The Marian Month of May
The Catholic practice of assigning a special devotion to each month goes back to the early 16th century. The best known of those devotions is probably the dedication of May as the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the early years of the 19th century, it quickly spread throughout the Western Church, and, by the time of Pope Pius IX’s declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, it had become universal. May Crownings and other special…