St. Bonaventure, Virgin and Child

Songs of Praise

Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) wrote a series of 150 short psalms to the Virgin Mary, following the themes and wording of the Biblical Psalms. These are still recited by lay people, and are really quite beautiful. Here is an example:

PSALM 1

Blessed is the man, O Virgin Mary, who loves thy name; thy grace will comfort his soul.
He will be refreshed as by fountains of water; thou wilt produce in him the fruit of justice.
Blessed art thou among women; by the faith of thy holy heart.
By the beauty of thy body thou surpassest all women; by the excellence of thy sanctity thou surpassest all angels and archangels
Thy mercy and thy grace are preached everywhere; God has blessed the works of thy hands.
Glory be to the Father, etc.

You can find the whole text here or here.

Lorenzo Monaco, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s