The Spirit of Mary

Nowadays we are both witnessing and participating in a number of radical changes in the Church. Whether Bishops should wear jewelled rings; whether priests have to accept compulsory celibacy; whether the Mass should be in Hindi or Latin; whether converts from the Protestant Churches should or should not be conditionally re-baptised – the new broom is sweeping clean, and not unnaturally raises a great deal of dust, in which trivial and important issues may be hard to distinguish.

Among these issues, it is plain to most of us that we may have developed some attitudes in regard to the Blessed Virgin which seem no more than a proper exercise of hyperdulia to us, yet made many Protestants think that we were Mariolatrists. The Second Vatican Council must have had ecumenical factors in mind when it firmly insisted on treating Mariology as a branch of Christology, and on a view of Mary as being first and foremost the Mother, image and archetype of the Church.

To speak of Mary without possessing in one’s heart the gentle spirit of Mary herself may tend to provoke division in the Church rather than mutual understanding, and the comments I wish to make about the Marian road towards God are intended to conform with that spirit. The attitudes which are divisive and immature seem to me to come under three main headings – simplicism, triumphalism and angelism.

The Marian who is also a simplicist will tend to see himself and the world in a dualist way – on one side, perhaps, the army of the Christian world marching under the banner of Mary; on the other side, perhaps, the army of the Communist world marching under the banner of Satan. Such a view is, of course, both irrational and socially dangerous. The Western democratic societies (let alone the new nations of Asia) can hardly be called Christian except in a nominal sense; and any view of political and social movements which attributes diabolical inspiration to one’s opponents involves a headlong descent into violent bigotry.

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This kind of simplicism attributes supernatural virtue to all that belongs to oneself – family, nation, communal habits, the Church in all her temporal aspects – and equally attributes a supernatural malignity to whatever one is least familiar with. It is most attractive to the paranoid temperament. No doubt it lay behind the sincere bigotry of the Inquisitors and the Crusaders. One does not honour Mary by invoking her support for it.

The attitude of Marian triumphalism is probably most notable in the endeavours of certain theologians to donate more and more formal titles to Our Lady – as if one honoured her most by the activities of a public ceremony. The ecumenical effect of this formal name-fastening is likely to be wholly negative. Yet there are aspects of Marian triumphalism which can hardly be shorn away without damaging the legitimate communal life of Catholics.

I think of that statue of Our Lady, set high on an external niche of St Mary’s Church in Wellington, which I used to see regularly from the window of my dentist – with its hands extended in a gesture of blessing, an image of the Mother of the House of God inviting all men to enter it and be refreshed. The legitimate aspect of triumphalism derives from the fact that Mary is herself the foremost member of the Church Triumphant, with unique functions corresponding to her unique role in the drama of the Incarnation and the Atonement. I think the illegitimate aspects begin usually with a compulsive ritualism which looks continually inward towards what the Church has already achieved, rather than outwards to a divided and troubled world that cries out for charity and healing.

The attitude of angelism is perhaps the most difficult to identify, since it may be linked with a necessary regard for innocence and purity. Technically, angelism denotes the tendency among believers to regard human beings as pure spirits rather than as men and women, to distrust and reject the biological and psychological functions which are an integral part of human nature. The Marian who is also an angelist will tend to enthrone the virtue of purity above that of charity; to regard children as spiritually superior to adults because they are biologically immature and thus not subject to various adult temptations; to regard a coarse word as something that may draw down divine punishment.

The subtle distortions that can proceed from angelism are almost endless. They can be particularly disruptive in family life. An angelist view of the Blessed Virgin will tend to isolate and emphasise certain unique physical factors – her virginity miraculously preserved during childbirth, her bodily assumption into Heaven – at the expense of the abandonment to the Divine Will which the believer is called upon to imitate, whatever his or her physical circumstances may be.

These are, as I see them, the chief dangers on the Marian road. I do not think the understandable Protestant fear that the Catholic may be secretly putting page 292 Mary above or alongside Christ, as a Fourth Member of the Trinity – in itself a logical contradiction! – has in fact any justification. Yet I think we should avoid scandalising our Protestant brethren by a triumphalist emphasis. I have sometimes thought that the gigantic statue of Our Lady planted, crowned with lights, on the road to Wellington north of Paraparaumu, represents an equally gigantic ecumenical mistake, whatever consolation we ourselves may find in it. The Baptist motorist will look up at it, and think – ‘Of course! I always knew that Catholics regard Mary as the tentpole that holds up the firmament. . . .’ And no later ecumenical arguments are likely to convince him otherwise.

Yet I am myself one of those people who came to the Church led by the Blessed Virgin; and I sincerely hope that when my mouth is finally shut by death, the last word my heart will utter will be the name of Mary, with a total trust in her maternal care, to which I have long since abandoned myself. It is necessary to remember that it was not our choice that the Blessed Virgin should be our Mother. God Himself gave her to us when He was dying on the cross. One can remember also the wise words of Thomas Merton, that without Mary our knowledge of Christ remains essentially an abstraction.

I take as a sign that the Marian road is right for me the profound joy that rises in the centre of my heart whenever I think of Mary or pray to her. It is a road of simplicity, not of simplicism; of triumph over sin and death, not of triumphalism; of angelic light and freshness, not of angelism. It is above all the path of joy. I would recommend any person to whom belief is a paradox, and life itself a hard and heavy burden, to go to the feet of Mary and speak simply to her, not necessarily in words, since she who is the perfect Mother perfectly understands the hearts of all her children. And I could guarantee that such a person – especially if their problems included apparently unconquerable habits of sin – would go from her with a positive awareness of the Divine Mercy.

God has already told us that we must become children to enter Heaven. Children of whom? – for children cannot be born without parents. Children of God, certainly; but simultaneously children of Mary, who conveys to us the hope, the life and the sweetness of God. We are such creatures that we require constant miracles to keep our souls in a state of health. It is Mary who performs for us these hidden miracles of grace, being herself a mediatrix of graces; who gives us the courage and will to approach the Sacraments which proceed from the primordial Sacrament, Christ, whom she carried in her body. We may say – ‘Ubi caritas, ibi Deus’ – where love is, there God is – but also – ‘Ubi Maria, ibi ecclesia’ – where Mary is, there too is the Body of Christ.

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