Mary

Our rhythm of life while living with the Salesians has involved a lot of prayer. One of the features of this prayer which is sometimes a bit uncomfortable is the extent to which these prayers centre of Mary the mother of Jesus rather than on a person of the Trinity.

Personally I have no problem with acknowledging Mary as a person worthy of special praise, there is much that is inspirational in her story. I also believe that we can ask others members of the Church to pray for us, be these fellow Christians living or dead. Thus I have no problem with us asking Mary, as a fellow Christian, to remember me in her prayers.

Where the spirituality of Mary gets very uncomfortable is when it is elevated to such as level that she is presented as if she is a god. While nowhere in ‘official’ Catholic theology is this claim made, within the culture of devotion and worship she is often presented as if she is God.

Here at DBTC the feast of ‘The Immaculate Conception of Mary’ was celebrated in a far bigger way than was ‘Epiphany’, ‘The Annunciation’ (the conception of Jesus), ‘The Ascension’, or ‘Pentecost’. The Feast of ‘Mary Mother of God’ was celebrated in preference to ‘The Holy Family’ which fell on the same day. The campus has many statues of Mary holding the child Jesus, yet when these statues are mentioned it is Mary rather than the child Jesus who is evoked and reverenced.

In preaching Mary is spoken of far more than is Jesus, she is the one who can grant us special blessings, she is the one who can assist us in need, she is the one who can answer our prayers. It is praying to Mary which is most often encouraged and celebrated.

So why this emphasis on Mary?

Centuries of hierarchical Church leadership have emphasised the masculine. When preaching to a mostly illiterate laity, unable to read the gospels for themselves, the medieval priesthood preached a God who was male, a God who was powerful, a God who was a judge. Thus the attributes traditionally seen as feminine were driven out of God. Perhaps it was a subconscious reaction to this lack of wholeness that devotion to Mary evolved. She is the merciful one, she is the caring one, she is the one who understands our weakness. When God became inaccessible in the eyes of many, it was Mary whom people looked to for consolation.

It is easy to see why Marian devotions have grown, and easy to see why it persists in a Church which is still male dominated, still hierarchical and still denies many of the feminine aspects of God.

But there are dangers in this spirituality. When speaking about Jesus we are obliged to hold true to the New Testament, we cannot credibly present Jesus in a way which contradicts these texts, and so when it come to Jesus every Christian must remain rooted in the earliest origins of Christianity. The same in-built safety mechanism does not exist when we consider Mary; she is mentioned only six times in the New Testament outside of the nativity stories and even then only briefly. Thus it is all too easy for devotion to Mary to collapse into superstition and tribalism. Sadly I think it often does and in doing so does her a disservice.