Mary and Ecumenism

My Childhood vision of Mother Mary MacKillop
galloping past the Alpha Convent bringing
more joeys to Central Western Queensland,
by Luke Roberts

Zenit is the conservative Catholic news service - it's "the world seen from Rome."

They've got an online interview with Mark Shea, identified as a former Protestant and now a leading Catholic apologist, who has written a three-volume defense of Mary. Some of his quotes:

Many of the [early Protestant] Reformers had a profound devotion to Mary and, in fact, accepted much of Catholic teaching about her. However, as Protestantism became more remote from Catholic teaching (and as, in English-speaking countries, Elizabeth I found it very convenient to supplant the cult of the Virgin with a political cult of the Virgin Queen), that connection failed and was eventually broken.

Along with that went the loss of a sense of the sacramental, of the senses of Scripture, and of an appreciation for the feminine in the life of the Church. Mary came to be seen almost exclusively as a sort of pagan goddess and an actual threat to genuine Christian devotion: a perception that would have been absolutely foreign to the mind of any Christian in the first 16 centuries of the Church....

One of the earliest slurs uttered against Jesus was that he was a bastard, the product of a liaison between Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera (probably a corruption of "parthenos" which is Greek for "virgin").

Is the point of the slur to attack Mary? Of course not! The point is to attack Jesus as a mere common bastard and to deny that he is the Son of God or of any divine origin.

Likewise, when the heretic Nestorius demanded that Christians no longer hail Mary as "Theotokos" or "God bearer", his attack was directed not at Mary, but at the notion that the Man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity were a unity....

When it comes to Mary, the average Evangelical Protestant is in a position analogous to that of a teetotaler terrified that a sip of wine at communion will transform him into a raging drunken libertine.

Rather than be hyper-focused on the question of whether Catholics honor Mary "too much" and are just about to bow down to Astarte and Isis, the Evangelical would find much more spiritual benefit asking the question "How is it we Evangelicals honor her ‘just enough'?"

When honestly considered (especially against the backdrop of historic Christianity and the practice of the apostolic Church), what he will discover is that it is Evangelicalism that is peculiarly fearful of the woman whom Scripture declares all generations shall called blessed.

Aside from pulling her out of the closet to sing "Round yon virgin, mother and child" she is basically never spoken of among Evangelicals—except to say that Catholics are way overboard about her.

But the reality is that the most Marian Catholics (think John Paul II or Mother Teresa) also tend to be the most Christocentric ones. That's because all real Marian devotion refers us to Christ....

ZENIT: Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote in an essay about the apparitions at Fatima that Mary was the key to bringing Christ to the Islamic world. What do you think of this proposal?

Shea: I think he's on to something.

I have no idea how it will all play out, but I was struck by a conversation I once had with a man from Turkey who emailed me asking for more information about the Catholic Church. He was raised Muslim but was drawn to Christ.

Looking over the vast menu of Christianities available on the web he was very quick to pare it all down to the Catholic Church. Why? "Because you honor Mary as we are taught to do in Islam."

I think there's something mighty important going on in that, just as I have noticed that, among the various folks I have met who have become Catholic from a Jewish background, virtually all of them have had some sort of mystical encounter with Mary.

It's interesting to tease out meaning from this. It certainly doesn't include the idea that if Jesus had a mortal father he would be just a "mere common bastard." When Jesus' message was that we are all the children of god.

Shea's point is that the veneration of Mary is Christ-centric and conservative. As someone who wrote about the church for 15 years, with all kinds of access to both what you might call the corporate side of the church and its living communities, I'd agree. The most conservative Catholics of all are incredibly devoted to Mary.

But as for the dire lack of the feminine face of god in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam, I'd second Shea's view: "there's something mighty important going on in that."