Editorial - Mary and the Church

“May is the month of Mary/Bright is the sun above…”

 

So runs the hymn. But, as Bl. John Henry Newman noted in his Meditations on the Church’s seasons, in Britain “We have often a bleak, inclement May”. However as he went on to point out, even if the month is cold, it holds the promise of warmer weather, of sunshine and the summer ahead.

 

Marian devotion was deemed rather unfashionable in the Western Church for a while in the 1970s, but it never really lost its popular appeal, and today flourishes anew: vast crowds visit Lourdes annually, the Fatima centenary saw pilgrim numbers there soaring – led by the Holy Father - and in England the shrine at Walsingham, restored at the end of the 19th century draws large groups each summer in this second decade of the 21st. The Rosary remains a defining aspect of Catholicism: St John Paul taught a new generation its value and added a new set of Mysteries which now accompany pilgrims as they make their way to Chartres, to Guadalupe, to Carfin, to Knock…or through the streets of London’s Soho or of Liverpool or of a Kent village…

 

The fullness of Christ’s divinity

 

If we are tempted to think of Marian devotion as a merely sentimental matter, the history of the Church teaches otherwise. Mary has always been the guarantor of Christian orthodoxy, and especially of authentic Christology. In the year 431, in proclaiming Mary to be Mother of God – and not just mother of Christ – the Church affirmed the fullness of Christ’s divinity.

As Cardinal Ratzinger – later Benedict XVI – noted “It is, moreover in direct service to faith in Christ—not, therefore, primarily out of devotion to the Mother—that the Church has proclaimed her Marian dogmas: first that of her perpetual virginity and divine motherhood and then, after a long period of maturation and reflection, those of her Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption into heavenly glory. These dogmas protect the original faith in Christ as true God and true man: two natures in a single Person. They also secure the indispensable eschatological tension by pointing to Mary’s Assumption as the immortal destiny that awaits us all. And they also protect the faith—threatened today—in God the Creator, who (and this, among other things, is the meaning of the truth of the perpetual virginity of Mary, more than ever not understood today) can freely intervene also in matter.”

 

 

Guide

 

Mary is the “guide of the wanderer here below”, as another popular hymn expresses it. In 2018, the Pope and the whole Church here on earth can trustfully place trust in that guidance with fresh heart: her new feast as Mother of the Church falls, on this first time of celebration, in this her month of May. As Cardinal Sarah puts it, announcing the feast as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments: “if we want to grow and to be filled with the love of God, it is necessary to plant our life firmly on three great realities: the Cross, the Eucharist, and the Mother of God.”