German Chancellor Angela Merkel may be Time's Person of the Year for 2015, but she is not the most powerful woman in the world.
That title belongs to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, according to National Geographic magazine which made her the cover story of its December 2015 issue.
The magazine cover article would be accompanied by a National Geographic feature on Mary to air on Sunday, Dec. 13. It is just a few days after the Roman Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 8 and would feature the global Marian devotion, reports Lifenews.
Explaining the magazine's choice of Mary, author Maureen Orth points out that she is a universal symbol of maternal love and suffering and sacrifice. She continues, "Mary is often the touchstone of our longing for meaning, a more accessible link to the supernatural than formal church teachings."
Diane Markosian, the photographer, was raised a Christian but admits to struggling with the topic for long even though she was raised in a family who believed in Mary. "I couldn't feel a connection towards Mary," she shares.
That all changed when Markosian photographed a mother and her infant bathing in Saut d'Eau falls in Haiti. "She embodied Mary. She represented what Mary meant. And that was enough ... That was more than a picture," Markosian adds.
Orth went to Medjugorje with a group of Americans who are mostly hockey dads. One of them, Arthur Boyle, first came to the pilgrimage site in 2000, to seek healing for cancer. On his first night, he heard confession at a Catholic church and felt light. The next day, a female visionary prayed over him and asked Mary's intercession to cure Boyle. When he returned to Boston after a week, the CT scan showed that his tumor "had shrunk to almost nothing." Since then, he has been to Medjurgorje 13 more times.
Orth recounts that seeking Mary's intercession started the first miracle of Jesus at a wedding in Cana when wine ran out. Jesus turned water into wine. Since then, a lot of miracles as well as appearances of her has been recorded which explains why millions of people visit yearly Marian shrines such as in Fatima, Portugal to seek her intercession.
The author notes that even Muslims consider Mary "to be holy above all women," pointing out that her name "Maryam" is mentioned in the Koran more of than "Mary" in the Christian Bible.
Orth also spoke of three young girls from Rwanda to whom Mary had appeared. These apparitions, numbering about 2,000 have been codified by Michael O'Neill, a Stanford University mechanical engineering and product design graduate. Of that number, 28 were approved by local bishops and 16 recognized by Vatican, according to O'Neill's website, Miracle Hunter.
All of these devotion are borne out of the belief that Mary is lighting the way for a world steeped in sickness, war and injustice.