For a nineteenth-century Anglican minister, John Henry Newman harbored a surprising level of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He dedicated an 1832 sermon, for instance, to instructing his congregation on the reverence that is due to the Mother of our Lord. i He also drew close to affirming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, describing Christ as “the immaculate ‘seed of the woman,’” and asserting that the Son of God did indeed participate in our nature, but did so by “selecting and purifying unto Himself a tabernacle” from among women. Upon becoming Catholic (in 1845), Newman’s Marian devotion naturally intensified, though he always kept in view that the glories of Mary are for the sake of her Son—to paraphrase the title of one of his Catholic homilies. Newman’s profound theology of Mary is, in fact, one of the key theological threads that runs through both his Anglican and Catholic works. For good reason, Fr. Nicholas Gregoris has noted that “the whole of [Newman’s] life and thought was imbued with his knowledge and love of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so much so that to understand Newman is to understand his Mariology.”