Page:O'Donnell - Hail Holy Queen 01 - Our Country's Queen.djvu/4

 As he lay dying in 1815, the venerable Bishop said: "Of all things that gave me most consolation is that I have always been attached to the practice of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, that I have established it among the people under my care, and placed my diocese under her protection." In the generation that followed Bishop Carroll's death the bond between Our Lady and the Church in the United States became steadily stronger. In 1846—just one hundred years ago—there met in Baltimore the Sixth Provincial Council which sought and received permission from Rome that American Catholics be allowed to select as patroness the Queen of the Immaculate Conception.

This series of five discourses will portray the Blessed Mother in the national scene today in the opening words of the "Salve Regina" as Hail, Holy Queen—our Country's Queen. She is the Mother of Mercy. She is our life and sweetness, and finally our hope.

For a moment, let us turn back the years to the time when the New World was indeed new. Let us turn the. motion picture camera of history on Mary in relation to America, particularly the United States. "Our Land and Our Lady," to use the words of Daniel Sargent, is our pageant of history.

We have already touched upon the scene aboard the Santa Maria, and upon the sublime confidence that Columbus and his men had in the intercession of Mary. Now let us rapidly follow in the footsteps of the explorers as they made their way into the wilderness of the New World, bringing with them that same faith, and leaving its seeds after them as they interwove the Immaculate Conception of Mary into our earliest history.

There was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, who led an expedition from the West Indies northward along the Atlantic coast until he came to a great estuary that he called the Bay of the Mother of God. We know it now as Chesapeake Bay. DeSoto came from Spain to Florida, and thence went to Georgia and Carolina and westward through Tennessee past the mile-wide Mississippi. Up the west coast of Mexico came Coronado, swerving east until he came to the Rio Grande on September 8, Our Lady's Birthday. He called it Our Lady's River. In a later day, Father Junipero Serra was to leave his indelible imprint upon California, spiritualizing it with its