Spiritual warfare event in Turkey prompts debate over veneration of Mary
The spiritual warfare event that drew around 4,000 Christians to the site of an ancient Roman ruin in Ephesus, Turkey, earlier this month has prompted a clash between two senior charismatic leaders.
“Celebration Ephesus” marked the end of a major spiritual warfare initiative against the [data missing] – recognized as a leading world authority on spiritual warfare – identifies as the high-ranking demonic principality most responsible for blocking the spread of the gospel.
But his assertion that one of her modern-day manifestations is as a “counterfeit Mary,” luring many to wrongly worship the mother of Jesus, has drawn a reaction from Ralph Martin, president of Renewal Ministries, which encourages Catholic renewal and evangelism. The two exchanged views in correspondence made available to “Charisma” magazine.
Martin said that while he was impressed with plans for the Ephesus gathering, he was concerned at “what appears to be a serious lack of sound information concerning the place of Mary in Catholic doctrine and life.”
He wrote: “Catholics understand worship as something due only to God. Any Catholic who worshiped Mary would be in grave error. Catholics give Mary special honor for what I believe are sound reasons, but we don’t worship her.” There were “superstitious and ignorant” expressions of Catholic Christianity “just as there are of Pentecostal Christianity,” he said, but these were not official teachings and should not be the criteria by which either were judged.
Martin pointed to the pope’s own declaration of “an infinite distance between Marian veneration and worship of the Trinity and the incarnate Word,” and said that while Catholics may use similar language in addressing Mary as in their worship of God, it had “a completely different meaning and value.”
Martin said that while he agreed that Satan was “counterfeiting Mary and her role in the plan of God,” it was important for people to “train our sights on the counterfeit not the authentic.”
Wagner, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., at the World Prayer Center, spotlighted the Marian link in his booklet “Confronting the Queen of Heaven,” which set out the background to the Ephesus event. He said that the historic roots of Mary’s exaltation could be traced to Ephesus–the last place she was known to have been alive, and previously the home of worship of Diana, another guise of the “Queen of Heaven.”
Responding to Martin’s concerns, Wagner wrote that when someone honored a dead person with gifts, prayers and pledges of allegiance “this seems to be to be just as much authentic worship as we see among the priests of Baal in the Old Testament, or the followers of Maximon in Guatemala today.”
For many Catholics, their allegiance to idols was “at least as great or greater than any allegiance to Jesus,” he said, distracting them from a personal relationship with Christ. This was underscored by the “uniform testimony of the millions of Catholic church members who are defecting… throughout Latin America and swelling the ranks of Protestant churches.
“They are convinced that, had they stayed in their Catholic churches, they would today be on the road to hell and not to heaven. This is not to say that there are no true born-again, heaven-bound believers who have remained in the Catholic Church, and few would deny that. However, at least in Latin America, they are perceived as the exception and not the rule.”
Christians from more than 50 countries took part in the four-hour worship event Oct. 1, which Wagner said he believed marked the breaking of the spiritual stronghold of the idol “responsible for sending more people to hell than any other.” The gathering followed prayer team journeys to strategic sites around the world in the previous two years–including Mount Everest–to engage in spiritual warfare against the Queen of Heaven.