Tema: The Virgin Mary and the Making of Europe.

As an integrated system of politics, economy and religion evolved in Europe around the year 1000, the figure of the Virgin Mary – so central to the lives of monks and nuns – became the core of a widely shared, though highly varied, European identity, says Miri Rubin.
Early in the 11th century the monk-historian Radulfus Glaber (died c.1050) commented on recent history:

Just before the third year after the millennium, throughout the whole world, but most especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches … It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches. Almost all the episcopal churches and those of monasteries dedicated to various saints, and little village chapels, were rebuilt better than before by the faithful.

This image – of Europeans hard at work replacing wooden churches with the ‘white mantle’ of stone churches – is one of the most commonly used in historical discussion of the making of Europe. Be it in its dramatic economic growth or its religious reforms, in the coalescence of dynastic kingdoms or the development of cathedral schools, Europe between 1000 and 1200 is seen as living through deep and lasting change. The great Italian-American historian Roberto Lopez named it a ‘commercial revolution’, R.I. Moore saw in the bureaucracies of church and state the birth of a ‘Persecuting Society’ and, more recently Robert Bartlett identifies in the period the ‘Making of Europe’.

The Virgin Mary and the Making of Europe | History Today

His Holiness Pius XI declared the Blessed Mother the Patroness of the United States of America in the middle 19th century I believe. As a European of British descent in the contemporary U.S.A., in the process of converting to to the Holy Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church, I must declare the Blessed Mother to be my Patroness as well.