The Latin Church has a tradition of honoring the Virgin Mary on Saturdays, chiefly by offering special votive Masses for Our Lady on this day of the week. The roots of this practice are said to lie in the belief that Mary w
as the first person to whom Christ appeared after his resurrection; some readers will know that St. Ignatius invites the exercitant to meditate upon this appearance in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises. The scriptures are silent on this event – as they are on much else that has a cherished (and even essential) place in Christian tradition – but it seems right that the first person to receive the news of the Resurrection would be Christ’s own mother.
The tradition of dedicating Saturdays to Mary should also remind us of the experience of Holy Saturday, the time between Christ’s passion and death on the cross on Friday and his Resurrection on Sunday. If every Sunday is in some sense a Feast of the Resurrection and if every Friday recalls the Passion (through such customs as abstaining from meat on this day), then it makes sense to see the experience of Holy Saturday as somehow present in every Saturday. This isn’t to say that we should spend every Saturday thinking about Christ in the tomb – just as we don’t spend every Friday meditating constantly on the Passion – but it is to say that the tradition of honoring Mary on Saturdays may have something significant to offer us.
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