We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
***
One common complaint among many Evangelicals, my old stomping ground, is that Catholics honor Mary “too much.” It’s a highly specialized complaint, much like the common Evangelical complaint about Catholic “graven images” that completely overlooks the Evangelical’s own bowling trophies. After all—and I speak from experience here as someone in recovery from “Mariaphobic Response Syndrome”—Evangelicals have no problem honoring Paul. They write hundreds of books about him, talk about his holiness and genius in thousands of sermons, and generally hold him up as a shining model of Christian greatness—as they should. They rightly observe that, if not for Paul, the gospel would never have reached the Gentile world.
But I began to realize there was often an odd choking sensation among us Evangelicals when Catholics noted with equal truth that without Mary, the gospel would have never reached the planet. The conversation chilled under an icy cloud of fear and a sense of menace, as though we were worried that the person saying this was just about to break out in a frenzy of goddess worship. Strange caveats and backpedalings ensued. We suddenly felt compelled to insist that Mary’s “Yes” to God means nothing unique at all about her role in salvation history and to press the claim that she certainly is deserving of no special mentions. We said, in a curiously rapid way, that God would just as easily have chosen somebody else, as though we had full access to the inner counsels of the Divine Mind as he surveys an infinitude of alternate universes.
It began to bug me that we reserved this kind of talk for Mary while nobody in the Evangelical world ever felt the need to talk this way about Paul. When it came to him, we remained in this universe, looking at what God actually did rather than flying off to a billion other hypothetical universes to pontificate about what God surely would have done.
Similarly, it began to bother me that when Mary herself declares in Luke 1:48, “For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed” we Evangelicals typically felt an ungovernable compulsion to declare that, since scripture likewise speaks of Jael as blessed among women (Judges 5:24), we can safely say that Mary is no big deal. Yet, strangely, we felt no similar compulsion to diminish Jesus when Isaiah calls Cyrus “the Lord’s Anointed” (i.e., “Messiah” (Isaiah 45:1)). In Jesus’ case, we recognized that Cyrus was a divine foreshadow of Jesus the Liberator, just as the manna, the parting of the Red Sea and Hezekiah were likewise types and shadows of the gospel. It was only in the case of the Blessed Virgin that we refused to see Jael is a prophetic foreshadow and instead turned her into a rival of the mother of the Anointed One, who is most blessed among women.
Eventually I could see no sense to this irrational prejudice against Mary. At the end of the day, Jesus Christ is God incarnate and Cyrus is not just as Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate and Jael is not. Mary freely said “yes” to giving God the Son the flesh and blood by which he would achieve the redemption of the world on the cross. In this universe and not some hypothetical one, she assented, not just to the conception of Christ, but day by day for thirty years until the moment she had to stand there, absolutely helpless, and watch him die the most shameful and unjust death any mother has ever had to endure under a cruel and despotic regime in some third world hellhole. In short, just as we would surely honor not just a fallen soldier but his grieving parents at the soldier’s funeral, so the Catholic Church has always very sensibly paid honor to the Mother of our Captain, who threw himself on the grenade of sin, hell, and death to save his troops and died in combat with the forces of Hell. Not to do so is churlish.
That’s why I finally realized that the real question is not “Don’t Catholics honor Mary too much?” but is rather, “Where exactly did we Evangelicals honor her ‘just enough’?” And it’s why I eventually concluded that the reality is that Catholics honor her as she should be honored while one would have to search a very long time in Evangelical circles to find any honor paid to her at all, and that quite grudging, timid, and filled with continual hesitations and a continual odor of deep fear of her.
That’s a fact noted even by honest Evangelical scholars like Timothy George.[1] Apart from “round yon Virgin, Mother and Child” at Christmas (a verse written by a Catholic,[2] by the by), veneration and honor of the Blessed Virgin is almost non-existent in Evangelical circles. So I came to realize that the complaint by Evangelicals that Catholics honor Mary “too much” is like the teetotaler telling the normal man who likes a glass of wine at dinner that every sip is “drinking to excess.”
As we move away from these controversies and look closer to home, we find another dynamic at work. Even within the Catholic communion, the Church is often complained of as “dominated by men.” To converts from an Evangelical background filled with jitters about Mary, this is hilarious. For what hits us converts in the face is not the masculinity, but the femininity of the Church. In other words, so much of the Church’s prayer, life and practice is contemplative, receptive, Marian, inward, body-centered and Eucharistic while so much of Protestant (and especially American Evangelical) Christianity is aggressive, word-centered, mission-oriented, and focuses on getting a job done. Both the masculine and feminine approaches to the faith are good and biblical, but it should be noted that the feminine way is particularly rooted in the Church’s reverence for Mary who is “blessed among women.”
Mary is, in the end, called “blessed” not merely because of her suffering, nor merely because she did or said this or that. Indeed, scripture does not contain an Acts of Mary because it is precisely her part in the economy of salvation not so much to do as to be. Her characteristic posture is contemplative; she “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51). Her characteristic gesture is to refer us to her Son: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5); her sole literary legacy is a hymn of praise that magnifies God, not herself. That does not make her a wallflower or a cipher. It makes her the most fully saved human being who ever lived—saved completely, saved from sin not by the desperate rescue from the pit that the rest of us have fallen into, but by being kept from the pit in the first place by the grace of her Son. This, in turn, makes her the freest creature God ever made, not an automaton. For “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17).
This curiously quiet and hidden place in the Kingdom of God, so far from the very public and dramatic trials and tribulations of the apostles with their Indiana Jones adventures and globetrotting ways is why Mary’s enormous powers—what John Paul II called “other and greater powers”[3] than those of the apostles—is often overlooked. Her power in the life of the Church is like air pressure or sunlight or gravity. You don’t think about it. It’s always there, in the background, the power of the entire prayer life of the Church, quietly interceding for the noisier and more visible members, calm and relentless as a river, seemingly weak, but able in the long run to grind the Himalayas down to dust. And she does it all in the peace of Christ, whom she loved from her very heart from the first moment of her creation and will be praising and loving when the last of atoms of this passing world are gone. Blessed, truly, is she among women.
[1] For a fine attempt to grapple with the question of why Evangelicals have such an instinctive distrust of Marian devotion, see “The Blessed Evangelical Mary, by Timothy George in Christianity Today, December 2003. Available on-line at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/december/1.34.html as of March 5, 2011.
[2] Fr. Joseph Mohr
[3] George Weigel, Witness to Hope (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 577.
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