
For Catholics, Mother’s Day is a day to honour both motherhoods at once.
Where mothers are still living, the faithful are encouraged to visit them, to bring flowers, and above all to bring presence — to speak, to listen, and to thank them for the unseen labours of a lifetime. Where mothers have gone before us, the faithful may have a Mass offered for the repose of their souls, light a candle, and pray for them by name.
But the day need not end there. The Catholic tradition offers many ways to draw Our Lady into the celebration.
A decade of the Holy Rosary, prayed for one’s own mother’s intentions, is among the simplest and most powerful. The May Crowning, traditional in many parishes and Catholic homes, places a wreath of flowers upon a statue of Our Lady — a small but deeply Catholic gesture by which a family honours both the natural mother of the household and the heavenly Mother of all. Some families also pray the Litany of Loreto together on this day, since each title contained within it — Mother most pure, Mother most amiable, Health of the sick, Comforter of the afflicted — speaks to a quality every Catholic mother strives, however imperfectly, to embody.
In offering Sunday in this way, Catholics do not diminish the natural celebration of Mother’s Day. They give it its full weight.
Mother’s Day and the Message of Fatima
Our Lady of Fatima asked for prayer, sacrifice, and reparation. These are not abstract demands. They are, in their truest sense, a mother’s requests of her children — for their own sake, for the sake of their souls, and for the sake of a world in great need of conversion.
To honour one’s mother on the 10th of May, and then to honour Our Lady of Fatima on the 13th, is to live out the Fourth Commandment in both its natural and its supernatural dimensions. It is to recognise that motherhood, in all its forms, is one of the great gifts by which God draws souls to Himself.
Two mothers. One love. One providential week in May to honour them both.
A Prayer for Mother’s Day
Memorare
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy, hear and answer me. Amen.
Last updated: 8 May 2026 08:52