The Church neglects one of the duties enjoined upon her when she does not praise Mary. She deviates from the word of the Bible when her Marian devotion falls silent. When this happens, in fact, the Church no longer even glorifies God as she ought. For though we do know God by means of his creation-”Ever since the creation of the world [God's] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20)we also know him, and know him more intimately, through the history he has shared with man. Just as the history of a man’s life and the relationships he has formed reveal what kind of person he is, God shows himself in a history, in men through whom his own character can be seen. This is so true that he can be “named” though them and identified in them: the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Through his relation with men, through the faces of men, God has made himself accessible and has shown his face. We cannot try to bypass these human faces in order to get to God alone, in his “pure form”, as it were. This would lead us to a God of our own invention in place of the real God; it would be an arrogant purism that regards its own ideas as more important than God’s deeds.
The Magnificat shows us that Mary is one of the human beings who is an altogether special way belong to the name of God, so much so, in fact, that we cannot praise him rightly if we leave her out of account. In doing so we forget something about him that must not be forgotten.
In order to praise Mary correctly and this to glorify God correctly, we must listen to all that Scripture and tradition say concerning the Mother of the Lord and ponder it in our hearts. Thanks to the praise of “all generations” since the beginning, the abundant wealth of Mariology has become almost too vast to survey.
“From henceforth all generations will call me blessed”- these words of the Mother of Jesus handed on for us by Luke (1:48) are at once a prophecy and a charge laid upon the Church of all times. This phrase from the Magnificat, the spirit-filled prayer of praise that Mary addresses to the living God, is this one of the principal foundations of Christian devotion to her. The Church invented nothing new of her own when she began to extol Mary; she did not plummet from the worship of the one God to the praise of man. The Church does what she must; she carries out the task assigned her from the beginning. At this time Luke was writing this text, the second generation of Christianity had already arrived, and the “family” of the Jews had been joined by that of the Gentiles, who has been incorporated into the Church of Jesus Christ. The expression “all generations, all families” was beginning to be filled with historical reality. The Evangelist would certainly not have transmitted Mary’s prophecy if it had seemed to him an indifferent or obsolete item. He wished in the Gospel to record “with care” what “the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Lk 1:2-3) had handed on from the beginning in order to give the faith of Christianity, which was then striding onto the stage of world history, a reliable guide for its future course.
Words of Our Holy Father, at the time Joseph Ratzinger, in “Mary:The Church at the Source.”