Mary;
the Good Sister-in-Law
The
August 25, 1997 issue of NEWSWEEK had a cover article on "THE
MEANING OF MARY; a struggle over her role grows within the Church."
The so-called struggle arose from a drive to have Mary infallibly
declared Co-Redeemer, Mediator of All Graces and Advocate of the People
of God before the turn of the Millennium.
The
Holy See asked the 12th International Mariological Congress, taking
part in Czestochowa in Poland in August of the same year, to study
whether it was possible and opportune to define Marian titles of mediator,
co-redeemer and advocate. This was comprised of 15 top Catholic scholars
in Mariology and 5 non-Catholic ones.
The
group unanimously agreed to reject the proposals for the following
reasons. The suggested titles were distinctly ambiguous as they can
be understood in very different ways. The title was not accepted by
the Second Vatican Council which emphasized Mary's greatness as arising
form her being the first witness in following her Son, more than from
any special privileges that she received. It would also be inopportune
as it may adversely effect ecumenical dialogue.
The
sad thing about some feasts of Our Lady is that they tend to put her
"out there in heaven" somewhere while the charm of Mary
is much more that she is so like us "down here." I like
to think of Mary, not as someone up there, but as someone I would
like to be married to my brother.
Attitudes
towards Mary and the feasts that express them are the product of history.
The First Vatican Council was called in 1869 "to rally the Church
against the rationalism of the nineteenth century." At the time,
there was an open conflict between those who favored a more liberal
Catholicism and those who favored a more authoritarian flavor. Pope
Pius XI, Pio Nono, a genuinely religious man, saw himself as the personification
of the Church and saw personal devotion to him as devotion to Christ,
and submission to him as submission to Christ. His great personal
achievement was to guide the council to the definition of the Doctrine
of the Infallibility of the Pope in 1870. The ultimate product of
the triumphalist tendency to put the good "up there" was
the Declaration of the Dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady in 1954,
100 years after the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception had been defined.
What I do not like about these feasts is that the emphasis on the
Assumption puts Mary in heaven, sinless, far from us, unattainable,
to be admired but not imitated. The emphasis is on grandeur rather
than simplicity, on reward rather than on gift received, on wealth
rather than on poverty. This Queen in Heaven is, for me, far from
the simple Mary of the Gospels.
I
like to think of Mary as the type of sensible down-to-earth person
that I would like to see one of my brothers married to. Maybe that
image comes to mind as I have been for a few weeks enjoying the hospitality
of my five sisters-in-law during my home leave in Ireland. For priests,
their most important relatives are their sisters-in-law. As parents
grow older and die a priest returns to the homes of his brothers and
sisters. His relations with his siblings will continue much the same
except for one variant - the sister-in-law. If the sister-in law is
welcoming and the priest has a pleasant relationship with her, he
has access to that family and a haven of welcome. If the relationship
is not good then his "home" has been made that much smaller.
For
me, Mary - whom we celebrate today as the mother of God - was a homey
woman who did not make much of a fuss about the day to day problems.
She had been through a lot in life and had coped well. Her greatness
was in her ordinariness, and her power now is in the feeling that
she is someone like a sister-in-law that you can sit down and have
a cup of coffee with as she throws sensible light on whatever problem
is bugging you right now.
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Taken
from Sundays
into Silence - A Pathway to Life. Copyright © 1998 by Claretian
Publications
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