Beware Yon Dragons

A regular running monologue of opinions and ideas from a "country priest".

This blog represents the personal opinions of Fr. Chori Jonathin Seraiah, and is not necessarily representative of the position of St. George Catholic Church, in Republic, Missouri, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Bishop Steven Lopes, or the Catholic Church as a whole.

Loving Christ Fully

May 23, 2026

Most married couples today will have temptations to lose love for one another. If their love is well grounded in the grace of Christ Jesus in the first place, then that love will endure. Rarely does anyone get tempted to love their spouse too much, but it does happen. I have only met one person whom I would say truly loved his wife too much. That might sound odd, but the first commandment says "thou shalt have no other gods before Me", and the Scriptures make it clear that we can turn anything into a "god" that takes the place of the One, True, God.

Let us make another application of this point. What if someone were to put so much devotion into reading theology that he no longer prayed, or went to Mass, or confession? Now, to be honest, I doubt anyone would ever do this, but just consider it for the sake of the argument. What would that mean? One simple word: idolatry. That is right, idolatry. We can apply the same to anything in life (money, fame, food, etc.) or even things in our spiritual disciplines (saying the rosary, fasting, etc.). If we love anything more than we love the Lord Jesus Christ, we are sinning.

Now, here is a challenging one. I have never actually seen anyone do this, but I have heard stories which made me wonder if it was happening. We know that idolizing even good and holy things is still idolatry. There is a level of devotion and love that we are to give to things other than God (our families, our church, etc.) but it is never supposed to reach the level of love and devotion that we give to God Himself. There is even a hierarchy of what that love is supposed to be like. We are to love God more than people, but we are also supposed to love our own family more than another family. We are supposed to love a spouse, more than another person's spouse. This should be obvious.

What about the Blessed Virgin? Is it possible that someone could show more devotion to her (and she is due a great deal of our devotion!), than to the Lord Jesus Himself? Yes, it is possible. True, she is central to the work of our salvation like no other human in all of creation. True, she cooperates with Jesus far beyond what anyone else is able to do. True, she is the Saint of Saints, and we hail her because of her special place in the accomplishment of our redemption. Yet, we have to ask, can we get clouded in our devotion to her and blur the lines between what devotion to our Lord is supposed to be and what devotion to her is supposed to be? Sadly, it is possible.

If we were to presume that we are always loving her rightly, and could never cross the line of proper devotion, that is the sin of presumption. If our goal in all of life is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and body (as the greatest commandment says), then we must aim at making sure that does not slip by giving some of what is due to God to someone else (even a little bit). The Blessed Virgin Mary is clearly involved in our salvation. But if we are more concerned with her involvement (for whatever reason) than with what Christ's involvement is, then we are imbalanced and have taken away from Christ what is His due. I am not inventing this idea; the Catechism lays it out clearly.

We each need to look deeply into our hearts on this issue. The best that can happen is we find no problems and our devotion to Jesus and Mary grows rightly. Yet, we might also find that our devotion is out of balance and we need to get ourselves back on the right track. Jesus wants you to love Him, and other things, with the right degree of commitment. His mother Mary wants the same thing. Let us each make sure we have not gotten off the mark.

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