Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Welcome to the special edition of All Things Catholic. This episode was recorded live at the Northern Colorado

Catholic women's conference earlier this month where I was truly like the

Blessed Virgin Mary. I was Blessed Among Women. I love being able to present at women's conferences. There's so many

great Catholic women who are doing so many wonderful things in their

parishes, in their homes, in their diocese, and I want to share with all of

you, my listeners here, a little bit of what I shared with them earlier this month.

And as Catholics, we love Mary.

We've got statues of Mary, stained-glass windows of Mary, icons of Mary.

We have songs about Mary, Immaculate Mary, Hail Holy Queen, we have prayers about Mary.

Hail Mary, Hail Holy Queen, memoraries.

We have devotions like the Rosary. We even have holy days of obligation

related to Mary. So as Catholics, we get to know Mary pretty well. But today, I want to ask you this question. How many of you know the

human Mary? How many of you know what was going on inside of Mary, step by step throughout her life.

How many of you are familiar with the,

what John Paul II called the interior pilgrimage of faith

that Mary made as a disciple. I think because we're so familiar with the

Mary of devotion and the Mary of doctrine, we sometimes may forget that Mary was

human like us. She no doubt was given extraordinary graces, unique privileges. There's no

doubt about that. But yet that didn't take her outside of the human family.

She is a woman that we could really relate to. And I think sometimes as Catholics, we put Mary on such a big pedestal. We go, wow, I love her. She's awesome.

But man, I can't relate to her. She's the

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