As Mother of God, our Lady is without equal,...

... surpassing by far all other created persons, whether angels or men.  After the human nature of the Son, no created entity is closer to the Trinity. According to St Thomas, Gabriel's words at the Annunciation, 'The Lord is with thee', express his recognition that the Jewish maiden is closer than he or any other angel is to the Three-Personed God:

She surpasses the angels in her familiarity with God. The angel indicated this when he said, 'The Lord is with thee', as if to say, 'I therefore show thee reverence, because thou art more familiar with God than I am, for the Lord is with thee. The Lord, the Father, is with thee, because thou and He have the same Son, something no angel or any other creature has. "And therefore the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Lk 1: 35). The Lord, the Son, is with thee, in thy womb. "Rejoice and praise 0 thou habitation of Zion, for great is He that is in the midst of thee, the Holy One of Israel" (Is 12:6).' The Lord is therefore with the Blessed Virgin in a different way than He is with the angel, for He is with her as Son, but with the angel as Lord. 'The Lord, the Holy Spirit, is with thee, as in a temple.' Hence she is called 'the temple of the Lord', 'the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit', because she conceived by the Holy Spirit. 'The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee' (Lk 1:35). In this way, therefore. the Blessed Virgin is more familiar with God than the angel is, for the Lord Father, the Lord Son, the Lord Holy Spirit are with her, in other words, the whole Trinity. That is why we sing of her: 'Noble resting-place of the whole Trinity'.

Our Lady is without compare in her objective dignity, and so it is fitting that she should be unrivalled in her subjective sanctity. To prepare her for the task of being Mother to the Son, both physically and spiritually, God the Father bestows upon her an incomparable plenitude of sanctifying grace, the, infused virtues and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

St Thomas argues as follows. The nearer something is to any kind of source, the more it shares in the effects of that source. The part of the lawn nearest to the sprinkler will be greener than the more remote parts. Now Christ is the source (grace, as author in His Divinity and as instrument in His humanity, and the Blessed Virgin is closer to Him than ant other creature is, because it was from her that He received His human nature. 'It was therefore necessary for her to receive from Christ a plenitude of grace greater than that anyone else.'

Even from her conception, she was full of grace. By the anticipated merits of her Son, she was preserved from all stain of Original Sin in the first moment of her conception. Now Original Sin is the privation of sanctifying grace. If, therefore, our Lady was preserved from that privation, if she lacked the lack of grace, she was–putting it positively–endowed in the first moment of her existence with the overflowing fulness of the redeeming grace of her Son. She never lacked grace nor did she ever lose it. By a special privilege she was free from all personal sin, mortal and venial, even from the inclination to sin. All men are sinners, says St Augustine, 'except the Holy Virgin Mary, whom, for the sake of the honour of the Lord, I want to exclude altogether from any talk of sin'.

When, then, we contemplate all the actions that make up our Lady's motherhood, ('Welcome in womb and breast,/ Birth, milk, and all the rest'), we should remember that these humble human realities are endowed, through Mary's supernatural perfections, with a spiritual beauty surpassing that of any other mother in human history. 'And she brought forth her first-born son and wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn' (Lk 2:7).

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