Marian Misconceptions

[Denise]

HER OWN HAVE RECEIVED HER NOT


May 2014
By Frederick W. Marks

Frederick W. Marks is the author of eight books, most recently Think and Believe (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2012).

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is far and away the world’s most influential woman, beloved not only by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox but also by Muslims. An entire chapter of the Koran is devoted to her, and even Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin have sung her praises. Johann Sebastian Bach, a devout Lutheran, honored her with his Magnificat; Nathaniel Hawthorne prayed to her; Sir Walter Scott died with her name on his lips. The eminent nineteenth-century Harvard historian Henry Adams wrote that she “remains the most intensely…most widely and most personally felt of all characters, divine…human or imaginary, that ever existed among men. Nothing has ever remotely taken her place.” More recently, her crown of twelve stars (Rev. 12:1) has graced the flag of the European Union.

Through the lens of the secular observer, such recognition may appear remarkable. But what astonishes believers is the fact that the Blessed Mother fails to find room in the hearts of many who should, by rights, welcome her. Take, for example, those under the mistaken impression that Marian veneration is biblically unsound. Scripture tells us that the Blessed Virgin gave us our Lord on four separate occasions: first at Nazareth with her “yes” to Gabriel, then at Bethlehem with her delivery in a stable, again at Cana where she launched Him on His public mission, and finally at Calvary where she saw Him through His passion and death. When she pronounced her “yes” at Nazareth she became, in a very real sense, the spouse of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, since it was the Holy Spirit who overshadowed and impregnated her (Lk. 1:35).

If Holy Writ told us nothing more about the Blessed Mother, this alone would justify all the attention she has received. But there is more. Jesus, speaking from the cross, asked His beloved Apostle, John, to regard Mary as his spiritual mother, even though John’s biological mother, Salome, stood looking on at a distance (Mt. 27:56). By extension, this makes Mary, in John’s words, the mother of all “who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Rev. 12:17). That John portrays her as a queen (Rev. 12:1), as well as a mother, is still further reason to view Marian veneration as Bible-based.

Significantly, Jews at the time of Christ regarded their queen mother as second only to the king in importance. There is an Old Testament precedent for this. Bathsheba, who sat on a throne next to that of her son, Solomon, was viewed as an intercessor (1 Kgs. 2:18-20), and her position relative to the king became the norm for Jewish royals. Thus, when John portrays Mary as a queen wearing a crown of twelve stars, he is following tradition. If Christ is our King, as He Himself claimed before Pilate, then Mary is our queen.

In the world of scholarship, there are some who take the “woman” of Revelation 12 as a reference to the Church. But the problem with this is that John identifies the woman as the mother of a son “destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod” (Rev. 12:5). The son is clearly Jesus, and just as clearly, the Church did not give birth to our Lord. Rather, it was He who gave birth to the Church (Mt. 16:18). The Gospels are rich in images defining the relationship between Christ and His followers: He is their Vine, their Shepherd, and their Bridegroom. Never is He their son.

Certain critics seem less interested in what Scripture has to say about the Blessed Mother than in alleging theological accretion dating from the Middle Ages. Once again, the record is instructive. Nobody could have been further removed from the Middle Ages than John the Evangelist. Yet the praise he bestows on Mary is without parallel. In addition to wearing a crown of twelve stars in his Book of Revelation, she is depicted as clothed with the sun (Rev. 12:1). There are only two other figures in the Bible who are comparably portrayed: God the Father, who is “robed in light” (Ps. 104:2), and God the Son, who shines “like the sun” (Mt. 17:2). Mary’s image appears underground in the Roman catacombs, as well as above ground on a graffiti wall near the grave of Peter — both predate the Middle Ages by nearly a thousand years. England’s King Arthur is likewise said to have won a signal victory against pagan invaders in A.D. 495 while carrying a badge of the Blessed Virgin into battle.

Still another motive for rejection of Marian veneration stems from the notion that it detracts from the worship owed to Christ. Catholics who have grown up in parishes where Marian devotion is stressed to the exclusion of intellectual formation and spiritual outreach have just cause for complaint, and to this degree, the above-stated notion may be accurate. But taking the larger view, Rome itself has never regarded devotion to Mary as a substitute for such Christian imperatives as the worship of Christ, the study of Scripture, and evangelization. The greatest missionaries of all time — men like Boniface in Germany, Matteo Ricci in China, Francis Xavier in Japan, and Roberto de Nobili in India — were nothing if not loyal sons of the Blessed Mother.

Mary would be the first to step aside if she felt she were standing in the way of Christian duty. But she has appeared many times over as a divine messenger, always pointing to her Son and encouraging greater devotion to Him. It is natural for a mother to draw attention to her son and, as we see here, the mother of Jesus is no exception — the evidence, by the way, for apparitions such as those at Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima is positively overwhelming. How pleased she must be to see Christ at the epicenter of every Catholic church — Christ on the cross and Christ in the tabernacle!

Even the rosary is Christocentric, with seventeen of its twenty meditations or “mysteries” recalling an event in the life of the Lord (assuming one counts Gabriel’s announcement of His birth). The Our Father, repeated at the start of each decade, comes from the lips of Jesus Himself. As for the Hail Mary, the heart of the rosary, it begins with lines taken from Luke 1, and then recognizes our Lady as the mother of the Man who is God, humbly begging her prayers.

One frequently asked question is why Catholics pray to Mary instead of going directly to God, and the reason is plain. We are instructed by James to pray for one another (Jas. 5:16), and if relatives and friends go down on their knees as intercessors on our behalf, why exclude Mary from the circle of petition? She is alive and well; she cares for us as only a mother can, and her prayers are certain to fall on receptive ears.

Of special interest from the standpoint of history is the fact that hostility to Marian devotion is a post-Reformation phenomenon that appears to have arisen in response to an event that occurred in faraway Mexico. When Luther and Calvin launched their reform movement, they subscribed to all that the Church practiced and taught on the subject of Mary. But fourteen years after Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, just as the Reformation was gaining momentum, Mary appeared to Juan Diego at Guadalupe, triggering the conversion of nine million native Indians. The year was 1531, and Christians were on the fence theologically. Should they leave the Church? If they had already done so, should they return? Suddenly, Mary appears to a Catholic and asks him to approach a Catholic bishop to have a Catholic church built in her honor so that people may approach her Son in the Eucharist.

Over the years, evidence for Mary’s New World apparition mounted, and Protestant reformers found themselves in a quandary. How could they admit that the mother of Jesus had come down on the opposite side of the theological fence? Subsequent apparitions, such as those at Lourdes (1858) and Fatima (1917), undeniably authentic, did little to ease the pain. Consequently, some Protestants wound up denying the importance of the Blessed Mother while others questioned the existence of post-apostolic miracles and advised folks to go “straight to Jesus.”

Still another stumbling block for our separated brethren is the impression that, in the eyes of Catholics, Mary couldn’t sin. If she couldn’t sin, then her “yes” to Gabriel lacked merit and she is deposed from her rightful place as a model of virtue. It is not hard to see where those outside the Church are coming from. Section 488 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is titled “Mary’s Predestination,” and one reads in the same volume that she was “wholly borne by God’s grace” and “redeemed from the moment of her conception” (nos. 490, 491). Needless to say, such statements are not untrue. But taken out of context, they can be misleading.

Context is key because the Catechism affirms Mary’s free will no less than three times (nos. 488, 490, and 511). Mary is also described as conceived without “stain of sin,” rather than “without sin,” meaning that she was free from such consequences of original sin as the pain of child birth, bodily corruption, and sensual temptation (no. 493). Doubtless, there will always be those who present Mary as conceived “without sin” (instead of “without stain of sin”), implying thereby that she couldn’t sin. St. Thérèse of Lisieux complained, over a hundred years ago, about preachers who made Mary “so different from us ordinary human beings” that they “raise her as much beyond our love as beyond our imitation.” The Little Flower must have heard what many of us may still be hearing, and what could be as puzzling to those outside the Church as those within: the suggestion that Mary’s motherhood of the God-Man was a gift from God rather than a reward for virtue — as if one precluded the other. Although no one is good enough to “earn” God’s gifts, the word reward appears again and again in Scripture, and we know that salvation requires effort (cf. Mt. 16:27; Rom. 2:6; 1 Pet. 1:17; Rev. 20:12).

The second verse of the popular hymn “Immaculate Mary” describes our Lady as “predestined” by “eternal decree.” Again, there is nothing technically wrong with such wording, provided one doesn’t assume that the Blessed Mother was more acted upon than acting. Yes, God chose her. But the choice required her cooperation. History identifies Mary as one of the first figures made into a puppet on strings for stage performance; hence the term marionette. Yet the Second Eve was anything but a marionette, God’s puppet on a string. Like Eve, she came into the world without taint of sin — that is to say, immaculately. But unlike Eve, she was a woman of indomitable will who freely accepted a pregnancy that was life-threatening given the effect it could have had on a jealous husband — the Jewish penalty for adultery was death by stoning.

The dogma that Mary was conceived without stain of original sin (meaning that, like Eve, she had free will but was not subject to sensual temptation or bodily corruption) is consistent with the Bible. Not only is it hinted at in Genesis, where we learn of a special “enmity” existing between her and the devil (3:15), it is also in keeping with her position as spouse of the Holy Spirit. Foreseeing Mary’s courageous assent to God’s will at the Annunciation (Lk. 1:38), it follows that God not only brought her into the world unstained by original sin but that He improved on her virtuous cooperation by keeping her morally pure.

To be sure, Paul wrote that “all have sinned” (Rom. 3:23, 5:12), and those prone to an exclusively literal interpretation of Scripture may see this as ruling out the possibility of an Immaculate Conception. But one need not take Paul literally because Jesus did not sin. The man from Tarsus maintains that “all die” (1 Cor. 15:22), but again, there are exceptions (e.g., Enoch and Elijah). Matthew, reporting on the Last Supper, tells us that “all the disciples said the same thing” (i.e., “I will not deny thee”); yet we know that Judas was not present at the time to say this or anything else (Mt. 26:35).

Summing up, Mary has been marginalized by not a few of her spiritual offspring — to the point of sharing with her Son the persona of a sign destined for contradiction (Lk. 2:34). For every person who doubts that Jesus existed — and there are some — one will find hundreds who deny that Mary appeared at Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima. Conversely, for every hundred outside the Christian fold who ask, “Why does one need Jesus if we have God?” there are probably a dozen within asking, “Why do we need Mary if we have Christ?” Once upon a time, Monophysite heretics maintained that Christ was not truly human, and again, one finds a Marian parallel in the modern-day tendency to believe that Mary’s “yes” to Gabriel was preordained. Edward Gibbon, author of the celebrated Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, blamed Christianity for sapping the vigor of Rome’s imperium much the way today’s naysayers see Marian devotion as an agent that undercuts the tribute owed to her Son.

There is, along the same line, a striking similarity between the indignities suffered by mother and son. Just as Mary’s “yes” to Gabriel prefigured Christ’s assent to the will of His heavenly Father, so too the Incarnation, seen as a voluntary comedown for the Son of God, finds a counterpart in the Blessed Mother’s willingness to renounce privileged environs. Nazareth, where Mary made a home for Joseph and Jesus, was hardly a suitable locale for one reared, according to the Protoevangelium of James, by well-connected parents in the cosmopolitan city of Jerusalem and educated at the prestigious Temple School. In American terms, it would be as if one of Boston’s elite were to settle among Appalachian hillbillies. Nathaniel put his finger on this when he asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn. 1:46).

Jesus found it unsafe to travel in Judea once the chief priests decided to kill Him (Jn. 7:1), and once more, there is a telling counterpart. Mary, after fleeing Bethlehem and living as a refugee in Egypt, dared not return to her childhood haunts in Judea, owing to the cruelty of its king (Mt. 2:22), and her days as a Christian ended as they began, in exile — with John in Ephesus. She who shared the highs in our Lord’s life shared as well in His ignominy and rejection. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (Jn. 1:11). She came unto her own, and her own have received her not.



“Look at the Protestant countries which threw off all devotion to [Mary] under the notion that to put her from their thoughts would be exalting the praises of her Son. Has that consequence really followed from their profane conduct towards her? Just the reverse — the countries…which so acted have in great measure ceased to worship Him, and have given up belief in His Divinity while the Catholic Church, wherever she is to be found, adores Christ as true God and true Man, as firmly as she ever did.” — Bl. John Henry Newman