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Mary is the single most venerated figure in Catholic spirituality after Christ himself. The Catholic Church has held from its earliest centuries that she is truly the Mother of God (Theotokos in Greek), preserved free from original sin from the moment of her conception, ever-virgin, and assumed body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life. Each of these doctrines names something the Church believes God himself did in her — to fit her, uniquely, for the vocation of bearing his Son.
For Catholic couples, Mary is woven into the wedding liturgy in many ways. Her words at the wedding feast at Cana — "Do whatever he tells you" — are the last recorded in Scripture and the Church has read them as her enduring counsel to every Christian household. Many Catholic weddings include a Marian moment, often the placing of flowers at a statue of Our Lady, with the singing of the Ave Maria or Salve Regina. The custom is a quiet act of consecration: the new family is being placed under Mary's motherly care.
For Catholic families at the time of death, Mary is invoked with particular intensity. The closing line of the Hail Mary — "pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death" — is the Church's most universal prayer for a holy death. The Salve Regina, sung at the Final Commendation in many Catholic funerals, calls Mary "our life, our sweetness, and our hope" and asks her to "show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus." She is the Mother of Sorrows who stood at the foot of her own Son's cross, and Catholic tradition trusts her to stand by every dying Christian as their own true Mother.
Marian devotion has taken many forms across the Church's history — the Rosary, the Angelus, May crownings, novenas, Marian apparitions and pilgrimages. All flow from a single conviction: that Mary, who said yes to God's plan for the world, continues to say yes by interceding for her children.