One of the egregious strengths of the Catholic church, its intellectual patrimony, paradoxically, can also be one of its weaknesses. But I want to draw to attention to the strength of its current intellectual catchment, notably among the clergy, as well as its patrimony, most of which has been preserved over the past two thousand years, together with the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium (or Head-Cloth) of Oviedo.
The former, in particular, seems to prompt the same muddle-headed disbelief among some Protestants as the Christian faith does among atheists, and presumably for a similar reason : it is felt as a threat to their world-view, notably with regard to the Catholic church's obvious claim to be the church instituted by Christ and proclaimed by is Apostles, disciples and the Fathers of the early church.
The fact that it has historically been a church of extremes, sublime at one pole and utterly depraved at the other, is a matter of voluminous record, and one which Pope Francis is seeking to remedy. No doubt it resulted from a perhaps excessive concentration on Jesus' precept concerning preservation of the tares, until Judgment Day ; while respecting the progressive amelioration of the lot of the poor under secular governments, too little. Another imbalance Francis is endeavouring to remedy, while wary of ideologies, arguably too much, though that is only a personal opinion.
I understand his point in principle and concur with it, although, in practice, it is arguably impracticable, if only because, as that magisterial economist, J M Keynes, remarked : 'In the long run, we are all dead.' And without an ideological framework, based on Christian teaching, there is an element of straining at a gnat, to swallow a camel about the piece-meal largesse of giving a little money to a homeless person when the fit takes us.
Anyway, that is a digression. What I really wish to say about our extraordinary reverence for Mary is that it is one of the key features of her divine wisdom that Catholic church recognises that it is extraordinarily important that we understand that, in God's providential economy, He ALWAYS uses the most appropriate means to accomplish whatever end he wishes to achieve.
Christ is God.
Mary gave birth to him as both true God, having been inseminated by the Holy Spirit, and true man, as the son of the purely human Mary.
Now we know that God has every gift we possibly could imagine and doubtless even more that we could not. Now, ask yourself, what level of dignity, of blessedness, could be too great, at least, that is, short of divinity, itself, that Jesus would have accorded his mother. No matter how great it has to be, it can never ever, ever, ever, approach the infinity of God's own qualities and capacities. Neither angels nor men can ever fathom the depths of God. But God was certainly not going to sell Himself short, when he was assigning his gifts to the mother of his Son. And that is putting it mildly.
The Glorious Mystery of the Rosary of the crowning of Our Lady as Queen of Heaven, in fact, has always seemed to me to be rather redundant, in view of that de facto, sovereign (human) dignity she was accorded, when greeted by the Archangel Gabriel on the accasion of the Annunciation.