Queen of Heaven | |
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Queen of Heaven and Earth, Holy Queen | |
Venerated in | Catholic Church, Anglican Communion, some Lutheran churches, Eastern Orthodoxy |
Feast | 22 August (General Roman Calendar), 31 May (General Roman Calendar of 1960) |
Attributes | The Mary, mother of Jesus crowned by the Holy Trinity, crown of stars, flowers |
Patronage | Heaven, eternal salvation to humankind, redemption |
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Part of a series on the |
Mariology of the Catholic Church |
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Queen of Heaven (Latin: Regina Caeli) is a title given by Christians to Mary, mother of Jesus, mainly in the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy, and, to a lesser extent, in Anglicanism and Lutheranism.[1][2][3][4][5][6] The title has long been a tradition, included in prayers and devotional literature and seen in Western art in the subject of the Coronation of the Virgin from the High Middle Ages, long before the Church gave it a formal definition status.
The Catholic teaching on this subject is expressed in the papal encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1954. It states that Mary is called Queen of Heaven because her son, Jesus Christ, is the king of Israel and the heavenly king of the universe.[7] The Davidic tradition of Israel recognized the mother of the king as the queen mother of Israel.