Of all the Christmas images, the one that best evokes the meaning and feeling of the Incarnation is the Madonna with Child. There, in the love between Mary and the infant Jesus, the mystery of God-made-man fuses with humanity\u2019s primordial experiences of birth and mother love and nurtures the faith, however fragile, that peace on earth is possible among men of good will. Little wonder, then, that in the iconography of the Christian church, Mary is second only to Jesus as an object of love and devotion.<\/p>\n
Over the last quarter century, however, the cult of Mary has cooled perceptibly, especially among better-educated Roman Catholics. One reason is the reform movement of Vatican Council II. Heeding Pope John XXIII\u2019s warning that \u201cthe Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her son,\u201d the council fathers curbed excessive Mariolatry and reminded the faithful that Jesus alone is source and center of Christian worship. More important, Pope Paul VI\u2019s anti-birth-control encyclical and the feminist movement of the \u201870s soured many Catholic women on the Virgin Mother model they were told to emulate in their youth. \u201cMary embodied domesticity, a piety that was the enemy of intellectuality and a purity that seemed to deny female sexuality,\u201d explains Catholic novelist Mary Gordon, 29. \u201cIf a Catholic girl rejected these things, she rejected Mary too.\u201d Despite such an enormous cultural change, the Virgin Mary is beginning to recapture the Christian imagination in new and often arresting ways. Overcoming their longstanding bias against Mariology, Protestants have joined Catholic and Orthodox scholars in exploring the meaning of Mary in the New Testament and the role Marian piety might play in a reunited Christianity. In several recent books and symposiums, Protestants have discovered that the New Testament does contain a theology of Mary, while Catholic scholars now acknowledge that there is little basis in the Bible for Catholic dogmas of Mary\u2019s Immaculate Conception (the belief that she was born without sin) or her bodily assumption into heaven.<\/p>\n
Free Agent: Among the new breed of independent Catholic nuns, Mary\u2019s virginity has become a source of feminist pride. \u201cBecause she was asked to become the Mother of Jesus without the intervention of man, she responded to the call of God as a person, without biological differentiation,\u201d says Sister Barbara Thomas, a past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. \u201cShe did this as a free agent, not bound by physical dependence upon man\u2019s cooperation, nor by social constraint to seek a man\u2019s approval.\u201d Perhaps the boldest effort to reinterpret the Virgin is \u201cThe Mary Myth\u201d (Seabury Press), in which sociologist Father Andrew Greeley acknowledges the historical and psychological links of Mary with pre-Christian goddesses. Explains Greeley: \u201cMary is the Catholic Christian religion\u2019s symbol which reveals to us that the Ultimate is androgynous, that in God there is both male and female, both pursuit and seduction, both ingenious plan Pieta: and passionate tenderness.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018New Eve\u2019: Much of the current interest in the Virgin is frankly analytical \u2014 an effort to discover how and why she emerged as the dominant female image in Western art and culture. Curiously, the New Testament contains little information about the historical Mary and some Scriptural passages are even negative. The few times Mary meets her son during his public ministry, Jesus emphasizes that his true kinship is no longer with his blood relatives but with the new family of his disciples. Most of the later Christian ideas of Mary are derived from Luke\u2019s account of the conception and birth of Jesus. Through her acceptance of God\u2019s call to be mother of the Messiah, Mary becomes in Luke\u2019s hands the \u201cNew Eve\u201d who symbolizes the link between the old Israel and the \u201cNew Israel\u201d of believers in Christ. Only in A.D. 431, at the Council of Ephesus, did the early church fathers give Mary her first additional title: \u201cMother of God.\u201d Today\u2019s scholars suggest several reasons why Mary became a powerful religious symbol. Greeley believes that the early Christians had a psychological need to express the feminine side of God, which their Hebrew forefathers suppressed. Historians point out that Christianity absorbed the religions of its pagan converts. Marian feast days fit easily into seasonal celebrations of ancient fertility goddesses. And in the East, where devotion to Mary developed earlier than in the West, images of Mary bore a striking resemblance to the seated figures of Near Eastern \u201cgreat Mothers.\u201d As a potent symbol of later Christian civilization, Mary became an icon reflecting shifting cultural values. Ascetics, who regarded even marital sex as sinful, extolled her purity. Mystics found in her total obedience to God the prototype of the single soul\u2019s rapturous union with the divine, and monks stressed her perpetual virginity. Meanwhile, the mass of average believers revered her more accessible human qualities – forebearance, compassion, maternal love and turned to her as \u201cmediator\u201d of Christ\u2019s saving graces. \u201cWhenever Jesus takes on the image of the stern judge or excessively suffering Saviour, popular devotion has swung to Mary as one who is more approachable to humankind,\u201d observes Notre Dame University theologian James Burtchaell.<\/p>\n
By the Middle Ages, Mary had attained an unofficial cultic status that neatly paralleled Jesus\u2019 own. Her Immaculate Conception echoed his Ascension. She was \u201cQueen of Heaven\u201d and he was \u201cChrist the King.\u201d Her prayer was the \u201cAve Maria,\u201d his was \u201cThe Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u201d Not surprisingly, then, the Protestant reformers rejected the cult of Mary because it conflicted with key Reformation themes. Among them: fidelity to Scripture alone, Jesus as the sole mediator between God and man and rejection of the monastic life in favor of the Christian family. In reaction, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, with the Jesuits taking the lead, enhanced Mary as a symbol of Catholic commitment.<\/p>\n
Apparitions: \u201cSince the nineteenth century, Marianism and papalism have gone hand in hand and given each other mutual support,\u201d says liberal Catholic theologian Hans Kung. In an unusual assertion of papal teaching authority, Pope Pius IX in 1854 proclaimed the Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Catholic faith and sixteen years later led a victorious papal faction at Vatican Council I, which declared the dogma of papal infallibility. Meanwhile, a curious cleavage in Christian sensibility developed among rank-and-file Christians. Whereas untutored Protestant revivalists were apt to hear the call of \u201cthe Lord,\u201d Catholic adolescents, such as Bernadette of Lourdes, claimed to see apparitions of the Virgin.<\/p>\n
Psychologically and ecclesiastically, Marianism peaked in 1950 when Pope Pius XII, the last Roman Pontiff to rule as an absolute monarch, proclaimed as Catholic dogma the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. Although some Mariologists anticipated even grander pronouncements by the Pontiff, none has been forthcoming. Instead, Vatican Council II chose to simplify the essentials of faith. Today, Mary is seen as a symbol of radical Christian hope \u2014 the first of humankind to be redeemed and fully glorified by her perfect faith in Christ, but totally subordinate to her son. In return, at least some Protestant ecumenists, such as Baptist theologian Arthur Crabtree, have begun to include Mary in their prayers as \u201ca unique member of the church and model for all Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n
Relevance: But the real question is whether ordinary men and women will find in Mary a relevance for their own lives. The story of Mary in history reveals different meanings of the Virgin Mother for different generations. Certainly the times are ripe for an appreciation of the feminine side of all human beings \u2014 and of God as well. And the Christmas story reminds us that Mary was not only the mother of the Messiah but a courageous woman in her own right who suffered for her singular response to God\u2019s call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of all the Christmas images, the one that best evokes the meaning and feeling of the Incarnation is the Madonna with Child. There, in the love between Mary and the infant Jesus, the mystery of God-made-man fuses with humanity\u2019s primordial experiences of birth and mother love and nurtures the faith, however fragile, that peace on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1734,239,2075,2380,5481,387,259],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}